Book Review: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

Not much time left in the semester now.  Thankfully, summer break will follow.  Sure, there are many things that need to happen this summer, but for now, it is easy to look forward and say that the future will be better than the past, or at least the immediate past.  Not to say life isn't grand.  Far from it.  But I'd be glad to have less school work for a brief period of time.

I've been working on the following review off and on for a little while, and I'm still not quite satisfied with it.  But you can only polish the proverbial nugget just so long.  So here goes:

Source: Amazon.com

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters

This is a tough one to review, and so I am going to borrow a long used trick of reviewing authors, and take someone else’s review to fill in some details that might aid the un-initiated.

When their father is eaten by a hammerhead shark, the Dashwood sisters and their mother are forced to leave their home behind, for it is their brother’s inheritance. In a world where the ocean has crept inland and even the gentlest sea creatures have acquired a taste for human flesh, a home with proper defenses round the perimeter is a must. The Dashwoods’ new home on Pestilent Isle has such defenses, but it is a strange place, and becoming stranger still. Nonetheless, it is a home, and they are pleased to have it. Now the sisters only need suitors who can protect them from giant octopi and devil-dolphins. In their world, such a man is one to swoon over.

From Tia Nevitt.com

I don’t know that I could do a better job of describing this book “in a nutshell” than Ms. Nevitt does (I’ll assume that this didn’t come from the book’s back cover flap and that thereby I would be stealing someone else’s theft).  I can certainly put in my two cents on the book’s contents as they struck me, but I’ll use her review a couple times more when referring to the book.  What she says gets the idea across significantly better than someone who is new to Jane Austen - aka: myself - could sufficiently do.


First off, I suppose the lack of familiarity is a big hang-up for me personally regarding this book.  I know there are people out there who are much more familiar with Victorian era romance novels, such as Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, than I am, and some have very passionate feelings on the subject.  I guess I’m chickening out, as I don’t want to tread on any toes.  As this book is considered a part of the growing “mish-mash” genre, it is tough to give a review that is fair to both sides of the coin.  I’ll do my best though.  Thus the cop-out to another person’s review.

With these preliminaries out of the way, let’s jump right in the water, yes?  Specifically looking at Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, I can say that I enjoyed it for the most part in a darkly humorous way.  I did find that the language of Austen’s part of the writing to be as daunting as I feared it might be, even when interspersed with Mr. Ben Winters inclusions of nasty sea critters and wild adventures.  Not enough experience with the period’s verbage I suppose, when looking at Austen’s prose.  But Victorian era novels are not my forte, and so I get lost easily.  Plus I have a habit of wanting to understand everything I read, and this makes me read a bit slower (listen slower? yeah, I suppose that fits for an audiobook) than I wish to.

Anyway, I think reading this book might have helped, as I could have taken the time to analyze the content a bit closer and not have become distracted by some of Austen’s more obtuse turns of phrase.  This applies directly to this review in particular.  Unless you have read Austen’s original Sense and Sensibility before and/or are familiar with the various idioms of the period, I suggest the paper version over the audiobook.  Just from personal experience, mind you.

So what do we really have here?  Well, it’s Jane Austen with sea monsters, steam-punk-like elements, pirates, an undersea submarine station, and plenty of other adventure to what I take to be an otherwise overly female-centric tale would be my overarching answer.  Sorry, but there it is.  I am impressed with the feeling that Sense and Sensibility is a lady’s book, and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters didn’t disabuse me of that notion.

Hmmm...  I’m at a lack for what to say next, and so I’m shamelessly going back to Ms. Nevitt’s review.

Only Margaret senses the deeply unsettling air of Pestilent Isle. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters expands this youngest Dashwood sister’s role, which I enjoyed because Margaret seems like almost an afterthought in the original story. Marianne is too absorbed with herself and Willoughby to notice anything amiss, but Elinor’s strange visions of a five-pointed star add to the unease. These flashes of foreboding lend Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters a very different kind of suspense than what the original story had.

