Drowning

In the last book I finished, number9dream, the main character Eiji's twin sister Anju drowned when attempting to swim out to a large rock in the middle of the sea. In my last post I discussed The Decemberists' album The Hazards of Love which tells the story of Margaret and William who both end up drowning. It got me thinking that story constructors use drowning far more commonly than it actually occurs in real life. Ophelia's suicide-drowning in Hamlet; siblings Tom and Maggie's tragic drowning in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss; Compeyson's drowning at the hands of Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations and Harold Bishop's suspected drowning which turned out not to be a drowning because he returned seven years later in Neighbours all spring to mind.

Theorists differ on the matter. Some say that drowning is often used because it plugs into one of our deepest fears. Others say that is is symbolic of Christian baptism and that the character drowning is on their way to a new life in eternity. I think that perhaps it is because death by drowning ensures that the person dying can retain their beauty unlike the chainsaw victim. In all the examples above, other than Compeyson, the reader/viewer would want to ponder upon the dead warmly and the drowning scenario allows us to hold an idyllic image of the departed.

Other than the ugly villain Compeyson's drowning, Harold Bishop's drowning sits the most uncomfortably with the theorists, probably because it was far more weakly plotted than the other examples. In 1990 I had watched the Bish wander hand in hand with Madge down the aisle in my assembly hall - it wasn't a wedding, just a extra-exciting assembly. A girl had won a competition to have the famous duo attend as they were appearing in the local Brighton Pantomime. I was in charge of pressing the play button on their entrance music that day and I have to say I did a pretty flawless job of pressing the button at the appropriate moment and then fading it out as they stood at the front of the hall ready to address the young crowd. I felt warmth towards this chubby chap who brought about the first of my very few brushes with celebrities in my life. But, just one year on and Madge was standing staring at the waves with no big balding head piercing the shifting surface. Hazza had drowned, yet, oh joy of joys, of terrible plots twists of terrible plot twists, he had not. Seven years on, he was back in Ramsey Street with no recollection pre-immersion. He gradually regained his memory and was integrated back into the plot of the show. His reappearance means that I shouldn't have really have discussed him in this article at all, but I allowed myself to follow the tangents of my mind and here we are.