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The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds
A voyage through the mind of a writer with a passion for the sea dives into lyrical explanations of a watery world with sections on charts, islands, reefs, wrecks, fishing, and pirates
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First published January 1, 1992
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About the author
James Hamilton-Paterson
41 books93 followersJames Hamilton-Paterson is a British poet, novelist, and one of the most private literary figures of his generation. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, he began his career as a journalist before emerging as a novelist with a distinctive lyrical style. He gained early recognition for Gerontius, a Whitbread Award-winning novel, and went on to write Ghosts of Manila and America’s Boy, incisive works reflecting his deep engagement with the Philippines. His interests range widely, from history and science to aviation, as seen in Seven-Tenths and Empire of the Clouds. He also received praise for his darkly comic Gerald Samper trilogy. Hamilton-Paterson divides his time between Austria, Italy, and the Philippines and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
July 23, 2022
'Seven-tenths' is the kind of book that will either mean nothing to you or make you scratch the skin off your forearms trying to get other people to read it. It was recommended to me by a person I don't actually know. If I can find someone I actually know who reads this book and ends up liking it as much as I do, I’ll probably kiss them on the cheek, or maybe the mouth, and ask if they’d be interested in licking the blood off my forearms.
'Seven-tenths' is a book about the sea. It has seven chapters (Charts and Naming, Islands and Boundaries, Reefs and Seeing, Wrecks and Death, Deeps and the Dark, Fishing and Loss, Pirates and Nomads) in which Hamilton-Paterson explores the scientific and philosophical significance of the things in-and-of the earth’s oceans. It is also, in some important ways, a book about Hamilton-Paterson himself: of a life spent thinking about the sea, and about the meaningfulness and meaninglessness it has bestowed on him as a terrestrial being.
“… and in between assessing his chances of death by drowning, shark attack or exposure, into the swimmer’s mind comes a sharp, vainglorious image of his predicament. Lacking all coordinates, he sees his own head occupying a fixed place. He pictures it sticking out of that expanse of curved blue ocean, a little round ball burnished with the sun like the brass knob on top of a school globe. In his moment of loss he becomes the pivotal point about which the entire Earth turns.”
Perhaps the best way to indicate Hamilton-Paterson’s achievement in this book is by referencing two much more famous books about the sea—Rachel Carsen’s ‘The Sea Around Us’ and Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. One of Carsen’s greatest virtues was to deliver science to her readers with flourishes of heart. One of Melville’s most endearing traits was his (often fumbling) attempts to incorporate science into his romantic epic. The willingness of both Carsen and Melville to try to bring the ‘other side’ of the sea into their books is a big part of what makes them great. But what I think Hamilton-Paterson has, quite miraculously, managed to do in his book, is maintain both the rigours of science and the indulgences of philosophy at pretty much an equal level.
This does, indeed, seem to be a conscious aim on his part. He quotes Vladimir Nabokov’s typically-inversive epigram, “The precision of the artist should accompany the passion of the scientist”, and explicitly begs the question to his readers in chapter one: “[Is] it scientifically useful to be imaginatively caught up in the deeps?” While praising deep-sea pioneer William Beebe’s journals, we get further insight into Hamilton-Paterson’s own ambitions as a writer:
“I quote Beebe because he is both scrupulous and imaginative, and his text is full of small observations which anyone who is thoughtful about the sea will immediately recognise as authentic, such as that you don’t get wet when you dive, only when you surface.”
The times when I was most impressed by Hamilton-Paterson’s fusion of science and the arts were when he goes into bowel-twistingly gruesome chemical detail as he speculates how people trapped in a submarine would die and then decompose; when he weaves geography and history to demonstrate our messy understandings of islands and the deep seas; and when he psychologises science to explain how we came to see deep-sea creatures as prehistoric and nature as a discrete entity capable of entering a state of ‘balance’.