Yet despite all the gloom, there is a sense of wonder in this book. Best of all is Sub-Marine Station Beta, an undersea city where the streets are canals and tamed sea creatures replace gondolas as the usual transportation. Beneath this dome of glass, residents must wear Float-Suits at all times. These suits act as breathing and floatation devices in case of emergency. This city is accessible only by submarine, but it is worth the trip, for Sub-Marine Station Beta is home to a host of sights, such as museums and the famed Kensington Undersea Gardens. Such inclusions almost lend Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters the feel of a steampunk novel.

Again from TiaNevitt.com

Now that Nevit has explained the outline of the plot a bit better, let me point out some other things about the book from my own experience.  Dipping a toe in the Sense and Sensibility side for Austen’s part of the story, I did enjoy her dynamic characters and the very human natures of the participants of this tale.  I may be un-interested in romance novels, be they Victorian era or modern ones, but the colorful details and rich characterizations shine through, even when glossed over (slimed over, perhaps?) with Ben Winter’s additions of horrible sea creatures, a bloodthirsty pirate named Dread Beard, and elements from HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos that would be easily recognizable to anyone who had read even one or two of that author’s works.

Some of the best aspects of Winter’s additions were the thinly veiled humor regarding British imperialism, the antipathy that so many of the main characters repeatedly display toward those of lower classes, and the ongoing allusions to “the alteration,” or the cause that has brought about a general enmity between human and fish-kind.  This reason for this “alteration” is never specifically solved in the book, which in a couple of reviews that I read was complained about, but I found it nice not to wrap up all the loose ends too neatly.  That and the Leviathan.  But I won’t completely spoil his/its entrance.

The humor itself was the best part of Winter’s additions, but also the worst, as I’ll explain shortly.  I can’t say if Sense and Sensibility is full of wit, as I have heard it said, but Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters overflows with raucous, morbid, tongue-in-cheek and extremely back-handed humor.  For instance, one scene left me chuckling quite loudly and drew several questioning glances from my co-workers on the night shift.  Let me see if I can appropriately set the scene for you.  I don’t know the exact correlating moment in the original Austen work, and can’t recall the exact details well enough to explain what was going on so that a person familiar with that book could figure it out easily.  So I’ll just tell you what I recall, as well as provide a quote from the scene that I was able to find online.  Here goes... Elinor and Mary Anne Dashwood are at Sub Station Beta, which is the holiday resort version of the place that the sisters visit in the regular book (I still can’t recall the name of that place from watching the movie with my wife way back when... sorry).  While there, the experience occurs wherein Mary Anne is ignored and brushed off by Wilougby (I’m winging that spelling, sorry).  Sometime not long after that uncomfortable encounter - which in Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters also involves giant lobsters in a horrific circus-like show that turns into a bloodbath - we join Elinor and her companions back at the home of the lady they are staying with, and discussing the events of the previous day.  Here is the quote from this particular scene:

"…they saw that a servant, who had been changing the water filtration tank and come detached from the breathing hose of his special Ex-Domic Float-Suit, was clamoring for their attention. The operations of the Station’s various life-sustaining apparatuses were meant to be entirely invisible to the inhabitants, and the man’s noisy exhibition was a rather embarrassing violation of decorum; Elinor and her guests studiously ignored him, and his increasingly insistent thrashing became the background to the ensuing uncomfortable exchange."

This part alone got me grinning, but it got even better.  The servant mouths the words “Help Me” through the glass of the undersea station as a giant Angler fish approaches him.  The proper British ladies and gentlemen take only scant notice as the man pounds on the glass and attempts to evade the huge and deadly fish, and while the dramatic events unfold, they carry on with their conversation.  Meanwhile, the servant is eaten bit by bit in gory fashion.  One male character remarks something to the effect that: “Angler fish have so many teeth” before continuing with what he must surely have said in Austen’s original novel.  The sheer absurdity of it had me in stitches.  It isn’t the circumstances themselves, but the dichotomy of the two things going on at the same time that were so funny.  And the way it was described.  Winters was especially on his game when writing that passage, I think.

