A Little Brown Sea

This is the tale of a Greek Cypriot boy called Theo. Having seen his mother being killed by soldiers after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, he is wounded himself but escapes, comes to England, and is brought up by his father. He admires the connection with the wild that a group of school friends have, but it is impossible to join them: wildness is seen by his family as a denial of civilized human values. He becomes a cynical professional philosopher at an ancient university. For him, philosophy is a game. It does not deal with any important questions. He becomes disillusioned with his life and his career, and in disgust at the whole academic project, resigns his post and heads to live rough by the sea in the English West Country. There he has some epiphanic experiences. The wild invades and interrrogates him. He goes repeatedly to Greece, searching for some philosophical certainty. This turns into a search for certainty about anything, and a search for his dead parents. He needs to know what it is possible to know about the world, and is dissatisfied with the conventional ways of knowing. The sea, which hid him when he ran from the Turks, now represents the capricious and the unknowable. If he can understand the sea, he will be able to decode everything else. He builds a boat and, following a white bird, sails back towards Greece. His fate is uncertain. This is a book about what it is possible to know: about uncertainty and how to deal with uncertainty. It was written, as all my books were written, for me - but there are many who share my concerns. There is a universal sense of ontological queasiness. We do not feel at home in the world because we do not know what the world is like. There are ways of getting to know it better, and therefore ways of inhabiting it more intimately. This book explores those ways. It recruits non-human voices to tell the story. Those voices provide perspectives on Theo's life and concerns that would be invisible to human observers. In The Alexandria Quartet Lawrence Durrell told the same story four times, demonstrating both the difficulty of saying 'x is the case', and the principle that the greater the number of vantage points, the greater the accuracy of description. A Little Brown Sea uses a similar - but much more radical - method.