Pharos, by Alice Thompson <br></br>The Mariner's Star, by Candida Clark <br></br>The Main Cages, by Philip Marsden <br></br>Lodestar, by Peter Nichols

Christina Hardyment takes to the hammock with a summer flotilla of nautical novels

The shades of several great writers about the sea hang over these four very different novels. The lighthouse island in Alice Thompson's Pharos is teasingly called Jacob's Rock, conjuring up expectations of a Virginia Woolf hybrid, although it is Candida Clark's The Mariner's Star that favours paragraph-long parenthetical sentences, slithering alliteration and prolonged heart-searching. The Main Cages recreates a Cornish community as real as Annie Proulx's Newfoundland, but Philip Marsden is more interested in the exterior world of fishing challenges than the development of characters that is Proulx's special talent. Only Peter Nichols, who spent 10 years as a yacht captain and who I suspect, like his hero, "read Homer, Conrad, Thoreau, and Melville, believed them and took them to heart", has in Lodestar written a book which will become required cabin furniture alongside Moby Dick, Typhoon, Stormchild and The Riddle of the Sands.

I have given the plot of this review away already, but all the books will find appreciative, though different, readers. Those responsive to aura and avenging angels will find plenty of both in Pharos. Alice Thompson warns in her subtitle that it is a ghost story. Yet the spare, lucid prose sets up her lighthouse-keeper and his new mate with such sure and sympathetic strokes (the swinging pendulum which drives the mechanism to make the light revolve, its click "the beat of the lighthouse's heart", the fact that "diffidence is needed to live successfully together in a lighthouse"), that it is easy to miss the early warnings of the horrors to come on a first reading. When the magic and mystery arrives, in the shape of an amnesiac half-drowned woman the keeper saves from a wreck, and we enter into her puzzled mind, we find a dreamlike world full of illusions and distortions.

Our reading is deliberately made uneasy and uncertain. In the end, what has happened has to be spelt out by a rueful survivor as he rows to the shore. On finishing, I felt a slight sense of loss for the straightforward story that I expected; nor did the dénouement pack enough moral punch. But the elegance and accuracy with which Thompson uses language is formidable.

In The Main Cages, Philip Marsden abandons the historical explorations of Eastern Europe with which he won acclaim (The Bronski House, The Spirit-Wrestlers) for fiction. He sets his story in his own deeply familiar Cornish world, 65 years ago. Depression threatens the fishermen's livelihoods, but the future is taking shape in the form of an ever-increasing influx of holidaymakers, hotels and retirement bungalows.

The "Main Cages" are a crop of rocks off Pendhu Point, a grumbling threat to ships which can also offer a rich harvest from the sea. Failed farmer Jack Sweeney builds up a life for himself in the nearby coastal village of Polmayne, buying a boat and learning the lore and luck of fishing, joining the lifeboat crew, and at last finding love in the neglected Russian wife of a summer-visitor artist.

The world of Polmayne is so sharply observed that its snobbish gentlefolk, blazered yachtsmen, over-eager vicar, brash hotel owner and rascally locals stay etched in the mind like old photographs. But this is no mere documentary: all are gathered in as essential strands of the story and woven into a convincing if tragic climax.

Candida Clark's The Mariner's Star is a very different treatment of the same world. It is a passionately interior novel, dense in metaphor, about the widow of a fisherman who sets out early one morning to drown herself as well. "But still the land is there, dazzling as a neck-chain locked about my throat so I can't unclasp it, however much I wrestle and strain. No, that's not the way, I tell myself, seeing my life like a string of beads I must meditate on in order to forget. So I try to fix all these land memories in my mind and hold them steady there and delicate, as though by pushing them through the sieve of rational thought I can diminish them and that way forget them, because anyway – and here I feign a courage that I do not feel – what must possess me now is this: to get away out to sea to find them. That's my life now. And I must do it. I'll just not be true to myself otherwise."

I quote at length because these sentences give the story in a nutshell. How you feel after reading them will govern how much you enjoy the rest of the book. Although The Mariner's Star looks like a novel, it is in fact poetry, its chapters a series of prose stanzas which are repetitive and indigestible unless you are prepared to reflect and dwell and savour. In which case, its ultimately optimistic message of new life emerging from grief lingers and comforts.

As hinted above, Peter Nichols' Lodestar is one of those books that you put life on hold in order to finish. Don't let the opening sentence put you off: there could be no neater way of summarising its anti-hero's character, or of setting up the magnificent tale in store, than the self-made millionaire Carl Schenk's appalling behaviour on safari in Kenya. He machine-guns the heads of three giraffes purely because "it was the most unpukka thing he could do", and he had become infuriated with the snobbish condescension of his white-hunter guide. When Schenk, his adoring and plucky wife Mamie and their bored daughter Harriet get back to Maine, they decide they will turn to Arctic safari.

They buy with insouciant ignorance the unsuitable, but fabulously fast and luxurious motor yacht Lodestar to take them there. The captain they employ is an ignorant charlatan, but fortunately Captain Will Boden – disgraced by losing his own ship, estranged from his wife, and jobless – decides that he will sign up as a mere stoker.

Roll on icebergs, polar bears and all manner of other perils, to say nothing of a little love interest. Then settle down to enjoy knowledgeable, no-nonsense prose, unusual and original characters and settings, and a plot which is unpredictable, often shocking, but always true to itself.

Christina Hardyment's book 'On the Writer's Trail' has just been published by the National Trust, priced £8.99