But this book is more diverse than a simple binary can explain. The ideas in it are complex and often wilfully contradictory. They fit into so many categories—existentialism, idealism, realism, solipsism, pessimism, luddism, sentimentalism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, biology, oceanography, geology, anthropology—but never wholly or in isolation. The only other authors I could conceivably attempt to compare Hamilton-Paterson to in this regard are Annie Dillard (‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’) and W.G. Sebald (‘The Rings of Saturn’). This is a very, very unique book, and I really think you should have a go at reading it.
'Seven-tenths' is a book about the sea. It has seven chapters (Charts and Naming, Islands and Boundaries, Reefs and Seeing, Wrecks and Death, Deeps and the Dark, Fishing and Loss, Pirates and Nomads) in which Hamilton-Paterson explores the scientific and philosophical significance of the things in-and-of the earth’s oceans. It is also, in some important ways, a book about Hamilton-Paterson himself: of a life spent thinking about the sea, and about the meaningfulness and meaninglessness it has bestowed on him as a terrestrial being.
“… and in between assessing his chances of death by drowning, shark attack or exposure, into the swimmer’s mind comes a sharp, vainglorious image of his predicament. Lacking all coordinates, he sees his own head occupying a fixed place. He pictures it sticking out of that expanse of curved blue ocean, a little round ball burnished with the sun like the brass knob on top of a school globe. In his moment of loss he becomes the pivotal point about which the entire Earth turns.”
Perhaps the best way to indicate Hamilton-Paterson’s achievement in this book is by referencing two much more famous books about the sea—Rachel Carsen’s ‘The Sea Around Us’ and Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. One of Carsen’s greatest virtues was to deliver science to her readers with flourishes of heart. One of Melville’s most endearing traits was his (often fumbling) attempts to incorporate science into his romantic epic. The willingness of both Carsen and Melville to try to bring the ‘other side’ of the sea into their books is a big part of what makes them great. But what I think Hamilton-Paterson has, quite miraculously, managed to do in his book, is maintain both the rigours of science and the indulgences of philosophy at pretty much an equal level.
This does, indeed, seem to be a conscious aim on his part. He quotes Vladimir Nabokov’s typically-inversive epigram, “The precision of the artist should accompany the passion of the scientist”, and explicitly begs the question to his readers in chapter one: “[Is] it scientifically useful to be imaginatively caught up in the deeps?” While praising deep-sea pioneer William Beebe’s journals, we get further insight into Hamilton-Paterson’s own ambitions as a writer:
“I quote Beebe because he is both scrupulous and imaginative, and his text is full of small observations which anyone who is thoughtful about the sea will immediately recognise as authentic, such as that you don’t get wet when you dive, only when you surface.”
The times when I was most impressed by Hamilton-Paterson’s fusion of science and the arts were when he goes into bowel-twistingly gruesome chemical detail as he speculates how people trapped in a submarine would die and then decompose; when he weaves geography and history to demonstrate our messy understandings of islands and the deep seas; and when he psychologises science to explain how we came to see deep-sea creatures as prehistoric and nature as a discrete entity capable of entering a state of ‘balance’.
But this book is more diverse than a simple binary can explain. The ideas in it are complex and often wilfully contradictory. They fit into so many categories—existentialism, idealism, realism, solipsism, pessimism, luddism, sentimentalism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, biology, oceanography, geology, anthropology—but never wholly or in isolation. The only other authors I could conceivably attempt to compare Hamilton-Paterson to in this regard are Annie Dillard (‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’) and W.G. Sebald (‘The Rings of Saturn’). This is a very, very unique book, and I really think you should have a go at reading it.
