We need to talk about Ernest

This was my first encounter with Hemingway and with his reputation preceding him, I have to say that I was expecting something a little more edgy or racy or, if I'm honest, riveting. But I was left a little cold by The Old Man and the Sea and I feel like a traitor for saying it. Dramatic, I know, but I do feel a strong sense of guilt at my less than enthusiastic response. However, I am trying to find out why I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would.

For those of you not familiar with the book, it is probably best to stop reading now as I will discuss the plot, the characters, the book as a whole. For those of you who have read it and love it, then this article may not be for you.

Hemingway has been on my reading list for years and I am not really sure why I have not experienced him before. He has been very much present on my literary radar from newspaper articles about him, when I have encountered him as a character in historical fiction novels or TV drama and as a great American writer of some renown. He was a larger than life character who travelled widely, a reporter, a lush, a maverick - to me, all of these descriptors point to a man of excitement and daring and recklessness; a man who grabbed life by the horns and rode it like a stuntman, relishing every moment.

Surely his fiction will be the same? Lively, vibrant, extraordinary?

Well, for me, sadly not. This has been one of the biggest literary disappointments of my life and I have been wracking my brain to uncover why The Old Man and The Sea has failed to set me alight when I was fully expecting literary euphoria to strike.

The story concerns itself with three main characters: a boy, an old man called Santiago and a very large fish (if you can call a fish a character as it has no lines other than the one attached to a hook with which the old man ensnares him). And if I am to be precise about the fish involved, it is a marlin, the warrior of the sea with its long sword-like protrusion and its muscular strength and fighting endurance.

It is, as the title suggests, the old man and the sea on whom the story is focused, the boy featuring merely at the beginning and the end as someone representative of the village in Cuba where the story is set and as the closest thing to a friend and family that the old man has.

The old man sets out to fish but has not been having a lot of luck in that quarter. He is frail and malnourished and there is a sense that he is near the end of his life. And so, when an enormous marlin, a beautiful, strong beast of the ocean, becomes snagged on his baited hook, a battle for supremacy - man vs fish - ensues. It has all the makings of something tense and unpredictable, suspense building as the two battle it out on the sea. In fact, it might have been better to call it The Old Man and The Fish or perhaps The Old Man and the Marlin would be the most apt, although revealing its surprise from the outset.

The old man catches the marlin; it is magnificent and a real prize but in bringing it back it is destroyed by sharks who attack it, strung as it is to the side of the skiff, and claim the meat for themselves with attack after attack after attack. The days long battle leaves the old man weak, ravaged and likely to die and his prize fish has been destroyed.

I actually didn't know the story before I read it: I was merely aware of the accolades and why wouldn't I be drawn to read it? Pulitzer prize, Nobel prize - these are achievements to which every writer, modest or celebrity-seeking would like attributed to their work, the ultimate kudos points, in double. I don't think I was wrong to expect greatness. And Ernest Hemingway? One of the most renowned twentieth century writers in the American literary canon. It was a given.

But I struggled through it. I was glad that it was a short book. I wondered if the 1950s were light years for good fiction.

My post reading analysis goes something like this:

The battle between the old man and the fish did not resonate with excitement for me and this is a huge problem in a book which is centred on this totally. I understand the tension that is being created due to the circumstances: the old man being alone on a big wide sea with no radio or other boats close to whom he could signal. The presentation of him as a man at the end of his life who is feeling jaded and just going through the motions of living, forcing himself to take sustenance, his appetite dwindling, sets the narrative up perfectly for him to experience the greatest battle of his life and one for which he has been yearning: to catch a monster of a fish for which he will need reserves of strength and wisdom and wile. Hemingway as a big game hunter would have identified with the old man and the thrill of the chase but I don't feel that that sensation of pursuing something is fully realised in this story. It is attempted and written about but I, as a reader, failed to feel it.

It is easy to feel sympathy for the man with his references to baseball and his hero, di Maggio, and how he wished that the boy was with him on his boat. Despite the fact that you feel like this fishing trip is his swan song, you have to admire his perseverance even in the face of injury and cramp and adversity. There is even the idea that he is, perhaps, a little mad in terms of him voicing his thoughts out loud but the fact that he is conscious and comments on it as he is doing it shows that he is fully present. And what about talking to the fish? I found this one of the most real bits about it rather than his introspection: a bond is created between the hunter and the hunted and his talking to it shows an understanding of the fish and what it will do and how it must feel, if it has feelings, about being trapped and chased. Of course, the fish knows none of this, below the surface of the water. But despite this, in some way, it is almost intimate, an exclusive discourse between two living beings. This was one of the things that I liked about the book, the old man's awareness of what he was subjecting the fish to and what it would ultimately culminate in in terms of the marlin's behaviour.

But the building up to the climax of catching the marlin, at times, I found boring. It gave me a picture of what was happening in the boat but not a connectedness. Was this deliberate, in a way, the narrative emulating the severe ennui that the old man was experiencing at sea? Maybe. I'm not sure that Hemingway set out to deliberately make a book boring for realism's sake.

