The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea by Randolph Stow

First published: 1965

Type of work: Bildungsroman

Time of work: 1942-1949

Locale: Geraldton, Western Australia, and its environs

Principal Characters:

• Rob Coram, a boy, age six when the novel begins
• Rick Maplestead, Rob’s cousin, who is fourteen years his senior
• Hugh Mackay, Rick’s friend and fellow prisoner of war
• Jane Wexford, Rick’s friend

The Novel

Rob Coram is six years old when, during World War II, Japanese forces threaten his isolated corner of the world—the rural coastal farmlands of Western Australia. For the next three and a half years, he grows up constantly fretting about the safety of his cousin and hero, Rick Maplestead. After Rick’s return from the war, the friendship is reestablished, but Rick is not the carefree young man he was, and Rob’s intellectual and emotional growth are affected by his friend’s outlook.

Rob and his immediate family live in Geraldton, a town about 250 miles north of Perth, while most other members of the Coram-Maplestead clan, which is well established in the Geraldton area, live in the country on large sheep stations. Rick Maplestead is twenty years old when he ships off to war just as Rob’s family moves to the country for greater safety. Much to Rob’s distress, nothing is heard of Rick until near the war’s end, when a comrade comes home and reports seeing Rick alive, in a prison camp in Thailand.

During Rick’s absence, Rob leads a relatively normal boy’s life. Despite occasional air-raid warnings, the evacuation proves largely precautionary. Rob takes the opportunity to exercise a keen curiosity about the countryside and the lives of his landed relatives. He also gains an appreciation of his heritage. Some of his relatives are old enough to recall the pioneers who established the Corams and Maplesteads in a desolate region peopled only, and very sparsely, by aborigines.

Rob exhibits an unusual thirst for expanding his horizons. The “merry-go-round in the sea” of the book’s title is a sunken ship several miles offshore, to which Rob aspires to swim, once he learns how. It is one of many horizons that Rob dreams of traveling beyond. As an emblem of the boy’s aspirations, the ship complements another—a playground merry-go-round that is more accessible but whose spinning suggests time’s relentless, quickening course.

In sharp contrast to Rob is Rick. When he returns from captivity, he is outwardly as vital and as genial as he was before the war, but he is stultified by what he has experienced and seen. Haunted by visions of comrades starving and being killed around him, and of himself being repeatedly tortured and brutalized, he spends his days playing tennis and drawing prisoners of war, and his nights smoking and fighting off traumatic memories.

Throughout this period, Rick is supported by Rob, whose childish idealism Rick finds more palatable than the workaday predictability of the lives of his farming relatives. The companionship has its value for Rob, too. He occasionally pauses to acknowledge that the criticisms of Rick voiced by his relatives—chiefly, that he is lazy—are true. Yet Rick, and his friend and fellow prisoner of war, Hugh Mackay, treat Rob as an equal and provide him with the knowledge he seeks: knowledge of the world beyond the closed family circle.

Rob’s maturation entails an increasing engagement with life; in the country and in Geraldton, he exalts in all of his senses. Rick, however, becomes increasingly disaffected. He loses the support of Hugh Mackay. After long idling happily with Rick, Hugh marries and adjusts to postwar life. Rick cannot. Seeking approval and support, he courts a nurse, Jane Wexford. When the romance fails as a result of Rick’s restlessness, Rick departs for England, leaving Rob, by now thirteen years old, to grow up alone.

The Characters

Between the ages of six and thirteen, Rob Coram passes through the stages of life experienced by any young boy. His rite of passage is not extraordinary, but its evocation by Randolph Stow is richer than many similar fictional accounts. Particularly fully depicted is the intellectual development of the child during the course of a friendship with his much older cousin Rick.

Rick strongly influences Rob’s identity, as does Rob’s evacuation to the country. The influence of Rick is opposed, however, by that of Rob’s family and schooling. During and after the war, he is forced to choose between Rick’s skeptical frame of mind and the ethnocentricity and violence that he learns when, for example, he hunts and practices warfare with his friends. Farm life makes Rob an amalgam of “bush kid” and “town kid,” a mixed blessing. When he returns to town, he is at odds with his schoolmates.

