Book review: Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks

Ingrid Horrocks' new book is a series of musing on "strange swimming explorations".

Where We Swim
by Ingrid Horrocks
Victoria University Press, $35

Despite the title — and cover photograph — there is not a lot of swimming going on in this book.

By the time we have reached the halfway point, there has been an inadvisable crossing of a polluted river mouth in Taranaki; a splash around in an apartment complex pool in Medellin, Colombia; a nervous slide into a cordoned-off offshoot of the Amazon River; a hotel pool in Phoenix and another, embedded in the basalt cliff face, in the experimental metropolis Arcosanti in the Arizona desert.

Horrocks doubts she could even meet the common definition of being able to swim (200m of freestyle in a pool): "I was that kid at the back of the race who was more drowning than swimming." Unlike Swim: a year of swimming outdoors in New Zealand by Annette Lees (2018), she does not talk to other outdoor swimming devotees or expound on the health benefits of a daily dip.

Ingrid Horrocks new book is a series of musing on "strange swimming explorations".

Rather, this is a book of "strange swimming explorations", a series of autobiographical musings pulling together stories of family, childhood, travel, academia and environmental degradation. The suck and surge of the tide, the tumble of waves, the chill of a winter dip, the unvarying blueness of an urban swimming pool — these moments of pause and surrender become the launching pad for these speculations, when the busyness of life as mother, partner, daughter and academic gives way to reflection and speculation.

These moments of calm are necessary. Where We Swim is an anxious book. There is personal anxiety about the health of her father and mother-in-law. There's cultural anxiety about writing about place, this place, as a Pākehā writer. There's environmental anxiety, physical anxiety.

The sea, the swim, the watery edges of these and other islands prove to be rafts of equilibrium. Horrocks aligns these experiences with the British women travellers she wrote about in her 2017 book, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814. "If 'where we swim' is metaphorical," she writes, "then Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney and also Mary Wollstonecraft, who felt perpetually unhoused and wrote so often about water, were some of the company I swum with."

Like the "wandering texts" of these writers, Where We Swim is digressive, provocative and strangely compelling, moving from Wellington's decision to change its Matariki celebrations after a whale is spotted in the harbour to the rescue of the young boys trapped in a cave in Thailand in 2018.

In the last two chapters we are back on Horrock' home turf — Wellington's south coast, a place of rocks and shingle and pounding breakers. The descriptions are bracing, evocative but still mysterious, answering the "where" of the title but not the "why". Then a solitary night swim in Wellington — cool sand, dark water, the "almost-breath" of the waves that tell Horrocks she is home, her children are safe.

- Reviewed by Sally Blundell

Sally Blundell is a journalist, writer and reviewer based in Ōtautahi, Christchurch. A longer version of this review will appear on anzliterature.com on April 14.