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The Enormous Shadow
AuthorRobert Harling
LanguageEnglish
GenreThriller
Published1955 (Chatto and Windus)
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages272
ISBN9780460023986

The Enormous Shadow is a thriller novel by British author Robert Harling, first published in 1955 by Chatto and Windus. Set in London, it tells the story of a journalist who uncovers a pair of British spies working for the Soviet Union.

Plot summary

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The Enormous Shadow is told from the perspective of an unnamed journalist working for a London newspaper, who returns home after five years abroad as Washington correspondent. At the behest of the paper's editor-in-chief Mr. Wensley, he agrees to interview three politicians for a series of profiles on up-and-coming members of parliament. One of them, Matthew Chance, is the Labour Party MP for Rhondda Valley and East End. Born in Wales, he volunteered for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, and later fought in the Middle East, Crete, and Yugoslavia during World War II. After the war he stood as a Labour party politician, earning a reputation for his trenchant criticism of Labour's pro-American foreign policy.

Publication

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No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in .... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.

Ernest Hemingway in 1954[1]

Written in 1951, and published in 1952 , The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's final full-length work published during his lifetime. The book, dedicated to "Charlie Scribner" and to Hemingway's literary editor "Max Perkins",[2][3] was featured in Life magazine on September 1, 1952, and five million copies of the magazine were sold in two days.[4]

The Old Man and the Sea became a Book of the Month Club selection, and made Hemingway a celebrity.[5] Published in book form on September 1, 1952, the first edition print run was 50,000 copies.[6] The illustrated edition featured black and white pictures by Charles Tunnicliffe and Raymond Sheppard.[7]

In May 1953, the novel received the Pulitzer Prize[7] and was specifically cited when in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature which he dedicated to the Cuban people.[8][9] The success of The Old Man and the Sea made Hemingway an international celebrity.[5] The Old Man and the Sea is taught at schools around the world and continues to earn foreign royalties.[10]

Literary significance and criticism

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The Old Man and the Sea served to reinvigorate Hemingway's literary reputation and prompted a reexamination of his entire body of work. The novel was initially received with much popularity; it restored many readers' confidence in Hemingway's capability as an author. Its publisher, Scribner's, on an early dust jacket, called the novel a "new classic", and many critics favorably compared it with such works as William Faulkner's short story The Bear and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick.

Ernest Hemingway and Henry ("Mike") Strater with the remaining 500 lbs of an estimated 1000 lb marlin that was half-eaten by sharks before it could be landed in the Bahamas in 1935. See Pilar for details of this episode.

Gregorio Fuentes, who many critics believe was an inspiration for Santiago, was a blue-eyed man born on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. After going to sea at age ten on ships that called in African ports, he migrated permanently to Cuba when he was 22. After 82 years in Cuba, Fuentes attempted to reclaim his Spanish citizenship in 2001.[11] Critics have noted that Santiago was also at least 22 when he immigrated from Spain to Cuba, and thus old enough to be considered an immigrant—and a foreigner—in Cuba.[12]

Hemingway at first planned to use Santiago's story, which became The Old Man and the Sea, as part of an intimacy between mother and son. Relationships in the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to as "The Sea Book". Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream. Hemingway mentions the real life experience of an old fisherman almost identical to that of Santiago and his marlin in On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter (Esquire, April 1936).[13][14]

Joseph Waldmeir's essay "Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man" is a favorable critical reading of the novel—and one which has defined analytical considerations since. Perhaps the most memorable claim is Waldmeir's answer to the question—What is the book's message?

The answer assumes a third level on which The Old Man and the Sea must be read—as a sort of allegorical commentary on all his previous work, by means of which it may be established that the religious overtones of The Old Man and the Sea are not peculiar to that book among Hemingway's works, and that Hemingway has finally taken the decisive step in elevating what might be called his philosophy of Manhood to the level of a religion.[15]

Waldmeir considered the function of the novel's Christian imagery[original research?], most notably through Hemingway's reference to the crucifixion of Christ following Santiago's sighting of the sharks that reads:

"Ay," he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.[16]

