The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth by Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker Secker & Warburg 310pp, £16.99 in UK
The sea is the original womb of life on Earth. As the quality of death is uncertain up to now, humankind keeps returning to the element of our seemingly innocent, oblivious origin, if only on brief holiday visits. The beach is that marginal two-day threshold that offered our protozoal ancestors, as it offers us, a promise of refreshing change.
"Like the melancholic of the eighteenth century, we are lured by the hydrotherapeutic promise of the sea," according to Lena Lencek, a Professor of Russian and the Humanities at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and Gideon Bosker, a professor of medicine at Yale. "Like the Romantics, we come to be spiritualised, to recover from broken hearts and broken lives, and to decipher the tangled ways of our souls in the chaos of the turbulent sea." Nobody is likely to accuse the authors of underwriting.
They have written fulsomely about every aspect of the Beach, from the time, "about four billion years ago, when there were no men, no women, no bikinis, and no sea, an inauspicious start for a journey that would culminate in paradise on earth". And they have written this all-encompassing oceanographic, meteorological, geological, psychological and sociological history of seaside Edenic bliss in language worthy of the glossiest travel brochure.
They define and describe in detail the principal ingredient of most beaches: grains of sand. These generally measure from one sixteenth of a millimetre to five millimetres in diameter, and are as many as millions of years old - "Lilliputian messengers from the depths of geologic time . . ." Examined under a microscope, "sands reveal themselves as pointed and bulbous rays exploding from pillow-shaped centres; creamy lozenges; shiny ball bearings; jagged, striated, and pitted flakes; glossy disks and striped cigars; spheres as bumpy as Trix cereal; shrivelled red chiles of volcanic lavas; and crystalline green jelly beans bursting with glauconite from the ocean floor." It's quite a relief when the microscopic examination is over.
In spite of intimidation myths of sea-monsters, the ancient Greeks and Romans built Mediterranean villas for luxurious recreation by the sea. When Graeco-Roman culture disintegrated, however, Christians, according to Lencek and Bosker, regarded the sea as a dangerous element which God used as an instrument of punishment. There was that story about the Flood. For many centuries, Europeans did not bathe much, even inland.
The authors become more cheerful when they tell of explorers' encounters with Polynesians before missionaries' Mother Hubbards spoiled the view. The Noble Savage was a swimmer.
The high fashion and bourgeois popularity of Bath and other watering places inspired on English physician, Dr Robert Wittie, in 1667, to observe in Scarborough that the sea would offer more vitalising minerals than any spa.
"Sea bathing as a form of therapy and penance was invented by the British," the authors claim, "the same nation that gave the world, nearly simultaneously, the cold bath, the steam engine, and the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, without the latter two developments, the likelihood that sea bathing would have become anything but an anecdote in the history of leisure is rather slim."
By the middle of the 19th century, royal patronage led the aristocracy to Brighton. Inexpensive rail travel enabled the general population to flock to resorts all around the coast of Britain. The same pattern of holiday-making was established on the Continent, in North America and beyond.
At last the book reaches the modern era, when the British (and others) "domesticated an alien environment (the beach) to make it hospitable to human practices and the frail human constitution. Spotwelding their protocols for civilised behaviour to these remote outposts, they began exerting some measure of control over the hostile forces of the beach." Hence, Blackpool, the French Riviera, Miami, Coney Island etc., etc.
Millions of men, women and children learned to swim, even those whom the authors call "landlocked". "The amphibian frog or the hydrophilic canine offered handy flotational models."
If prose like that makes you squirm and whimper, there is the consolation of lots of pictures. They are well chosen, but printed regrettably small and in black and white on shoddy paper, presumably to minimise the publisher's costs.
This ambitious work is equipped with the apparatus of scholarship - a twelve-page bibliography, a six-page index and a four-page appendix of "paradises by the sea", a global list of beach hotels and resorts, with their telephone and fax numbers.