A short sad story of a dying man attempting to make the most of his final days on a long sea voyage, cautiously pursuing a woman he views as unattainable. I enjoyed it, in spite of its weaknesses and predictability, because the writing is so fine.
2012 ( )

This is Vita Sackville-West’s last novel, and it is everything that a last novel should be. It speaks of a life drawing to a close, it is elegiac and it is haunting.

Edmund Carr was a journalist, who had risen from humble beginnings to become a political columnist for a leading newspaper, and to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle and move in elevated social circles. When his doctor told him that he only had a few months to live, and that the end would come suddenly and with little pain, he decided to take extended leave and travel on the same cruise ship as Laura Drysdale.

She was war widow, she moved in the same social circles as him, and he had come to care about very deeply. He had not – and would not – speak to her, or to anyone else, about his feelings, or about his illness. He simply wanted to spend as much of the time that he had left as he could in her company.

The story is told by Edmund, and it reads as in internal monologue, but it is in fact his journal, discovered after his death; with the letter he had obtained from his doctor setting out the facts of his medical condition, in the hope that there would be no confusion or misunderstanding of he was taken ill.

The characterisation was pitch perfect, the voice always rang true, and the author’s choice to tell the story this way was entirely right.

As the ship sails towards warmer climes, Edward settles contentedly into life on board and, as there are only a few other first class passengers, he and Laura fall quite naturally into each other’s company. If she remembered had any idea why her friend had decided to take the same trip that she had spoken about, she gave no indication; but as Edmund spent more time with her his feelings for her deepened. He continued to keep his own counsel, but he began to think about how different his life might had he given less attention to his work and more to the pleasures of society and the possibility of love.

Edmund’s equilibrium was disturbed when he sensed that another man might have a romantic interest in Laura. He and Colonel Dalrymple had been on friendly terms, but seeing him in her company made him terribly jealous, and he struggled to cope with his feelings and feared that he would say or do something that would give away his feelings.

Good manners, and well-bred English reticence prevail, and the friendship between Edmund and Laura endures. The watch the sun setting from the deck, they dine together on an island visit, and they watch a lightning storm from her private balcony in the early hours. And as they talk he learns much more about her. She knew little of life outside her own class and milieu, and yet she had nursed in the war and she had worked with the French resistance.

There is little more that that to tie this story to a particular point in history, and not a great deal to tie it to a particular part of the world. The weather is warm, and a string of islands slips by to mark the passing of time, but no more than that was needed.

I want my fill of beauty before I go. Geographically I do not care and scarcely know where I am. There are no signposts in the sea.

The conversations that make up a large part of this book are beautifully realised, and they say much about the characters and much about the author who created them.

The writing is lovely and wonderfully evocative, so that reading really felt like being on that voyage and seeing all of the sights; with the leisurely progress of the boat perfectly matched by the slowly unfurling narrative.

It was such a pity that some prejudicial attitudes towards other cultures and classes caused quite unnecessary turbulence. In books from earlier periods I could accept them as being of their age, but not in a book from the sixties and in this story.

But the story and the characters will stay with me.

It is a simple story, informed by the author’s own travels, published just a year before her death and surely written at a time when she had to consider her own mortality; and the portrayal of Edmund’s realisation of his feelings, and of his resolve to not tie Laura to a dying man, is done with delicacy and with grace.

The resolution of the story is perfectly judged; and the right ending to a short novel – and a writing career – that says everything the needed to be said. ( )

Published in the year before her death No Signposts in the Sea is perhaps Vita Sackville West’s most haunting novel. Written at a time when Vita was suffering from the (still undiagnosed) cancer that would end her life, it was also her last.

Vita and her husband; Harold Nicolson and their friend Edie Lamont – to whom the novel is dedicated, set sail on a cruise of the West Indies and South America in 1959. Vita and Harold had enjoyed cruise life before, yet on this last, sad voyage Vita began writing No Signposts… a novel about dying, unrequited love and how life should be grabbed at with both hands. The novel feels beautifully intimate, bound up as it is life, love, death and travel.

The novel is also shot through with extracts of poetry, reflecting the thoughts of the central characters Edmund and Laura. There is a delicate, elegiac quality to the narrative – which I really enjoyed. I can only assume that Vita was (on some level at least) aware that she perhaps – like Edmund in her story – would not be around for long.