One of the most outspoken critics of The Old Man and the Sea is Robert P. Weeks. His 1962 piece "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea" presents his argument that the novel is a weak and unexpected divergence from the typical, realistic Hemingway (referring to the rest of Hemingway's body of work as "earlier glories").[17] In juxtaposing this novel against Hemingway's previous works, Weeks contends:

The difference, however, in the effectiveness with which Hemingway employs this characteristic device in his best work and in The Old Man and the Sea is illuminating. The work of fiction in which Hemingway devoted the most attention to natural objects, The Old Man and the Sea, is pieced out with an extraordinary quantity of fakery, extraordinary because one would expect to find no inexactness, no romanticizing of natural objects in a writer who loathed W. H. Hudson, could not read Thoreau, deplored Melville's rhetoric in Moby Dick, and who was himself criticized by other writers, notably Faulkner, for his devotion to the facts and his unwillingness to 'invent.'[17]

Some critics suggest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea in reaction to the overtly negative criticism he received for Across the River and into the Trees.

Legacy

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In 1954 Hemingway donated his Nobel prize gold medal in Literature to the venerated Marian image of Our Lady of Charity. The Swedish medal was stolen in 1986, but was returned later upon the threat of Raul Castro.[18]

The Old Man and the Sea has been adapted for the screen three times: a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy, a 1990 miniseries starring Anthony Quinn, and a 1999 animated short film. It is often taught in high schools as a part of the American Literature curriculum.

In 2003 the book was listed at number 173 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's 200 "best-loved novels".[19]

In 2007 the book was featured as a plot element in an episode of "South Park" (series 11, episode 6).

References

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  1. ^ "Books: An American Storyteller". TIME. December 13, 1954. Retrieved February 1, 2011.
  2. ^ Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. p. 5
  3. ^ Perkins, Maxwell (2004). Bruccoli, Matthew J.; Baughman, Judith (eds.). The sons of Maxwell Perkins: letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and their editor. University of South Carolina Press. p. xxvii. ISBN 1-57003-548-2.
  4. ^ "A Hemingway timeline Any man's life, told truly, is a novel". The Kansas City Star. KansasCity.com. June 27, 1999. Archived from the original on October 12, 2008. Retrieved August 29, 2009.
  5. ^ a b Desnoyers, p. 13
  6. ^ Oliver 1999, p. 247
  7. ^ a b Meyers 1985, p. 489
  8. ^ "Heroes:Life with Papa". TIME. November 8, 1954. Retrieved December 12, 2009.
  9. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved October 4, 2009.
  10. ^ Meyers 1985, p. 485
  11. ^ "El pescador que inspiró a Hemingway 'El viejo y el mar' recupera la nacionalidad española". Retrieved June 7, 2013.
  12. ^ Herlihy, Jeffrey. "Eyes the same color as the sea: Santiago's Expatriation from Spain and Ethnic Otherness and in Hemingway's the Old Man and the Sea". Hemingway Review. Retrieved April 17, 2015.
  13. ^ Old Man and the Sea. Introduction: The Ripening of a Masterpiece. Simon and Schuster. Retrieved September 29, 2012.
  14. ^ Hemingway, Ernest (edited by William White) (1967). By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. Selected articles and dispatches of four decades. New York: Scribner's.
  15. ^ Joseph Waldmeir (1957). "Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man". Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. XLII: 349–356.
  16. ^ Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. p. 118
  17. ^ a b Robert P. Weeks, Robert P. (1962). "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea". College English. XXIV (3): 188–192. doi:10.2307/373283. JSTOR 373283.
  18. ^ "Huffington Post". March 27, 2012. Retrieved October 7, 2014.
  19. ^ "BBC – The Big Read". BBC. April 2003, Retrieved August 23, 2017
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Sources

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Further reading

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Awards and achievements
Preceded by Nobel Prize in Literature
1954 		Succeeded by

{{DEFAULTSORT:Old Man And The Sea, The}} [[Category:1952 American novels]] [[Category:American novels adapted into films]] [[Category:Books by Ernest Hemingway]] [[Category:Charles Scribner's Sons books]] [[Category:Novels about animals]] [[Category:Novels by Ernest Hemingway]] [[Category:Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning works]] [[Category:Novels set in the Caribbean]] [[Category:Fish in popular culture]] [[Category:Works about old age]]

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