Hemingway's description of the marlin is good:

He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides. He was bright in the sun and his head and back were dark purple and in the sun the stripes on his sides showed wide and a light lavender. His sword was as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier and he rose his full length from the water and then re-entered it, smoothly, like a diver and the old man saw the great scythe-blade of his tail go under and the line commenced to race out.

One critic, who applauded Hemingway's book, talks of the bareness of his narrative and I can see that in the marlin's description. It is descriptive, yes, but it is economical in what it tells us about the marlin, enough for us to picture the massive fish in its entirety: its colour and markings, its strength, its sword (compared with a baseball bat deliberately, for sure, due to Santiago's love of the sport), the prowess in its movements. There is no surplus of "flowery language" here and I get what I need from this description. In fact, the appearances of the marlin are, for me, some of the most interesting parts of the book.

The old man catching his prize is climactic although I can't help feeling sad that such a powerful creature of the deep has been subdued. This then is further exacerbated by the attack that the marlin's carcass is subjected to as the old man attempts to bring it to shore. The old man continues to battle but this is no waiting game - he is no longer the pursuer but the pursued. The previous excitement has turned to fear as sharks continually barge the boat and tear chunks from the marlin. The old man is faced with fighting them off with whatever he has to hand whether harpoon or club or knife. These were the scenes in the book that I enjoyed the most. The resilience that the old man shows after being in his skiff at sea for a number of days chasing the marlin is incredible as he attacks the sharks and tries to make quick his return to the village. I sense his determination to fend the sharks off and not give in as well as the pointlessness of trying, knowing that he has not managed to preserve the fish at all.

He wants to bring the fish back to trade the meat but also for the others to see the magnificent fish that he caught. He makes it but the marlin does not, although its skeleton is still there. The boy is pleased to see him and takes care of him on the shore but is in tears, whether from relief or alternatively, from sorrow at seeing the toll that the time that the old man has spent at sea has taken on him with no real recovery imminent, we are not told.

And so the story ends.

It is easy to see that this is not just a story about the old man catching a fish. There is some sort of allegorical subtext that can be gleaned from the story:

Firstly, the contrast between the youth and success of the boy compared to the bad luck and fading away of the old man. The old man will soon be usurped by younger men who will be more successful than him in their endeavours. Hemingway wrote it when he was in his fifties, only living to the age of 61, so he would have been a man in the prime of life but with old age ahead of him, if he had allowed it. The sadness that the young man feels could be a reflection of Hemingway's sadness at getting older and saying goodbye to what he once was - but I could be reading too much into this, looking for meaning where there is none in an attempt to rationalise my reaction to the book, to show that I understood it even if I did not enjoy it.

Did he identify with the old man?

His character, his creation, the old man, achieves the most successful catch of his whole life, only to have his moment of triumph torn from him by sharks, benefitting from his success. Is there something to this? Maybe. Is this how Hemingway felt in his later years? Attacked by sharks? Or is it just a metaphor for life? That we can wait for years for the right moment and eventually it comes along, only to have it ripped out from under us by others, more grasping and determined? Is it a criticism of people who require the validation of others to consolidate the idea that they have succeeded? After all, the old man was successful in getting the fish but if there was nothing to show for his battle, if the fish is not there for all to see, has he really achieved anything? Does success itself and its associated rewards depend solely on the opinion of others or can success be measured merely on the sense of satisfaction that an individual receives from doing it, an internal emotion exclusive to them?

Or could it just all be about the futility of life? Striving and enduring only to have to acknowledge that it will not be preserved - that living only leads to death, whether you are an old man or a marlin. That your achievements and your battles, however significant can be diminished over time to nothing, like the skeleton of the marlin. That pursuit of a dream can lead to disappointment. That all of your efforts can be for nothing. That you can only survive if there is a record of your achievement or if you leave a legacy. The old man has no family - the boy is the only one who seems to care for him - so his legacy is not his blood but it could have been the stories generated by the marlin. He would have been kept alive in the retelling of the day the old man returned with the biggest fish...

I really don't know.

If this is the case, then it is a pretty bleak book. But it is only trying to get to the root of why I did not like it that I am indulging in this level of analysis. When I read it, I didn't get this level of layers from it. However, I don't think that it can just be a story about an old man and a fish. I think it has to work on some sort of metaphorical level and I think that other readers can see this depth of meaning in it as they are reading it and it is from this, that the praise stems.

But, for me, it was mediocre at worst, okay storytelling at best. But, what I can say it has given me is some deeper thinking, in that it has got me to analyse and discuss and ruminate and that can be no bad thing.

But I think that Hemingway and I are finished.

Please feel free to comment and I would love to hear if there are any books that you've read which have been lauded by others and especially held high in popular opinion but, when you read them, you just didn't understand what all the fuss is about.