Theme Thursdays -- Crockery/Utensil -- Sea Change by Jeremy Page

Theme Thursdays is a fun weekly event that will be open from one Thursday to the next. Anyone can participate in it. The rules are simple:

• A theme will be posted each week (on Thursdays)
• Select a conversation/snippet/sentence from the current book you are reading
• Mention the author and the title of the book along with your post
• It is important that the theme is conveyed in the sentence (you don’t necessarily need to have the word)
  Ex: If the theme is KISS; your sentence can have “They kissed so gently” or “Their lips touched each other” or “The smooch was so passionate."

This week's theme is Crockery/Utensil:

When the kipper is lifted out on to a plate, he sits a know of butter on top, and watches it gradually slide down one side. His mouth waters.  And then he thinks of a surprising addition -- he suddenly fancies it -- several raw onions which he cuts in quarters and quickly blanches in the fish pan.  He's never had raw onion for breakfast before, but he's at sea, so what the hell [. . .] After he's finished, he looks at his plate.  It seems suddenly poignant.  What was it they found on the Mary Celeste?  A half-eaten meal and a broken rail?

pages 24 & 25, Sea Change by Jeremy Page


This book throws the reader right into the story -- it opens with Guy & his family spending a lovely morning in a peaceful field but the morning takes a sudden and tragic turn, changing Guy's life in one irrevocable instant.   We next encounter him five years later, alone, on a houseboat on the North Sea, writing nightly, in his journal, his imagined story of his life without that morning in the field.  Intense stuff.


I'm counting the plate, in the quote above, as crockery, partially because I think the excerpt is a good example of  Page's style and the tone of the book.  It's quite a lovely book (I'm on page 93) language-wise -- one of those books where you keep finding powerful little snippets that you want to make into your new e-mail signature line.  (Or am I the only one that happens to?)