Interesting that this book is called Maurice and Maralyn here .. the book I read was called "A Marriage at Sea," but I'm sure this is the same book.
Anyway, this was such a good book and so original imo. There are so many stories with incredible plots and happenings, both in books (fiction, non-fiction) and also in real life. People will tell a story with a tradition story arc, but then I'll be wondering, what happened next?? How did the people go on to live their lives after this, and how did this event shape them as a person? This book answered all those questions and left me completely satisfied as no other book has ever done.
This book is a true story, created from historical documents, about a couple, Maurice and Maralyn, who lived in the UK in the 1700s and decided to sell their home and live on a boat. The couple themselves are interesting as characters. They are sort of weird, especially Maurice. He feels like an outcast from his family and society as a whole. Overall, neither of them are particularly likeable characters, but I felt like that made them very real. I don't like many of my coworkers for example. Maurice and Maralyn very easily could have been 2 coworkers to any of us. Simple, just regular people who have strange quirks and are not really people you'd want to hang out with. Their normalness and unlike-ability also makes it extremely interesting what happens to them after the major incident.
I'm going to get into spoilers from here on out. So the "main plot" of the story is how one day when they are out sailing on the way to New Zealand, a whale capsizes their boat. However, the book starts with how the couple got together and why they decided to sell their house and embark on this journey. I appreciated the context but also appreciated how the author pretty much got straight into the drama with the whale and the boat.
She also took a long time to explain how they survived on the boat which was super interesting as well. Because the novel is recreated partly from their journals, we know that they are eventually rescued or else their things are rescued soon after their death, if that's what happens. Despite this there is still so much suspense while they are stranded in the ocean. You don't know how they will survive or what horror is going to befall them next. It was so interesting to hear about their methods of survival, what constituted their most difficult days, what a lighter day was to them, how they passed the time, how they made it through arguments, what was meaningful to them while they were stranded, how they rationalized it, how they made it through each day, what did they do for fun, what did they do for hygiene, etc etc etc. The book explained all of that and more. I did wish that it went a little more interior into their minds, but I understand the limitations to that (and will comment more on this later). As it was it was still great.
When they were finally rescued and I still had somewhere between 40-60% of the book left I was overjoyed. I really wanted to know what was going to happen after - and the suspense regarding them staying alive stuck around for awhile. I knew that even though they were rescued - they still had a LONG way to go until survival from the ordeal was a sure thing. It is very easy to die after rescue from starvation, disease, or a multitude of other things, so that was still adding to suspense for awhile.
Something that was really interesting to me was that these people were nobodies. They were not successful in any way, they didn't have many people who cared about them, and they had no money or worldly possessions aside from the boat that was now at the bottom of the sea. So they had no ties to anywhere, no support, and no means to create a life for themselves (they just worked whatever jobs made them money, they were not educated or skilled in any type of area). So once they were rescued I was very curious about what was going to become of them. The world was very interested in them, and their rescuers were quite attached to them as well, so they sort of had some options, but I kept thinking that eventually the goodwill and interest of the public would run out. What would they do then?
Basically they got rescued by some South Korean sailors, and once the sailors reached out to the company they were working for, the news spread around the world. The press and the public became very interested in the story, and international politics was hinted at as well. The South Korean sailors wanted to take them to South Korea, but the company the sailors worked for forced them to stop in a different country on the way and drop off the couple to get medical checks. The couple was not able to get back on the ship to South Korea with their rescuers. But part of the reason that South Korea and the sailors wanted to bring the couple back was so that South Korea could make a good name for themselves in international media. It wasn't because they felt they had some filial duty to the couple when they found them in dire straights or out of some superior moral compass, it was to make the country look good in the media. And this sort of idea followed them for a very long time.
They did get tours all around the world, they got media invites and a book deal. The reason that the couple took these deals, even though they were pretty reclusive at heart, was so that they could fund their next boat. They had no money and no means to get another boat (which is where they planned to live again despite the tragedy), so they thought the quickest and easiest way would be to take these media deals. They milked these deals and got everything out of it possible, which was interesting to read about. They went from being completely alone on the open water, floating 24/7 and eating turtles, to suddenly being thrust in the public eye and having lavish dinners with 100s of people in all different countries and sleeping on a bed on land. I wish they would have talked more about their interior lives again here, and the transition from surviving on the ocean to living on land. I am sure that they both had some amount of PTSD from this experience but it was never really discussed.
