Paul's Reviews > The Waves

This is a wonderful novel; Woolf herself referred to it as a play-poem. Often when I’m thinking about a review I will read what others have written, do a bit of research about the context or author. In this case, that approach is not really possible because there is a whole industry around Woolf and her novels and people spend academic lifetimes on all this!
Woolf said she was writing to a rhythm and not to a plot and the novel is a series of interludes and episodes revolving around six characters Susan, Jinny, Rhoda, Bernard, Louis and Neville. There is also Percival who does not feature in the novel, but is a focus for the others and whose early death in India has a significant effect on the others. Each character speaks over nine parallel episodes from childhood to late middle age. The wave metaphor appears and reappears and gives structure. Woolf tends to base her characters on people she knew and The Waves is no exception. Susan is Woolf’s sister Vanessa; Louis is most likely part Leonard Woolf and part T S Eliot; Neville is Lytton Strachey and possibly part Duncan Grant; Bernard creates some disagreement amongst critics who are split between Desmond McCarthy and E M Forster; Jinny is clearly part Woolf herself (Jinny was her father’s nickname for her), but also may be Kitty Maxse or Mary Hutchinson); Rhoda is also partly based on Woolf herself. The elusive and charismatic Percival around whom the group revolves is probably based on Thoby Stephen, Virginia’s brother, around whose memory the Bloomsbury group formed. Of course, this being Woolf, there are other views and some have argued that each of the voices/characters are actually part of Woolf herself and she is holding them in tension throughout, examining different parts of herself. She is certainly looking at the collective aspects of identity and the way the boundaries of identity merge and coalesce with that of the wider world.
I think Woolf is in some ways thinking in a more musical or even symphonic way; as though each character were a different musical instrument, all combining to produce a greater whole. This fluidity and movement is also reflected in the descriptions of the waves, which are italicised and separate the nine parts of the novel. The sections relating to the waves cover one day, which is the whole lifetime of the characters. Percival represents solidity and reliability. The sort of certainty that the Empire, the upper middle classes and the Victorian and Edwardian era represented. It is no coincidence that Percival goes to India. His death represents the whole edifice crumbling and the innate uncertainty of life itself. It may represent Woolf’s feelings about the loss of her brother, her own distress at the abuse she endured at the hands of her step-brother, the cataclysm of the war, her own mental illness; nothing is sure. There have been critics who have argued that Woolf is being over mystical and visionary; but close reading does indicate that Woolf is making some political points as well; this is not far in time from A Room of One’s Own. She mocks the all-male public school system, particularly as it produces figures like Percival and is critiquing colonialism at the same time.
The Waves is also Woolf’s reflection on the inexorable nature of death as Bernard sums up the whole thing in the closing pages. The end reminded me of Don Quixote astride Rocinante tilting at a windmill; the windmill being death. We all fling ourselves against “unvanquished and unyielding” Death; Woolf eventually chose how rather than wait for it.
In “A Sketch of the Past” Woolf said “that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art … we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” In The Waves Woolf expresses these ideas in her play-poem in a beautiful and lyrical novel laden with images and reflections that dazzle, stretch the mind and ask difficult questions. I loved this; as broad in scope as the sea and intensely personal; written with great craft and style.