Before the war, Rick was a rugged, bronzed, blue-eyed outdoorsman, sportsman, and eminently likable young man. An egalitarian by nature, he treated Rob as a peer despite the fourteen-year difference in their ages. Rob, in return, determines at a young age to emulate Rick in every way he can, and does so, much to his mother’s consternation, when Rick returns from the war, embittered, disillusioned, and disoriented.

The friendship is based on faith, a quality that Rick, ironically, largely loses during captivity. Their bond has been sealed, it turns out, by a postcard Rob sent to Rick during the war—the only mail to reach Rick in more than three years. It prompts Rick to write in Rob’s autograph book the verse: “Thy firmness makes my circle just,/ And makes me end, where I begun.”

After the war, Rick is constantly admiring himself, as if to recover years of lost self-esteem, but his alleged narcissism expresses a more profound lack of assurance. Haunted constantly by memories that are revived by chance statements or occurrences, he lapses into impassive silence. His gloom and skepticism frighten Rob. During three postwar years of aimlessness, his family comes to compile a long list of his supposed faults. Yet he remains a hero for Rob, who, sadly, cherishes as a trophy the torture scars on Rick’s ankles, which symbolize the emotional scarring that prevents Rick from resuming normal life.

While Rob is a companion and stalwart in Rick’s life, Hugh Mackay is more. Rick tells Rob that he and Hugh each weighed about seventy pounds upon liberation. Hugh is, he says, “permanent.” Jovial and skeptical, he scoffs at military hierarchy and the British Empire, of which Australia had remained an important part despite independence in 1901. Hugh and Rick are, by their own estimation, brilliant conversationalists—because they had nothing else to do during captivity—but only Hugh can stop talking and start living again. Rob thinks of Hugh as “brilliant and buccaneering” and is shocked that he would settle down. Hugh, although also haunted by war memories, adjusts in every way that his mate cannot, and will not.

Jane Wexford, a nurse, is sympathetic to Rick’s suffering after the war but cannot love him. They argue bitterly about the use of atom bombs against the Japanese. Rick, vengefully, applauds their use. Jane considers them profoundly immoral. They become lovers, but Rick is unable to divorce himself sufficiently from his past, from his closeness to Hugh and to death, to marry Jane.

Critical Context

Much of Randolph Stow’s fiction, however seemingly mundane its subjects, deals with intellectual and spiritual development and with national identity. Rob Coram and Rick Maplestead exemplify these two central interests.

The purpose of the symbolism in The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea is to permit a study of a boy’s wartime experiences that is more profound than simple storytelling would permit. The symbolism is, by comparison with its use in other Stow novels, restrained. The most fully symbolic work is Tourmaline (1963), about a wasteland of that name, which exploits to a far greater degree the symbolic possibilities of Australia’s strange and mysterious landscape. In To the Islands (1958, revised 1982), a man searches for his own soul by seeking the aboriginal dreamworld. Stow’s interest in relations between Australia’s European settlers and the aborigines who arrived long before them is also found in The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea.

In Stow’s earlier novels, Stow’s metaphysical investigations were marked by an uncontrolled use of metaphor, character, and action that he brought under control in The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea. That process continued in such novels as Visitants (1979), which focuses directly on the spiritual differences between racial groups in the South Pacific.

In several novels, Stow takes up the question of Australia’s national identity. He variously celebrates and debunks its mythologies. In The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, he links the country’s history of European colonization with one of the most influential events of its recent history, the threatened invasion of its shores by Japanese forces.

Bibliography

Beston, John B. “The Family Background and Literary Career of Randolph Stow,” in Literary Half-Yearly. XVI (July, 1975), pp. 125-134.

Bowen, John. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LIV (May 29, 1966), p. 22.

Hassall, Anthony J. A Strange Country: A Study of Randolph Stow, 1986.

Willbanks, Ray. Randolph Stow, 1978.