He is an attractive figure: he is not from the middle classes but a self-made man and a well-respected journalist living by his intellect and understanding of politics.
Edmund’s realisation of his feelings, and his determination to not bind Laura to a dying man, are very gently handled. The novel’s charm comes from the impression of time passing as well as islands slipping by. English reticence and cool good manners predominate, but Edmund rages silently in his diary when he grows jealous of the Colonel, who also spends time with Laura. The voyage is peaceful and uneventful, and Edmund and Laura spend their time among a small group of first-class passengers (this is the late 1950s). He knows he will die within three or four months, without much pain, and so he takes extended leave from his post as a political columnist on a famous British newspaper to travel on the same ship as Laura, a friend with whom he is slipping deeper in love, but whom he will not tell about his illness or feelings. It’s short, narrated through the quiet diary entries of Edmund Carr, who is under a sentence of death that he is keeping private from anyone on the cruise ship on which he is taking his last voyage.
We could argue over ‘great’, but I contend that No Signposts in the Sea is a novel to hold the reader spell-bound. I do NOT agree with Victoria Glendinning, who wrote an introduction, who says that No Signposts in the Sea ‘is not a great novel’. For once I agree with the blurb on the back of the Virago edition: ‘this haunting, elegiac tale, published the year before her death, is her last and finest novel’. This is Vita Sackville’s West’s last novel, and it is exquisite.
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