Wavedancing

About the Book

The author let his imagination loose on various places where he spent time in the course of an extended cruise around the Atlantic. In the course of the resulting yarns, he works through preoccupations that have dogged him since the 1960s, to do with the amazing possibilities coupled with apparently self-destructive proclivities of our technological age, and the challenges this poses to his catholic Christian faith.

Wavedancing tells the story of some islanders and seafarers who inhabit or come upon, but loose, an idyllic island utopia. Their loss refers to the lack so widely felt today of a satisfactory context and sense of meaning for life, of relationship with nature and God, and between men and women and even the different sides of our brains.

The story is worked through in differing contexts, from its imaginary primal location in Pulawayo, to a fishing community in Ireland that is ravaged by the impact of modern technology, to a Breton island struggling to survive nuclear disaster, and to another instance of contemporary degradation in the Orinoco Delta in Venezuela. Though the hero and much else are lost, we find our way to another imaginary island and another new start there, in the vicinity of the Spanish Virgin Islands.

About the Author

Joe Aston was born 1946, in England. He was educated at Benedictine schools and at Jesus College, Cambridge University. He grew up mainly on the English south coast, doing a lot of sailing round the Channel and to Brittany and Ireland, where he has lived since 1973. After various jobs in England, including teaching, journalism, publishing, building and farming goats, he settled down to commercial fishing on the Irish west coast, and rearing a family of nine children, with Fiona, his wife.

Since retiring from the fishing, he has sailed round the Atlantic, following humpback whales to the Cape Verde Islands and dolphins up the Orinoco, and featuring in the film The Return of the Humpback Whale (Ergo films, 2004). With this voyage and the publication of Wavedancing , he is now at last fulfilling a dual aspiration that he has harboured for thirty years. For current activities see www.gannetsway.com