Published in 1965, The merry-go-round in the sea is a superb novel. It manages to be both simple and complicated in its themes and prose.
Rob Coram is six at the beginning of World War Two when his favourite cousin, Rick, goes off to war. The novel follows them both over the next eight years, as Rob grows in his awareness of the world and Rick comes home depressed and restless.
I’ve read few novels which have evoked the landscape so well as this one. Stow manages to describe all the smells and sounds and sights and perceptions of the Geraldton town and countryside, and reproduce them as a precocious child would sense them. His prose is both precise and poetic.
As a coming of age novel, it works well too. Stow shows how the passage of time alters Rob’s perception of the world, captured well in the title. Rob thinks that the mast of a wrecked ship out at sea is a merry-go-round and he’d like to one day swim out to and play in it. He clings onto the belief even when his mother tells him it is not so. A few years later he manages to swim there with his friend and can look back with a bittersweetness at his old innocence.
But it’s also about Rick growing up, or refusing to grow up; coming home from the war and realising that he can’t settle down into what he sees as the suffocation of the suburbs.
As well as this, it’s a novel about family, a large and extended family which has stayed close and has its own web of folklore and custom.
One thing it’s not is a page turner. The prose is so pristine and the scenes so self-contained that it didn’t have a strong narrative drive for me.
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koko said:
it is a stupid book
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steve said:
ahahahahahahahahhahahahahahah best reply ever.
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adrian said:
i had to read this book for english lit.. and i couldnt. So slow and boring, i’d rather fail than finish the book ahaha
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Logitech said:
omg what is with this book! so ridiculously slow, and boring with no freaking point behind it!
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Anonymous said:
ahhaha no shit hey ! omg last year when our lit class had to read it was when the author died, hilarious.
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Jess said:
Haha I had to read this book for English Lit too, and my god was it hard to read. Though, i managed to finish it,even though it took forever.
Still, its not as long as Great Expectations. (I just cant get into reading that book) (Again, another lit book.)
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Anonymous said:
I have a feeling you were in my literature class, haha.
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Anonymous said:
Im doing the merry go round in the sea for lit aswell so hard to keep interested… I’m also going to be reading great expectations as well for Lit! Just realised that I am 6 years late to this post!
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Anonymous said:
Loved it! At the age of 40 I finally realize the relevance of his verse. It is life really. The roundabout in the sea….
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Tim said:
I first read merry-go-round in the sea when I was 8 years old, if it’s too slow for you then that’s your loss. It isn’t a book about seat of your pants action, it is about everything the reviewer above says. In life you might forget specific details but all the sights, sounds, emotions, ideas etc this book covers remain etched in your mind.
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Anonymous said:
8 years old ? mann i was playing pokemon in when i was 8 years old, ahah
but good on you that you could enjoy such a descriptive book at that age
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Anonymous said:
I read this in year 11 english literature. While i could appreciate the prose style with which Rob was written since it reminded me of childhood, the book just felt dragged on. It was like describing a picture rather than a story.
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Anonymous said:
lool this book sucked shit
had to do it for lit aswell, my teacher agreed with us that the book was very slow and boring
ahhaha
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Anonymous said:
this book is shit so slow so boring hard to stay awake long enough to read a chapter and ofcoarse have to read it for yr11 lit.
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anonymous said:
had to read this book for lit and now i have to write an essay. i dont know what to say about his family though… any ideas?
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Yasmynne said:
I had to perform a scene for this book in my drama class, and I thought it was amazing – the book not our act.
Of course I saw it from perhaps a completely different point of view from those who did it for their English Lit, but I thought the play was brilliant. Randolph Stow regularly uses ecclecticism, and he does it so well. It’s not really supposed to have a point or a plot line – it explores the rapid maturation that Rob has to face, that his life is stuck in a loop and how badly the war effected Australians, especially P.O.Ws.
I loved it. To me, it was deep and very moving.
But I did have to interpret and perceive it from an entirely different perspective.
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non-oz said:
Most of the foul-mouthed, semi-literate replies above tell one more about the repliers than they do about the book. Poor Ausralia!
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