I picked it up for the Librarything Virago Group’s author of the month – which in January is Vita Sackville West. There are no signposts in the sea.”ĭuring 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. Geographically I do not care and scarcely know where I am. 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. There is a delicate, elegiac quality to the narrative – which I really enjoyed. The novel is also shot through with extracts of poetry, reflecting the thoughts of the central characters Edmund and Laura. The novel feels beautifully intimate, bound up as it is life, love, death and travel. 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. 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. Written at a time when Vita was suffering from the (still undiagnosed) cancer that would end her life, it was also her last.
Published in the year before her death No Signposts in the Sea is perhaps Vita Sackville West’s most haunting novel.
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