The sea takes many forms in fiction. It was an adventure playground in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and a rowdy neighbour in Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn. It played the wine-dark seducer in Homer’s Odyssey and the snot-green tormentor in Joyce’s Ulysses. But while its colour can change and its humour may vary, its fictional properties remain reassuringly stable. The sea is our unconscious, a repository of memory, the beginning and end of all things. It’s what Jules Verne described as the “Living Infinite”. In Madeleine Thien’s rapturous fourth novel, The Book of Records, “the Sea” is the name...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
