At one key point in the sublime but emotionally honest loveliness that is Annie Stanley All At Sea, the eminently assured novel of Sue Teddern, our far-too-hard-in-herself protagonist sagely observes that there are simply some chapters in your life to which you cannot add a definitive “The End”.
Given our predilection as a species for nice, neat ending to things, it makes sense that we’re tempted to think you can do just that, that it’s a given that we’ll get to scrawl a jaunty, completist “The End” at the finish of a difficult or less-than-perfectly executed period of our life and walk off happily into the sunset, content that we’ve managed to exchange the pain and regret of a messily incomplete ending with one done up with a fetchingly, neatly tied bow.
Alas, life rarely affords us that dream Hollywood finish and we’re left, like so many of the engaging characters in this charmingly grounded story of second chances, wondering if we’ll get any of the endings we secretly hoped might come to pass.
Chief among the musers and wonderers is likably fallible Annie, a lady in her late thirties who has reached a point, following the deaths of both much-loved parents, the cessation of a relationship (one she initiated) and departure from her dream teaching job, where she’s wondering if she’ll get a chance to fix any of the glaring mistakes in her life.
Or really, whether she even wants to?
Kate called it a breakdown. Maybe it was; I don’t honestly know. I simply decided I didn’t deserve to be teacher and/or Rob’s girlfriend any more. So I stopped. Dad quizzed me a few times on my plans but I couldn’t tell him what they were because I didn’t have any. Keeping things simple was the only was I could get out of bed in the morning – although, more often than not, I didn’t. (P. 34)
Trapped at home eating biscuits and watching Netflix, Annie is lost in the washing turmoil of grief, that horribly unsettling, emotionally unpredictable period, the exact length of which is as individual as the person caught up in it, and not even remotely certain which way is up anymore and where she should head next.
If you have ever lost someone, especially a beloved parent who, even in their children’s adulthood, remain calmly reassuring beacons of stability and certainty, you will find much with which to identify in Annie Stanley All At Sea, a title which not only captures the emotional state of the delightfully flawed protagonist but which hints at she accidentally ends up dealing with this disorienting maelstrom of pain and loss.
Annie’s rash, impromptu response to losing her dad, precipitated by some erroneously arrived at ideas about who should matter in her life and who should not, is to grab her father’s ashes and takes for a tour of the 14 English-based regions of the Shipping Forecast, a radio broadcast weather report for coastal regions which her father listened to religiously and which became one of the touchstones of her much-diminished family’s life.
By heading out on the road – and train and ferry and just about every other mode of travel – Annie hopes she can find some peace, although at the start of her hastily-conceived race around Britain, all she wants to do is stop her step-mum Bev, who’s actually a decent and caring person regardless of how Annie sees her, from scattering her dad Peter’s ashes in Austria.
It dawns on her fairly quickly that she has perhaps acted a little too quickly, but as she travels through places like Cromarty, the Hebrides, Fowey, Bideford and Tobermory, meeting new friends and working things with old friends and lovers, some of which end up well while some do not, she begins to appreciate that perhaps she has let her life sink into a slough from which she now needs to climb.
To Teddern’s credit, Annie doesn’t arrive at this place instantly nor does she get there in any kind of linear fashion, reflection of the fact that life, and grief for that matter, rarely go in nice, neat straight lines and nor do they lay all the answers in easy to find existential breadcrumbs.
Being with Annie all through her delightful and harrowing journey – the flavour of any given day is determined by all kinds of factor from simply how she is feeling to whether someone has laid a glaring home truth on her or affirmed that she is a better person than she believes – is a supreme joy, even on the bad days because it reassures us that while life is messy and emotionally chaotic and frustratingly unwilling to tidy everything up neatly, that doesn’t mean that is the end of things.
In fact, all those frayed loose ends of life and the chaos that surround them even years later, can sometimes be where all the healing starts, all initial indications to the contrary, and witnessing Annie slow and all too human arrival at that point, in a way that feels happily believable is one of the chief rewards of Annie Stanley All At Sea.
Something’s changed. I can’t put my finger on it but I like what I see. I couldn’t have said that six months ago. I pull a silly face to puncture the moment. Even the silly face feels real. This is the authentic Annie Stanley. Maybe she was there all along, hidden beneath the sweatpants and a permanent cloud of gloom. I must remember this moment, in case I need to draw on it in an emergency. (P. 289)
The big question looming over Annie throughout her quixotic but emotionally meaningful travels is whether second chances are even posisble?
It’s a valid question at the best times for anyone but it assumes a haunting, urgent resonance when the death of a parent in particular makes you rethink a host of choices you have made and wonder, rather forcefully and not in the typically assumed daydreamy way, whether you can undo that breakup with an ex or you can restore your somewhat distant relationship with a sister or close friend?
That’s certainly where Annie lands, and if you have grappled with these “what ifs” and “what can bes”, you will find much to identify with in Annie Stanley All At Sea and its profoundly stuck protagonist who, over the course of this beguilingly impactful story begins to realise perhaps it’s not too late after all.
The joy of Annie Stanley All At Sea is that even when we see Annie on this lifechanging journey to somewhere (hopefully better), it doesn’t happen in a snap second nor with the waving of a wand, but rather over weeks and week of agony and ecstasy, emotional ups and down, all grounded in a very real humanity that knows second chances are distressingly thin on the ground but hopes that they will materialise in great number anyway and bring some meaning and change to a period of life that often feels bereft of any potential and possibility.