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I found some notes I took on this book a long time ago, and it desperately made me want to dive into the world of Virginia Woolf again. The Waves is probably her most challenging work (at least out of the ones I've read), and I certainly needed plenty of time, and some help, to penetrate it.

This book is carried by rhythm, not plot. A poetic, dramatic description of nature and human life and all its dynamics. The sensory descriptions in it are unmatched. Writing a coherent review is difficult, as the book itself is not coherent, but I'll attempt it anyway: We are presented with nine episodes from the lives of six main characters: Bernhard, Susan, Neville, Jinny, Louis and Rhoda. There's also an absent, seventh character that all the others seems to circle around. There is a poetic, italicized intro to each episode (or chapter, if you like) describing the sun's movement over the sky in the course of a day. This "day" can be said to represent the lifetimes of the characters. These lyrical pieces has a grand and charged atmosphere. There is a time jump in between each episode, so we only get glimpses of the character's lives.

In dramatic monologues, supplemented here and there with "said" ("said Susan, said Bernhard") they tell us their immediate sensory experience, interspersed with glimpses of their living situation, and a lot of their inner lives. So in a lot of ways this is a character study, which I love. These inner monologues are continuously shaped and changed by the characters' surroundings in a matrix where everything influences everything else. And the immediate sensory experience is always surrounded by past memories and future projections. The characters are continuously created and recreated - just like the major metaphor of the book, the sea, is always in perpetual motion.

You can read this book as poetry, a set of beautiful , lyrical pieces from different immediate situations, but if you put in the effort to really get to know the characters, the book becomes a lot more rewarding. So here's my take on the six of them (and to the hidden, seventh one):

BERNHARD

Bernhard is the storyteller, the maker of winged words or confused messes - depending on who you ask. He is given the central perspective in the novel, and are given more room than the other characters.

Bernhard has a great love of words, of trying to create connections, real or imaginary. This is both a gift and a burden to him. He cannot help the urge to create, and get lost in, stories. He is elusive, undisciplined, easily influenced by others and easily distracted, constantly jumping from one thought to another. Bernhard has a flowing and ever-changing identity. Exploring and questioning everything, but he never finds himself. He imagines himself into other characters instead.

His talents lies in picking up all atmospheres in a room, all nuances of emotion in others. He picks up so much from other people, that it seems like he can hardly distinguish himself out from all of it. So in spite of his talents, he is not able to leave anything substantial of himself behind for posterity.
At the same time, Bernhard and Susan are the only two out of the six main characters that ends up living conventional family lives.

SUSAN

Motherless and fathersbound, intensely homesick at her boarding school, Susan feels everything intensely. She loves and hates, she is stubborn and unreasonable, very jealous and sometimes asocial. But at the same time, she is very closely connected to the other five characters, her childhood friends, and this bond lasts for a lifetime. Susan is strong and unkempt, with dirt under her fingernails. Born to be a farmer and a mother, she is bound to the earth, her home, the soil and its seasons and fertility.

NEVILLE

Neville is a man of order, and he cannot stand Bernhard's messy and fragmented stories. He is sickly and weak, but still very confident and comfortable in his place as part of England's upper class. He is disciplined and dedicated to his studies, a true academic, studying ancient/classical literature, if I remember correctly. He is also gay, and suffers from lost love. He locks himself away inside, reading in front of the fireplace, dreaming about love and sex.

JINNY

In the novels first few pages, Jinny spontaneously kisses Louis. This is the start of her long career of flirtation. Always dancing and always seductive, Jinny is very comfortable in her own skin. She likes her body and the way she looks, and takes great pleasure from it, as well as from other people's admiration. She enjoys life, especially it's physical pleasures, and life after the boarding school is like being set free.

However, this superficial life makes it difficult to make lasting connections of love or friendship. Jinny is vain, and it's like she only moves around on the surface of things; she loves city life , new clothes and pretty objects. There is no real depth to anything in her life. She lives in the moment and always longs for the next sensory, bodily pleasure.

LOUIS

Louis, the foreigner with the australian accent, "son of a banker, in Brisbane" - this is his identity. New money, and without old connections, he longs for a long ancestry and deep roots. One of the first images Louis paints for the reader is a feeling of roots extending deep into the ground and a connection with ancient civilizations. Thoughtful and alone, this is what he longs for.

He is the youngest of the six, good at school and a solid sort of guy, but he feels like an outsider. Uncomfortable, clumsy and not really a part of the gang. He is shy and suffers from an inferiority complex, at least when he is confronted with everything genuinely English.

Louis seeks what is lasting and predictable - he needs to feel safe and grounded. Even though he gets a very social job, he still feels like he's set apart, and he has a tendency to isolate himself from social life.

RHODA

Rhoda is the most mysterious and the most fascinating of the six characters. In her, Woolf gets to plunge into the psychological depths of human consciousness, through Rhoda's psychological problems. I'm uncertain what diagnosis Rhoda would have gotten today, but as a literary character, although she is suffering, I find her mind and psyche absolutely fascinating.

Dreamy and removed from real life, Rhoda lives in her own head. Like Susan she is motherless, and like Louis she feels herself excluded and set apart. She hides a lot, behind furniture or people, she wants to be invisible. She feels like she has no face, no eyes to see through, and no identity, like she is shattered, and not able to handle life. She sees herself like the white foam at the end of a wave (which made me think of H.C. Andersen's original "Little Mermaid" fairytale), like she has no soul, no self, no essence. She feels like she is dissolving more and more over time.

PERCIVAL

The hero of their childhood, who dies tragically while young, is remembered by all of them. When he is alive he is their sun, their centre. Made perfect by his death, he is remembered as a strong, handsome athlete. The natural leader of the boys at the boarding school, charismatic, relaxed and warm. He never gets to speak for himself, we see him only through the eyes of the others, and so have no direct access to his mind or voice.

It's ironic that in a book filled with identity crisis, the only character that can be said to have a strong, positive sense of self, dies young. I'm wondering if The Waves is telling us that being alive is being rewritten, or pulled apart, and that the picture they have of Percival would have proven to be false if he had lived and been allowed his own voice.

I had to read this book in little gulps, and then digest for a long time before continuing. The pleasure of the prose and the complexity of the characters made such a reading the only possible one for me. And so worth it.