Maurice wrote a book about their experience and it was a huge success. Their story fascinated people all over the world, and they secured a contract for a second book which covered the expenses for a new boat. So they built a new boat and they decided to go on another expedition, this time more dangerous, to Patagonia. When discussing the trip and the second book, they were urged by their publisher to have a purpose for the next trip, or else the book wouldn't sell. These were simple people, they just wanted to get away and explore. They didn't want to set a certain goal and cater to the media. They also decided to go on the second trip with a group of friends, not just as a couple. Maurice notes this saying that it would be more romantic, more intense, more interesting for the masses if they once again went out just the two of them, but they were following their own hearts and went with a group of people. In addition, on the day they were supposed to leave, it was going to be filmed by the media. However, the weather was horrible and they couldn't leave that day, so they just filmed as if they had embarked and then went to hide until the day was actually favorable for leaving. All of this was palpably disappointing to the couple, that they could see that their life was being tugged towards the lame desires of the masses. They were able to see that they had become caricatures.
Their next voyage was barely described, which was a let down tbh. But they did describe that once they published the 2nd book, it wasn't received well. Sales were nowhere near the first one. People weren't interested in things that went right, only interested in tragedy. So again, they are a caricature, if they wanted to continue to hold people's attention, tragedy would need to befall them again or they'd need to experience some sort of other mishap or hi jinks.
It does go on to describe how Maralyn dies and how Maurice continued to live which was insanely interesting to me. He was a miserable person, with and without Maralyn, but especially without her. Despite getting extremely sick many times, he continues to live on in misery. it was sad, because it was clear that the best thing that ever happened to him was the tragic 4 months he was lost at sea. The whole time he was complaining, bashing Maralyn's ideas for survival, considering how to commit suicide, and telling Maralyn all the ways she was wrong. After the whole ordeal, he admits to everyone that she was the one who kept them alive in every sense of the idea for the entire time they were out there. And then he was the one who always talked to the media, up until the day he died. He would often reminisce over their time at sea and even his memories with Maralyn at sea. He didn't really reminisce on his time with her before or after the sea voyage ... It was painfully obvious that he was stuck within the tragedy and that it was the only thing that gave his life meaning.
That was all very sad not only because of how miserable and hopeless he was during the experience that was going to live his life meaning, but also because it was a complete, freak accident that ended up being the only meaningful thing in the entirety of his existence. It was random chance. Without this random event that had continued to have no real meaning or purpose other than entertainment for the media, he would have just been sad bumbling sack of bones for his whole life. Well, he was that despite this event anyway. It was just depressing how he clung to it his whole life even after the whole world had moved on... he didn't orchestrate anything out of his life or experiences, in a way, he went through life as if he was stranded on the ocean, just floating along and complaining, and doing nothing other than floating around. He didn't really do anything with it after, or do anything for himself or anyone else out of it. It just goes to show how completely random and nonsensical our lives are. It's also possible for them to be completely meaningless - for everyone else in the world but also even to ourselves. I guess my point is that this spectacular event didn't even really change their lives. They had a blip of fame but then still went on to live on a boat like they wanted. Then Maurice was miserable until he died.
What I appreciated about that was how human it was. it wasn't drummed up, it didn't try to make his life interesting, it just showed how one regular person with nothing going for them got their 15 minutes of fame in an otherwise bleak life, and how they descended back into their bleak life after it was over. It was obvious that this couple were not prepared for their "fame" and wanted nothing to do with that life, but it's the only thing they had to support themselves. Reminds me of TikTok today, when people suddenly go viral and they weren't prepared for it, and they try to continue it for all it's worth even though it's mostly a futile endeavor, viewers are always looking for the next best thing.
The other aspect of this book that I really appreciated was the commentary on biography and writing. Maurice becomes a writer, not in that he becomes a successful published writer or anything but just that he spends the rest of his life writing. Letters, journaling, documenting, whatever, he never stops writing about his life. He notes that it's very hard to write an accurate account of something - because you can't actually write about how it feels or the reality of it. You can write that you ate turtles, you can write that you sat on a dingy and saw sharks swimming by and reached in and grabbed one, but you will never be able to get across what the experience of eating the turtle is really like. It's like the concept of how people can explain anything to you but once you experience it yourself it takes on a new life for you and becomes reality. Explaining the reality of what it is like to eat a turtle after you've been stranded on the Antlantic ocean for months is something that Maurice could not put into words. He could explain how he filleted it, what it tastes like, the emotions that he had while eating it, but it's still not an encompassing account of the experience. An argument could be made that Maurice is just not skilled enough to do so, but I see his point. I will never understand what it is like to be stranded at sea, no matter how many accounts of it that I read, because being stranded at sea for me is going to be different than being stranded at sea for anyone else. And while we are reading another's account, we are applying our own life experience and lens to the story. He mentions that there is just so much that he experienced, and felt in even the smallest of moments while out at sea, and it was impossible to truly capture it all. When he was trying to write a biography of the event, he found it impossible to capture it as it truly was. But what is the truth? The truth is only what he experienced through his own lens of life and he found that he could not explain that through words.
