Customer Reviews

Ultramarine (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Ultramarine, the first published novel by Malcolm Lowry, tells the story of a young man's disillusioned coming of age at sea. Much of the raw material for the novel comes from notebooks Lowry kept during his own stint as a deckhand. Dana Hilliot, the young Lowryesque hero, faces the contempt of many of his fellow seamen, who view him as a spoiled upper-class poser incapable of doing a real man's work. He affects a grimly stoic front while engaging in elaborate fantasies of revenge.
Lowry's description of life at sea reveals the boredom and discomfort of a long voyage, relieved only by exhausting labor, sudden danger, and occasional nights of drinking and whoring ashore. His young hero's Conrad and Melville-inspired dreams of adventure at sea are replaced by the grimy reality of a deckhand's daily life. The realistic dialogue, the description of the sea and the port cities, and the hero's fevered inner monologue hint at the richness of language that was to inform Lowry's greatest novel, Under the Volcano.
The young hero's moral agonies as he struggles to remain faithful to his fiancee at home may seem comically overwrought to present-day readers, but Ultramarine's rewards certainly outweigh its few flaws. This work of Lowry's youth shows an unruly genius already testing its limits

The French Translator for Lowry's masterpiece, Under The Volcano, said that, until Lowry, she had only encoutered two types of writers:1) The philosophical intellectual, who could go on about great ideas and philosophers but couldn't tell you what street he was walking down and, 2) The observant "Naturalist" writer who observed and recorded everything around him but whose fund of ideas and original thoughts was quite in the red.-Lowry proved to her that a writer could be both, as does this book.

Here we have the young Lowry's thinly veiled autobiographical hero, Dana Hilliot (a name Lowry contrived from Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, James Hilton, whom Lowry knew at school, and T S Eliot) remaining (sometime tiresomely) faithful toward the dialogue of the sailors on ship as well as wending his unique "Lowromancings" as he playfully called his poetic, philosophical passages through the work.

At one point in one of these extended meditations/poetic reflections, Hilliot ponders that he is engulfed in the "detritus of wisdom" rather than having discovered any pearls, but then goes on to speculate as to what he would do were he discover one of these "pearls" ----Stop writing?

Let's be thankful that Lowry kept searching and swirling and went on to write one of the greatest novels of the century.

I read Under the Volcano, and have a read a number of his other works. Under The Volcano is his best novel. Lowry fought alcoholism much of his adult life and it is reflected in his writings including Ultramarine. This is his first novel published in 1933. This novel is short, just 186 pages, and it is good, original, and entertaining for lovers of literature, but not as good as some of his other works. If you like Lowry, I recommend the collection of short stories Hear Us O Lord From Heaven They Dwelling Place.

The story comes from Lowry's own time at sea before university. The novel lacks symmetry and the coherent structure of a conventional novel - and that is the creative part. Unexpected things take place. The story involves a young man of 19, Dana Hilliot, working on a freighter ship in Asia. It is part narrative by Dana and part third person narrative, almost stream of consciousness: we are told the events in and around the sea voyage.

On board he is lost in time, and this sets the mood:

"But the sun hurt his eyes. Lowering his head, he tried to calculate how long it had been there. Today, or was it yesterday? Two days ago. All the days were the same. The engine hammered out the same stroke, same beat, as yesterday. The forecastle was no lighter, no darker, than yesterday. Today, or is it yesterday?"

Lowry fills the pages with anecdotes about sailors' lives and the characters that he meets. His shipmates are from Norway, England, Greece, Spain, and America. When they stop at a port, the others seek pleasures but he often stays on the ship, often drinks heavily and constantly thinks of his sweetheart, Janet, who is back in England.

He wants to be accepted as a regular crew member, not as a young man from well off family seeking adventure.

The story takes unexpected turns as Dana lives on board and then visits ports along the passage, often drunk, confused, or bored, but not as confused as the character in Lowry's later novella Lunar Caustic, set in a mental hospital.

Ultramarine is a novel about sea life. A young man named Dana Hillot decides to go aboard a freight ship. The characters in this novel are so vivid. Even now I am able to think of one, Andy the chinless wonder. This novel is one of my favorites by Lowry. Lowry spent some time at sea himself, so that probably was the inspiration for this novel.