Ever since Roger Cox @outdoorscots introduced me to Andy Martin’s @andymartinink books by donating “Stealing the Wave” (2007) to the Sea Library, I HAD to find and buy and add to the shelves Martin’s “Walking on Water” from 1991 too. They have arrived with a splash…
This book is about waves. It is the story of an obsession, a journey through heaven and hell, the clumsy initiation of an outsider, the author himself, into a cult and a culture. It is also an oblique history of the world, a human comedy on waves, that will find an echo in anyone who has fallen prey to the spell of the ocean. Surfing is less a sport than a state of mind, an adventure in mythology, a religion with its own high priests and ritual sacrifices.
The North Shore on the Hawaiian island of Oahu is a strip of beach and a microcosmos of the world: the adobe of terror and ecstasy, innocence and experience, a mecca and coliseum for surfers. Andy Martin, Cambridge don and would-be waterman, joins the surreal afficionados of a sport that is also a religion, a compound of myth, miracle and masochism, with its high priests and ritual sacrifices.
I bought paperback and hardback copies for the Sea Library, because I wanted to have both beautiful covers here. Walking on Water by Andy Martin is published in hardback by John Murray in 1991 and in paperback by Minerva in 1992.
Sea Library 