“I want my fill of beauty before I go. Geographically I do not care and scarcely know where I am. There are no signposts in the sea.”

During a week when I felt increasingly hopeless and helpless I felt very much like sailing away on a calm sea, this book felt like perfect reading. I picked it up for the Librarything Virago Group’s author of the month – which in January is Vita Sackville West. Although I enjoyed this little novel enormously, there were a couple of moments when I was brought up sharply – almost back to the mad reality of 2017, with – what was for me – some unexpected, racially offensive attitudes. I know to expect it of novels from the 1930s and 40s – I read a lot of books from that period, stupidly I had not expected the same in a novel from 1961. It was naïve of me, I suppose. Still, the 1960s were still a different time, I understand that, and VSW of a very different class, that shows too, but none of this was enough to prevent me from enjoying this novel.

The story is told by Edmund Carr, the novel is his journal, discovered after his eventual death. We know from the beginning that Edmund is on borrowed time.

Fifty-year old Edmund Carr is an eminent journalist, who came from humble beginnings, and now counts members of an entirely different social class among his friends. One of those friends is Laura Drysdale, an attractive widow of forty. Edmund nurses a secret tenderness for Laura, and so when his doctor tells him he has just a few months to live, Edmund decides to spend his last weeks with Laura. Laura has booked herself passage on a cruise ship. Edmund hurriedly leaves his job in Fleet Street, and books passage on the same ship.

Delighting in having the sun on his face, Edmund settles into a lovely on board routine, frequently in the company of Laura. Keeping both his illness and the truth of his feelings a secret, Edmund is content just to be in Laura’s company, terrified of ruining the relationship they already have by looking for more. He is unable, however to free himself of his feelings, now so much in the company of Laura they are, if anything strengthened.

“And sometimes I suddenly hear her voice. This is a queer experience. I know her voice so well in the ordinary way of things, and then suddenly and unexpectedly I hear it as though I had never heard it before. It may be only six words, of no especial significance. Thus, I heard her say no, no more coffee thank you, and it was as though she had said Edmund my darling, I love you.
Love does play queer tricks,”

Together they watch the sunset from the deck, share dinner on a beautiful island, watch a magnificent lightning storm from Laura’s private balcony, all while observing their fellow cruisers with wry humour. Laura is presented as perhaps being a little unconventional – she discusses her views on marriage quite candidly and relates the touching story of a lesbian couple she knows. In these sections, we can presumably see, Vita’s own attitude to love and relationships.

Fellow passenger Colonel Dalrymple adds a little complication to Edmund’s contentedness. At first Edmund is happy with the colonel’s company, he, along with another passenger make up a four with Edmund and Laura, for bridge. In time, though Edmund imagines the Colonel has romantic interests of his own toward Laura, and his own jealous paranoia begins to threaten his enjoyment in Laura’s company. He watches the colonel, listens for footsteps between cabins at night, makes an uncharacteristically snide remark, and then worries that in doing so he has given himself away.

“Then come mysterious currents which rock the ship from below without much visible convulsion. Where do they come from, these secret arteries of the sea, tropical or polar? They are as inexplicable to me as the emotions which rock my own heart. I do not let them appear on the surface but am terribly aware of them beneath. Sometimes, churned by a gale, the waters grow angry and the blue expanse turns black and white, tossing us remorselessly, the waves crashing with a sound as of breaking biscuits, the rain hissing as it obliterates all vision, and again I draw the parallel between the elements and the surprising violence I have discovered in myself.”

Despite a couple of small jarring moments, this is a lovely, thought provoking novel – VSW re-creates her own love of cruising, her enjoyment becomes our own, the expanse of sea, the warmth of sun, a night-time, moon bathed deck, her writing is gloriously evocative. ( )

There are no signposts in the sea, nor as Edmund Carr tells us, are there any tombstones. Both these statements are significant to Edmund. The senior leader writer for an unnamed leading broadsheet, "... one of the weightiest of our national newspapers", Edmund had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, one which would cause little pain or limitation until the very end. Like most of us, the fifty year old Carr had never really seriously contemplated his end. Now, he said, "I wondered quite dispassionately how best to arrange what remained of my life."