September 22, 2010
"Travelling long distances by sea, on the other hand, gives us time. Travel is like death in that it requires mourning. The light melancholy of watching a coastline recede is a necessary observance. We join in with shipboard life just as soon as we wish, and not before. Otherwise we write in our cabin or spend hours watching the wake of our own passage. The caves sucked into the water's surface by the turning of invisible propellers--each subtly different, each marbling a dissipating track which stretches back, an elastic streamer--become hypnotic. They set us adrift on inward voyages where we barely have enough sarcastic energy left to stop ourselves seeing our frail barks upon the vasty deep as paradigmatic. Such time, such long hovering on the edge of banality, is powerfully restorative. By the time approaching land is announced we are free to be excited. Later, it seems to us that only by having breathed the salt air of loss for long enough are we able to make a properly carefree disembarkation. We have adjusted. Our biological clocks are reset, our homoiothermal balance has altered with the latitude, our internal maps--whose every nautical mile has been felt as travelled--make sense. Behind us the ocean is criss-crossed with thousands upon thousands of multicoloured streamers, a planet festooned with farewells."
"I have never seen phosphorescence as bright as on that night. Leaning over the edge of the bangka I could follow every move of the searchers below. Only, the whirligigs of sparks, the flashings and showers of cold fire were at depths which could not be determined. Just as the glints and refractions in the best opals can appear deeper than the thickness of the stone itself or else closer than its surface, so the divers' movements excited discharges of light which were either a few feet away or in a universe beyond. It was vertiginous to gaze down because the view was more what normally expected to see overhead, On nights as dark as that it is anyway hard to define the horizon, to separate black sky from black sea. Now it was as if the cosmological figures of Sagittarius and Orion had come to life in a firmament beneath the boat. Legendary men outlined in stars swam among clouds of dark matter, galaxies and nebulae swirled in the eddies of their passing. In that moment I could have glimpsed a figure of the Bajau's own believing, the sama sellang or ocean gypsy who lives in the depths and sometimes leaves his kingdom at night to walk the beaches, a black and shining giant twelve feet tall. He is King of the Fishes, and any Bajau wanting to fish in his domain should have the courtesy and sense to ask his permission first or risk having his boat turn turtle without warning. It was while I was leaning over and watching that one of the outriggers inexplicably sheared off, tipping the bangka over and myself into the sea in a sheet of flame. In only a minute or two the Bajau had found their pot on the seabed by the light of their own hands. They emerged with it, laughing, and we all hauled ourselves from the ocean running with greenish fire."
So many of the paragraphs in 'Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds' are just as luminescent that it's hard to pick one as representative. A strange and beguiling meditation on the meaning of the sea, this discursive book deftly mixes science, history, anthropology, philosophy, and personal essay. A treasure trove glinting on the bottom of transparent tropical waters.
"I have never seen phosphorescence as bright as on that night. Leaning over the edge of the bangka I could follow every move of the searchers below. Only, the whirligigs of sparks, the flashings and showers of cold fire were at depths which could not be determined. Just as the glints and refractions in the best opals can appear deeper than the thickness of the stone itself or else closer than its surface, so the divers' movements excited discharges of light which were either a few feet away or in a universe beyond. It was vertiginous to gaze down because the view was more what normally expected to see overhead, On nights as dark as that it is anyway hard to define the horizon, to separate black sky from black sea. Now it was as if the cosmological figures of Sagittarius and Orion had come to life in a firmament beneath the boat. Legendary men outlined in stars swam among clouds of dark matter, galaxies and nebulae swirled in the eddies of their passing. In that moment I could have glimpsed a figure of the Bajau's own believing, the sama sellang or ocean gypsy who lives in the depths and sometimes leaves his kingdom at night to walk the beaches, a black and shining giant twelve feet tall. He is King of the Fishes, and any Bajau wanting to fish in his domain should have the courtesy and sense to ask his permission first or risk having his boat turn turtle without warning. It was while I was leaning over and watching that one of the outriggers inexplicably sheared off, tipping the bangka over and myself into the sea in a sheet of flame. In only a minute or two the Bajau had found their pot on the seabed by the light of their own hands. They emerged with it, laughing, and we all hauled ourselves from the ocean running with greenish fire."
