FOR A PRIZE THAT EXISTS AT the lofty pinnacle of literature, it is cheering to note how often the Booker can be caught sneaking down to sea level. Since its inception in 1969 the sea has been a feisty but faithful muse for the prize, with marine-linked novels a recurring theme among the winners.

Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, artfully set between the worlds of men and fishes, would make an elegant addition to the prize-winning fleet when this year's winner is announced on Tuesday. First to take to the water was Stanley Middleton's Holiday (joint winner in 1974), in which the middle-aged hero returns to the seaside town where he used to holiday as a boy. The bleak coastal atmosphere is the perfect, brooding backdrop to Middleton's tale of marginalisation from the happy families on dry land.

This use of the seaside as a place of retreat, for regrouping one's thoughts, returns like a tide to the Booker. Iris Murdoch used it in The Sea, The Sea (1978), in which her middle-aged playwright, Charles Arrowby, retires to the coast to swim, to walk, and to remember the women in his past. This idea was updated by John Banville in The Sea (2005), in which a middle-aged protagonist returns to the seaside village where he holidayed as a boy, to remember his dead wife and his youth. It is a measure of Banville's effectiveness with words that he needed only half of Murdoch's title.

In Offshore (1979) Penelope Fitzgerald delivered an intriguing variation on the theme. Set on a flotilla of Battersea houseboats, her novel explores the idea of characters who belong neither on land nor sea. Populated with humans out of their depth and fishes out of water, Fitzgerald's is a clever microcosm of the crisis in late 20th-century identity.

Great expectations for the writer from nowhere

Andrew Holgate talks to Lloyd Jones the surprise favourite who could pip Ian McEwan to the prestigious prize

Background

• The tide that runs through the Booker

• Unknown has great Booker expectations

• No certainties as judges pick interesting list

• McEwan could be pipped to Booker

• 13 novels make Booker’s dozen

Background

• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

• The Gathering by Anne Enright

• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker

Related Internet Links

• News and reviews on our special Man Booker page

• This week's books news and reviews

Related Internet Links

• Read In Time: A Correspondence by Erica Wagner

If the seashore is the perfect location for exploring human boundaries, the open ocean is the place for a novel that wishes to discover what happens when those boundaries are crossed. The ocean-going ship is ideal for writers who want a floating crucible whose crew cannot escape one another and who are subject to the most intemperate stresses of nature.

William Golding did it first, and brilliantly, with Rites of Passage (1980), set aboard a 19th-century ship on a passage to Australia. The whole of male English society is on board — lower ranks, officers, parson and aristocrat. Golding's execution was so powerful that he ruled the waves alone for a decade, while the Booker succumbed to the pleasures of land.

It fell to Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (1992) to take the prize back out to sea. Aboard the Liverpool Merchant, a ship engaged in the slave trade between West Africa, the West Indies and Europe, Unsworth's protagonist is Matthew Paris, a physician whose anti-Church writings on evolution make an interesting contrast with the Reverend Colley in Rites of Passage. It is fascinating to read these two great ocean-going novels side by side, with Golding exploring man's reversion to savagery, while Unsworth describes a more Utopian vision.

Following Unsworth's triumph the Booker spent the best part of another decade in dry shoes until, from out of a blue sky, it was blown back to sea with a story that set a course straight for the interior of the human psyche. Life of Pi (2002), Yann Martel's touching allegory of a boy cast adrift in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, infuriated some critics and captivated others. Yet it is a very traditional sea story, with all the claustrophobic determinism of Golding and Unsworth.

Yet it also evokes an idea of the sea, so beloved of Murdoch and Fitzgerald, as a mirror in which one sees one's life reflected. In this glass the mundane becomes mysterious, the yearnings of the heart magnified, and the precariousness of life is exposed.

This strange power of the sea to give insight is why great novelists return to it time and again. When Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad were writing, navigators and novelists put to sea to survey the limits of dry land, and to discover more of it.

This desire of novelists to sound the depths of the human heart has not changed, but perhaps the water they navigate is no longer the same. These days, with the world all discovered, the sea fulfils a new office. It has become the symbol of our yearning for the undiscovered. For the strange, the beautiful, the outlandish, we now cast our eyes towards the waves.

The search for unexplored continents in the human psyche has always been the goal of literature. To win the Booker, the writer must plunge us headfirst into the ocean of human experience. So it is unlikely, that novelists will stop getting their feet wet any time soon.

Chris Cleave's work appears in Sea Stories: An Anthology of New Writing About the Sea published by National Maritime Museum, £7.99. Read Erica Wagner's short story, In Time: A Correspondence, that appears in this book.

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