The day after his diagnosis, he discovered that Laura Drysdale, a woman whom he greatly admired, was going on a sea voyage of some months duration. He took an indefinite leave from his office and booked passage on Laura's ship, telling no one of his diagnosis.

Edmund kept a diary on the voyage, a diary which is most of the book. The reader sees him falling in love with Laura, tormenting himself with what could be. He had always avoided serious entanglements and now felt that to enter into a relationship with someone would be wrong, given his condition. Instead, he put Laura on a pedestal, agonized over her words and deeds, desperately searching for signs she might care for him. The tragedy is that obsession can cause us to lose our way, causing us to miss the very signposts that would lead us out of the storm.

This is a very well written book about the nature of love and of marriage, questions of long standing importance to [[Vita Sackville-West]]. The novel was set in 1955, a time of great uncertainty about the future for people like Edmund and Laura. It seems difficult now to imagine a world where given a certain amount of material well being, people could just step away for a time to actually think and read and write. One of the things that struck me most was the sheer excellence of the syntax of her language. Every once in a while I would stop and reread a bit, not necessarily for what was said, but for the pleasure of reading something so well constructed, but then what else would you expect from a man like Edmund, the voice of The Times, or a woman like Vita?

My only quibble was with the use of the third person "one" in place of "I" or "you". This usage has always bothered me. It is as if the speaker is unable to commit to a point of view and so fobs it off on that anonymous "one", who is actually "we" for a particular elite. This discussion of second marriages where "one" has different referents highlighted the stilted cadences of it all:
I take it that one does not commit the same mistake twice, not unless one is a film-star with a positive passion for divorce. No. But one would not commit it unless one was very sure that it wasn't one -- and when one is in love one isn't always able to judge.

How can anyone so dispassionate actually be in love?

However, any other usage would not have been nearly as convincing. It would not have conveyed who Laura and Edmund were.

No Signposts in the Sea was Sackville-West's last novel. It was written over two different sea cruises she took with her husband Harold Nicholson. Like Edmund, Vita was preoccupied with death on these cruises. She was ill with the as yet undiagnosed cancer which would kill her a year later. All in all this was a good book to lead off that contemplation of what really should be said before it is too late.

No signposts in the sea is a book that grows on you. While the story initially seems a bit boring, and of light kaliber, the development of the relationship between the two main characters, Edmund and Laura provides depth.

When Vita Sackville-West wrote this novel, her last, she was already terminally ill. She and her husband had started making cuises and voyages a few years earlier. No signposts in the sea is told from the viewpoint of Edmund, who is also terminally ill. During the voyage, Edmund comes to terms with the finality of life.

The beauty of the story lies in the contrast between the finality of life and the infinity of the sea. The title, No signposts in the sea does not occur in the novel, but there is another sentence that is very similar, viz. "There are no tombstones in the sea" (p. 48). Tombstones are reminders of death. Perhaps the title should be understood as suggesting ultimate freedom, one can (still) go in any direction.

The contrast between the land and the sea, is also reflected in the personality of Edmund and Laura. It has been pointed out that Edmund is an unlikely character, as he has supposedly never traveled before, although he is an expert on the Middle East. However, this objection seems very contemporary. It enforces the provincial views, the lack of openmindedness and some of the pettiness, such a jealousy or erotic fantasies which Edmund cannot see separate from his dealing with Laura. When Edmund observes the beauty of Asian men stripped to the waist, several times over the course of the novel, this is not with an erotic view, although even that idea may not be entirely impossible, but, more in the sense of estrangement, as British men of the Victorian Age and later, actually well up till today, will normally never be seen in that way. British men are fixed in a kind of formality, which excludes a free, more natural expression of physical prowess and beauty.

Much of Edmund's complicated sense of being is contrasted by the much more natural, and more simple Colonel Dalrymple. However, the most spiritual of the three, is of course Laura. She has a very full, rich life experience, of which Edmund only sees a glimpse, for example when she tells him how she got through the war. To Edmund, the voyage is like a spiritual awakening, although till the very last he confuses embracing the spirit of eternity with the physical embrace of Laura. ( )