So many of the paragraphs in 'Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds' are just as luminescent that it's hard to pick one as representative. A strange and beguiling meditation on the meaning of the sea, this discursive book deftly mixes science, history, anthropology, philosophy, and personal essay. A treasure trove glinting on the bottom of transparent tropical waters.
February 6, 2015
This is a very good read. At first I was a bit put off by the author's literary style. He tended to over do some of his similes, analogies and image portrayals. The first chapter is a largely technical treatise (aboard a British vessel doing sea floor mapping for USGS), so I guess he wanted to keep the interest of his technophobic readers but it just seemed too flowery at times. I am always glad when I stay with a book that might otherwise send me away and it turns out to be worth the stay. The author eventually settles in to his theme and every chapter provided to me a new way to consider various topics on the oceans theme.
p. 33 "It could be argued that the Old Testament story of Genesis was less a matter of creation than of naming, ... [god] uttered some solid nouns ..."
His chapter on "Islands and Boundaries" is particularly insightful and interesting. I have been a student of island phenomena for many years, but he manages to make me think about some aspects of islands in ways I hadn't considered.
p. 89 "...coral reefs are true borderlands, abounding in all sorts of ambiguity."
The chapter on Fishing authoritative. He clearly understands the trajectories of the commercial industry. It's even more interesting to me what these trajectories imply about humans as force for good or ill on the planet. It's not pretty either.
p. 207 "In this single century we've slaughtered a thousand times more people than all the Genghis Khans of history put together. Into the bargain we've laid waste to our planet. Not bad going for a mere hundred years."
I never really understood what his "overlay" tale, of a swimmer separated from his boat in the middle of the ocean, is about. It seemed unconnected except for the obvious. It didn't work for me.
p. 33 "It could be argued that the Old Testament story of Genesis was less a matter of creation than of naming, ... [god] uttered some solid nouns ..."
His chapter on "Islands and Boundaries" is particularly insightful and interesting. I have been a student of island phenomena for many years, but he manages to make me think about some aspects of islands in ways I hadn't considered.
p. 89 "...coral reefs are true borderlands, abounding in all sorts of ambiguity."
The chapter on Fishing authoritative. He clearly understands the trajectories of the commercial industry. It's even more interesting to me what these trajectories imply about humans as force for good or ill on the planet. It's not pretty either.
p. 207 "In this single century we've slaughtered a thousand times more people than all the Genghis Khans of history put together. Into the bargain we've laid waste to our planet. Not bad going for a mere hundred years."
I never really understood what his "overlay" tale, of a swimmer separated from his boat in the middle of the ocean, is about. It seemed unconnected except for the obvious. It didn't work for me.
August 4, 2024
I love this book. Each and every one of us on the planet could write a book about the ocean, and none of us would come up with Hamilton-Paterson's odd mix of tales: a swimmer at sea who cannot find his boat; a small, uninhabited island in the Philippines before and after Japanese developers turn it into a resort; imagining the last hours of the sailors on a doomed submarine; the peculiarity of the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor; the old belief that bodies and ships "sink to their level" instead of to the bottom; a group of Filipino fishermen who live at sea; and the moral hazards of finding a dead man in a small boat out at sea.
My favorite story comes when the author wants to know what a coral reef sounds like. To find out he dives down onto the reef during a cloudy night so he can't see a thing and be distracted by his vision. Holding his breath and clinging to the reef, he listens to crabs walk across the coral, fish swim by, then, every once in a while, all the creatures go silent all at once. "What do they know that I don't?" he wonders. There's a man after my own heart.
My favorite story comes when the author wants to know what a coral reef sounds like. To find out he dives down onto the reef during a cloudy night so he can't see a thing and be distracted by his vision. Holding his breath and clinging to the reef, he listens to crabs walk across the coral, fish swim by, then, every once in a while, all the creatures go silent all at once. "What do they know that I don't?" he wonders. There's a man after my own heart.
