Ultramarine by Malcolm Lowry

The sea! My God, what it may suggest to you! Perhaps you think of a deep grey sailing ship lying over in the seas, with the hail hurling over her: or a bluenose skipper who chewed glass so that he could spit blood, who could sew a man up alive in a sack and throw him overboard, still groaning! Well, those were the ancient violences, the old heroic days of holystones; and they have gone, you say. But the sea is none the less the sea. Man scatters ever father and farther the footsteps of exile. It is ever the path to some strange land, some magic land of faery, which has its extraordinary and unearthly reward for us after the storms of the ocean.

Dana Hilliot, the Norwegian-British sailor of Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine, is not quite a sailor. He has shipped off on a yearlong voyage aboard the Oedipus Tyrannus for reasons that are obscure, both to the reader and himself: they have something to do with proving himself to his girl at home, Janet, and something to do with "gaining experience," and something to do with a cargo ship called the Oxenstjerna that he and Janet have seen appear and reappear on the horizon like a mystic vision. But as it turns out, sailing is hard work, and Hilliot is bad at it. He's widely hated by his fellow sailors and tortured by the temptations of shore, anxiously obsessed with keeping faithful to Janet, who has yet to send him a letter. He's two months into a yearlong voyage, and the remaining ten months look less like "experience" and more like purgatory.

The parent-rival on the Oedipus Tyrannus is the chinless cook, Andy, who is the ringleader of the anti-Dana sentiment on board. Hilliot seethes under Andy's contempt even as he craves, in a deep dark way, his approval. When Hilliot at last ventures to shore in China, he gets roaringly drunk and lets himself get entangled with a Russian prostitute named Olga, only to leave and return to find--as is obviously required by the Oedipal metaphor at work here--her deep in the arms of Andy. Experience, as always, is mixed up with sex, and Hilliot's virginity becomes a torture; his love for Janet requires him both to be a true, pure virgin and an experienced man.

Lowry is the only author I've ever read who comes close to what James Joyce does with stream-of-consciousness. As in Under the Volcano, the real story in Ultramarine is in the psychosexual drama that roils inside the protagonist. And as in Under the Volcano, the real movement of the mind is best captured when the protagonist is roaring drunk, when the mind is at its most honest and most disordered. I think Ultramarine was more successful, to me, because it's about half the length of Under the Volcano, which became at length cryptic and suffocating. In Ultramarine, the eddies of Hilliot's mental anguish are punctuated with the earthy voice of the other sailors, interrupting each other with anecdotes, and dashes of strange humor: the Oedipus Tyrannus, we discover, has been charged with carrying a whole circus of elephants, tigers, and other exotic animals from China. (It's almost like the novel shifts from an Oedipus story, about a man tortured by his own sexual inadequacy, to a Noah's ark story--perhaps one in which Dana really does get to start his new life on the tip of Mt. Ararat.)

Some of Ultramarine is inscrutable. People's minds really are sometimes, I guess, so it only makes sense. But there's enough of work, of dirt, enough of booze, of the sea, to balance out the maziness of the novel and make it worth reading.