Unfortunately, this also leads me to my complaint about the additions by Winters.  Too much of a good thing is truly not a good thing, and Winters doesn’t know how to reign it in.  We get the point after the seventh or eighth monster fish-caused killing, and by then, it is literally overkill.  Almost every single scene in which a sea monster comes into play ends quite over the top and in gruesome fashion.

The scene I described above with the servant could have been done with more... subtly I suppose is what I’d say.  The additions by Winters lack any sense of nuance.  The nasty dismemberment of the servant would have been just as humorous if it had not been so gruesome, as the scene that is set up before the actual disembowelment part is quite funny.  It is the incredulity you feel as you watch (in your mind) the servant pounding on the glass and the proper Brits going on about their business even as the man is attacked that makes it funny.  It is one of those instances in which something is so ridiculous that you can’t help but laughing.  But Winters ends it in a bloody red haze, and the cheap slasher movie aspect diminishes the overall effect.  Perhaps if it had been written with a bit more panache, it might have remained funny instead of turning from purely farcical to ultimately unsatisfying.  At least that was my take on it.  A “less is more” approach.  Letting a few things go to the imagination.  People in Austen’s time could do that, so why can’t we seem to manage it today?

Thankfully, there are other instances in which the discontinuity of the two worlds isn’t so offensive as to break the spell.  For instance, here is another quote from the book that I found and decided to include, in order to show some of the funny one-liners that get tossed into this mish-mash world:

"’Is there a felicity in the world superior to this?’ asked Marianne with a grin. ‘Margaret, we will walk here at least two hours, and if we are set upon by any sort of man-beast with giant lobster claws, I shall swiftly butcher it with this pickaxe I brought for that purpose.’"

The whole book is scattered with great one-liners, if you take the time to watch for them.  I only wish I could find more and include them.  And, as a semi-aside, I have to point out that the part with Edward Ferrars and his mother trying to convince him not to marry a woman considered below his station (I think that is how it went) is also wonderful all by itself.  Not only is she threatening his economic and social ruination, she is also dropping little minnow fish into a bucket of water into which she has demanded he stand, and he is being nipped by their tiny little teeth.  Each time she asks him to relent and he refuses, she drops another one in.  This scene by itself is hysterical in its pure silliness.

So now you at least know what you’re up against, if you decide to tackle Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.  Would I recommend it?  Depends.  Do you love the original Sense and Sensibility?  How much?  Can you live with the changing of something you hold dear?  If so, you might be able to stomach it.  Speaking of stomaching it, bear in mind that the book has had gratuitous gore and violence added, as I have clearly explained.  As noted, this turned me off in places.  So much at times, that I actually was looking forward to Austen’s prose to re-introduce itself.  But then I suppose subtlety was the furthest thing from Winters mind.

So, have I made this review as clear as mud on a fine rainy spring day?  Have I mucked up the waters enough, so to speak?  Would I read this book again, knowing what I know now about it?  No, I can’t say as I would.  But do I regret reading it in the first place.  No, I honestly don’t.

And is anybody else in the mood to eat fish?

 P.S.: Via a happy coincidence, my wife has been reading Sense and Sensibility at the same period of time in which I read Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.  If only I could convince her to write a featured review of that book that I could then submit to you readers.  She is awfully busy, but maybe… just maybe a letter writing campaign might do the trick!  I know I’d love to hear from somebody else on a book that I personally don’t intend to read.  How about it?  Any takers?  Send in your requests and maybe she will relent.  Can’t hurt to try.

Learn more about Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters from Amazon.com

And again, acknowledgment and thanks to TiaNevitt.com for her concise and informative review.  No, I don't know her, but I stole her words just the same and am happy to give credit where credit is due.

The parting comment:

Source: The Onion.com/Youtube

Yeah, so others may have seen this one already, but I got a kick out of it.  And they said teenagers were bad in my generation.  Long live cell phones and social media...