May 7, 2013
A good book with something to fit everyone's interests in the ocean, but I don't think the entire book will appeal to everyone.
August 2, 2025
3.5 rounded up. The gorgeous prose of this book is a bit incongruous with non-fiction writing but it’s, by far, the best thing about it. The author can be so steadfast and cynical at times that it’s hard to read without thinking about what his own personal issues are in the way. (For example, he makes snarky comments about boarding school kids and the parents who sent them there that he MUST have been sent to boarding school himself.) But then he also describes the stars seen at sea as “a million suns lighting up a single earth night”. Beautiful.
September 3, 2022
There’s a lot I didn’t even understand here, but I loved this book. It wanders about, but never too far from the sea which it examines from scientific, poetic, historical and deeply personal angles.
I’m not even sure what to believe - in a work of non-fiction I’m pretty sure he dropped in some fiction but I’m happy with that.
An unexpected and wonderful book.
I’m not even sure what to believe - in a work of non-fiction I’m pretty sure he dropped in some fiction but I’m happy with that.
An unexpected and wonderful book.
January 17, 2024
Save for a great early essay on mapmaking and a richly-observed later essay on the Bajau boat people -- almost unbelievable! -- lots of these essays felt samey and elegiac without varying the thing being gawked at.
August 13, 2021
I think it took me...four or five months?...to finish Seven Tenths. Contrary to what I initially expected, this is not something that can be read quickly. While some of the writing is challenging in places, what I found more challenging were the ideas that Hamilton-Paterson wrote about. In Seven Tenths, he writes about things that many people (myself included) just don't think about on a regular basis. Yet many of these ideas are so beautiful, important, & even transcendent at times, that the book demands the reader's time. It requires time to sit with thoughts.
Some of the essays in Seven Tenths are more effective than others. Like others have reported, the initial essays are less powerful & less engaging than subsequent ones. It's almost as if the book builds & builds from simple fact-based reporting of a scientific journey to the book's final pages, which cover loss, death, life, & what it is to be human. ...I found the book a bit like a wave.
Unlike many other readers, I didn't find the final essays as moving as some of the others. I was challenged by the blending of fiction with fact, philosophy & spiritual stream of conscience. Though some of the phrases on the final pages were a beautiful end to Hamilton-Paterson's book, summarizing a general idea touched upon repeatedly throughout -- the sense of loss & grief that we carry with us throughout our lives, of there being something else, just beyond, something perhaps a little unsettling.
I don't think I've underlined or dog-eared so many pages in a book ever. Seven Tenths is not a book only about the sea -- it speaks to so many facets of human life in the Anthropocene -- the dread, the grief, the loneliness, the horizon & the past, longing & loss & hope, & mostly the beauty of life on earth, from beginning to end. ...& of course the ocean, which I've been obsessed with since I first saw it, thirty years ago.
Overall, this is an incredibly thoughtful & moving collection of essays. I found his essay on ecological changes to be some of the most moving & prescient writing I've ever read on the topic; time & time again (but especially in this essay), Hamilton-Paterson articulates feelings that many of us don't feel capable to put into words, feelings we aren't used to acknowledging or pausing over. This is an essay I'll return to many times. The entire book is worth reading for this essay alone, though almost every section will leave you with some new perspective or idea. This is wonderful writing that helps to untangle the reasons so many of us are beguiled by water, but of course it's so much more than that, too. Highly recommend, but be prepared to give yourself some time with it.
Some of the essays in Seven Tenths are more effective than others. Like others have reported, the initial essays are less powerful & less engaging than subsequent ones. It's almost as if the book builds & builds from simple fact-based reporting of a scientific journey to the book's final pages, which cover loss, death, life, & what it is to be human. ...I found the book a bit like a wave.
