Sea Change (Armstrong Novel) - Themes and Literary Significance

Themes and Literary Significance

Sea Change was the first book specifically for boys to win the Carnegie Medal. All the characters are male and the story is set almost entirely in the traditionally masculine environment of a ship at sea. Further, Cam's family is not mentioned, nor do any of the characters refer to life ashore. The focus is firmly on the work of the ship and the interactions between crew members.

Michele Gill places Sea Change in a Late Victorian tradition of didactic adventure books inculcating manly values (Victorian masculinity). She notes the emphasis on the trustworthy adults who guide the boy's training. "The novel suggests the continuance of a set of attributes which define manliness as well as maintaining the status quo within a society recovering from the upheaval of a World War."

From another perspective, Marcus Crouch sees the book as breaking drastically with the tradition of sea stories through its uncompromising realism. "In its unobtrusive way this was a revolutionary book ... It substituted for romance a robust facing of reality." He identifies Armstrong's intention to give the reader a sense of his own power, a confidence in his ability to live a full life in the real world, to provide in effect an "admirable textbook for life". What makes the book a true novel, though, is Armstrong's exposition and analysis of character. As well as having a command of the details of shipboard life, Armstrong has a profound understanding of how a young man thinks, and skilfully shows Cam's essential decency and his struggle to come to terms with the world he finds himself in.