The God Beneath The Sea - Development and Themes

Development and Themes

Blishen and Garfield began work on The God Beneath the Sea after discovering that Greek mythology had had similar impacts on them as primary school children. In Blishen's words, "these stories seemed to illuminate, to make clear, what was going on around me in my small and unimportant life. They were about love ... They were about the desire for power, about jealousy, about triumph and great defeat." Garfield suggested they should "write the stories for today's children" and remove the "upholstered Victorian quality" of the stories as told to themselves.

The authors aimed to restore the power the myths had had for the Greeks, and for themselves as children. They decided to tell the myths not as separate stories but as "a fresh and original piece of fiction" and a single, continuous account of the origins of the world, of man's struggle against his surroundings, and of man's struggle with his own nature. They hoped while writing the book to present the myths as "a total coherent account of the human situation, the human predicament, and human opportunities." One of the main difficulties they encountered was selecting a sequence of myths from "the enormous expanse" of Greek mythology to form a single story that would increase the power of the work.

They shared a concern about recent developments in children's literature and society's attitudes towards children. They felt that older children's literature had been moving closer to adult literature, and that the book had taken them "further than ever been taken before" towards that end. They felt it necessary to address "meaningful violence" and "the strongest of human passions" in the novel, because these were "the preoccupations with which our children are, we know, at the moment filled."

Blishen and Garfield used four source texts: E. V. Rieu's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Metamorphoses, and Robert Graves' The Greek Myths. The authors' primary source text was Graves' The Greek Myths, because of the simplicity of his writing. They also borrowed from Ovid and many musical sources, including Handel.

About the writing process the authors told Junior Bookshelf (August 1971), "We wrote together, much of the time. One of us would actually commit the words to paper. There were often long silences. These might be broken, not by a grave suggestion as to further text, but by some wild burst of laughter. Much of the matter we were dealing with was most grim and tense. Laughter - and some schoolboyish joking - helped."