Unlike many other readers, I didn't find the final essays as moving as some of the others. I was challenged by the blending of fiction with fact, philosophy & spiritual stream of conscience. Though some of the phrases on the final pages were a beautiful end to Hamilton-Paterson's book, summarizing a general idea touched upon repeatedly throughout -- the sense of loss & grief that we carry with us throughout our lives, of there being something else, just beyond, something perhaps a little unsettling.
I don't think I've underlined or dog-eared so many pages in a book ever. Seven Tenths is not a book only about the sea -- it speaks to so many facets of human life in the Anthropocene -- the dread, the grief, the loneliness, the horizon & the past, longing & loss & hope, & mostly the beauty of life on earth, from beginning to end. ...& of course the ocean, which I've been obsessed with since I first saw it, thirty years ago.
Overall, this is an incredibly thoughtful & moving collection of essays. I found his essay on ecological changes to be some of the most moving & prescient writing I've ever read on the topic; time & time again (but especially in this essay), Hamilton-Paterson articulates feelings that many of us don't feel capable to put into words, feelings we aren't used to acknowledging or pausing over. This is an essay I'll return to many times. The entire book is worth reading for this essay alone, though almost every section will leave you with some new perspective or idea. This is wonderful writing that helps to untangle the reasons so many of us are beguiled by water, but of course it's so much more than that, too. Highly recommend, but be prepared to give yourself some time with it.
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January 18, 2012Hamilton-Paterson's enchanting essays contain plenty of information about the sea, what humanity has thought about it, and what we're doing to it now - but their real charm is as vehicles for musing on that peculiar sense of homesickness and melancholy disconnection which is one of the pillars of being human. At times, he can fall prey to a too-easy neophobia, but by the end even that has been acknowledged, albeit through interrogation by a Filipino fisherman's ghost (it's that sort of non-fiction book).
January 19, 2014
I couldn’t help but think of the whales. I knew, of course, intellectually, that whales are big, and so is the ocean. But actually experiencing the difference in scale between these creatures, this environment, and my puny little self…. Consider. Some whales can live to be 200 years old, maybe older, we don’t know. They have complex social structures. And at their respective nadirs, there were only an estimated 5,000 Humpbacks and less than 2,000 Blue Whales in the world.
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June 3, 2009
The history and science of the sea is written about so lovingly and personally that, while you’re reading this at the beach, when you look up from the page the entire world will have changed. What we have missed and not even known about is framed by what we can know and experience. As dangerous as space and much less studied, the sea gives itself to myths of every sort.
July 20, 2012
an invigorating plunge into the sea--metaphorically, historically, biologically, environmentally--by a writer with limitless literary musicality. i sort of had a panic attack reading the last section about how we're systematically destroying the oceans, but it was also a much needed splash in the face about the food choices i make.
March 1, 2010
A mercurial and poetic incantation to the sea in its many iterations and forms. Balances science with history, cultural studies, fiction, and personal memoir. Unlike anything I've ever read before or since!
July 15, 2023
Part poetry party science. Tis great.
July 23, 2008
Fantastic nonfiction about the ocean--if you love the sea, read this book.
Want to read
December 21, 2010own the dutch translation 'De zee, de zee'
January 26, 2011
Nederlands: De zee, de zee
March 3, 2011
Such an amazing book. A must read for, well, everyone. The last section is heart breaking.
December 5, 2015
Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I really loved this -- for me, the perfect balance of fact and poetry. Gorgeous stuff.
November 12, 2013
Amazing book full of different stories, tales, and adventure.
July 17, 2014
An enchanting meditation on the watery parts of our world.
A definite go back to book that is always In my suitcase.
A definite go back to book that is always In my suitcase.
January 14, 2016
Like its subject, incomparable, incredible, all-encompassing. Well worth the time and effort.
September 9, 2020
Enjoyed many passages about the author's encounters with the sea. Highly recommended if you enjoy nature writing to do with the ocean or with water.
February 19, 2017
Read this book and you'll never go swimming or fishing or sailing or diving or to the aquarium quite the same way as before.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews