Review: The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (1978 winner)

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch is a novel about an aging theater icon who retires to the North Sea coast of England. It is a wonderful, fantastic story, about long-lasting attachments between people and the ideas that hold them together.

Murdoch is known as a philosophic writer and there is not a lot of action in this book. But she knows how to pace the story to keep it entertaining. She parses out what action there is, so just when it starts to seem too talky, something startling happens to capture the reader's attention.

Charles Arrowby was a famous playwright, actor, and director who, in retirement, seeks solitude in a funky, spooky old house perched on seaside cliffs. The story is told through his journal, which contains observations on his present as well as self-serving, only sometimes honest, reminiscences on his past.

While Charles seeks to put the theater life behind him, his life is theater. When former lovers, friends old and new, and even his Buddhist cousin turn up at his isolated retreat, Charles can’t help but manipulate and bully them into being a part of his one-man show. He treats the people in his life like he treated the audiences he mused on in this passage:

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied.

In the end, things do not work out as Charles planned, which only shows that Murdoch was much wiser than her narrator.

This is a wonderful, engrossing book, well deserving of its Booker prize.

(This review is also posted on Rose City Reader.)

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

An ageing man gives up his glamorous life in London as an eminent theatre director, moves into an odd house on the coast, and picks up his pen with the intention of 'finding' his 'form' and exploring what has been and will be his life. The man has a few strange episodes at the start of the book relating to peculiar visions and ghostly activity, but the story is quickly overtaken by a series of increasingly incredible events the centre on him finding his long lost childhood sweetheart.

The sea, the sea is too long by far. The novel's charm comes from the daily occupations of a man seemingly seeking something akin to solitude or peace - his daily encounters with the sea, his domestication of the rocks surrounding his house, the meticulous descriptions of his particular brand of culinary activity. In these details, the novel sings. The story, though, is curiously constructed - it starts like a ghost story, quickly shifts into a somewhat farcical drama and then becomes a meditation on spirituality. The house is at times phantasmic, though it never truly fulfils its potential as a force to be reckoned with. The central plot - the overlong 'history' section - is ridiculous, and brings out all that is unbearable in Charles, the protagonist. By chance, he meets again his childhood sweetheart, who left him some forty five years earlier. He decides that he has another chance to pursue her, that they may find happiness with one another again, and he hatches elaborate plots to determine ways to meet her, to ensnare her, to 'rescue' her. She, however, has no intention of being rescued, has no notion that things might be different, and at the apex of the silliness, when Charles has her held against her will in his house, there are a number of very tedious exchanges in which Charles fails to listen to anything she says, and in which she fails to say anything rational or convincing. This farce ruins what has the makings of a great novel: many of the peripheral characters are interesting and colourful; the setting is evocative, menacing and powerful; and the context of the protagonist seeking a retreat but ending up with something different has potential. The ending is a reward for the feat of endurance to get through the book, but its potency is all but destroyed by the preceeding nonsense.

Sadly, I think this novel tries to be too many things, and as a result, fails to find a focused 'form' - which throws an odd light Charles' explicit intention to allow the writing to find its own form.

Iris Murdoch: the sea, the sea

This is the first time I have read a book by Murdoch, as I have previously been a little frightened by Murdoch's reputation as an intellectual.

The book is written in the form of a diary, kept by Charles Arrowby, theatre actor turned director, retired to an isolated neglected house on the edge of the sea. The plot is fairly brief; Charles recognises one of his neighbors as childhood love who had run from him forty years before, and obsessively pursues her. The main body of the writing (502 pages of small type) is description, of Charles's moods, thoughts, worries, meals, and of the sea, the rocks and the weather.

There is a sense of unease about Charles. Shortly after the narrative begins he spots a huge sea serpent off the cost by his house, writhing in coils above the sea, which remains unexplained. There are strange rooms in his house. There are continual shadows, faces, drafts, noises, rustlings and clickings about the house, and there is no electricity, so nights are dark except for candles, oil lamps, firelight. The very residents of the area are hostile to Charles, for no reason.

The book charts Charles' loss of control over his life. At the beginning he schemes and influences past loves by letter, bringing them back into his life, deciding who to disrupt, who to hurt. Then he sees Hartley, and it all changes. He schemes as before, but he has miscalculated; Hartley does not want him, something he cannot conceive of, so all his plans go awry. As he continues to focus on Hartley, he loses control over all the other people in his life, who make plans without him, who change how they relate to him. Revelations are made, relationships he broke apart are mended, people he thought he disliked out turn out to be vitally important to him.

I really enjoyed this book, though I did tire of Charles Arrowby. This is another book written in the first person, and I admit that I was speed reading through the pages at the end, not wanting to miss anything that was happening, but keen to skim over more of Charles' ruminations.

I had an interest in Titus. As soon as his name was mentioned I felt that it had occurred before in the book in relation to Charles, though I can't now find it. Titus is a theatre name isn't it? It doesn't really belong in the world of Roy and Mary. And Titus is red haired; Lizzie was described as having red hair, and her description is like the description of Titus. Charles grows a red beard at the end of the book. I wondered if those were hints that in the cruelest of ironies, Titus actually was Charles's son.

The best bit of the book for me was during the kidnapping of Mary/Hartley, when the novel became a farce, with everyone turning up at the door, and Charles' house of cards falling round his ears.

I have not yet decided if I would read more Murdoch. I did enjoy this book, and though it was very long, and to some extent wearying, there really wasn't a wasted word.

1978 - The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

The narrator of The Sea, The Sea is Charles Arrowby, an unreliable narrator extraordinaire! He's an aging actor/director, who decides to retire to peaceful solitude by the sea, a fantasy beloved of so many. He buys a horrid little house called Shruff's End which is besieged by damp and void of amenities such as electricity and heating. Still, in summer the sea is lovely, and the weather is warm, and all seems well...

Murdoch's specialty is irony, and before long the reader becomes aware of Charles's egocentric view of the world. It takes only a little longer to realise that he is subject to delusions and powerful obsessions. He thinks that the whole theatrical world will be at his door disturbing him - and when they fail to turn up - he goes up to London to invite them!

Alas, they all come at once, the very weekend he plans to abduct his childhood sweetheart from her husband. Hartley Smith, now Mary Fitch, was as innocent childhood love (or so he tells us), and when she 'just happens' to live in the same village, his love for her is rekindled and he determines to rescue her from her 'brute' of a husband (who turns out to be handsome, and rather heroic, having done something very brave in the war).

By now, about half way through the book, the reader isn't sure whether any or all of the visitors are an illusion. Is Hartley real? Is she some other woman he has attached his fantasies to? Absurdity piles up on absurdity. Are we really meant to believe that Charles keeps Hartley locked in one room while he sleeps in another, content with minor fondlings? That James, Gilbert, Lizzie, Peregrine and Titus are all sleeping in serious discomfort in this bizarre household so that they can help him in his crazy conspiracy? And mad Rosina, is she real?

Well, finer minds than mine may make something else of it, but I don't think so. I think that Charles is down on his luck and can't afford his old lifestyle as work dries up. He has a romantic view of solitude but loneliness, drugs and cheap wine work together to form a soup of wild delusions. I think he's incapable of having a relationship with anybody and that it's significant that most of the characters (if they ever did actually exist) 'disappear' one way or another.

Did I like the book? I think it's a bit long and could have done with some of the editing that Murdoch reputedly resisted. I became rather weary of Charles (as I think I was meant to do) but the interminable conversations with Hartley were irritating, and the ending was disappointing. I'd have liked Charles to get his comeuppance!

I finished reading and journalled this book on 19.7.03
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers

Trevor's Review of Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea

"I left in store with that first love so much of my innocence and gentleness which I later destroyed and denied, and which is yet now perhaps at last available again. Can a woman's ghost, after so many years, open the doors of the heart?"

This was my first time with Iris Murdoch, and I see why she was shortlisted so many times. I was drawn to her simple yet ellaborate prose, her fine rhythm, all bolstered by her expertise in psychology.
Here we have the memoirs of Charles Arrowby. The story he tells is brutal and haunting, not always on the surface but mostly in the characters' psyches. These poor people should not be dealing with each other, but somehow out of their interaction comes a sense not just of redemption but also of transcendence. After living a famous life in the theater, Arrowby moves to a small home by the sea and begins to write his memoirs. The first part of the novel is very much a day to day recitation of events--though thanks to Murdoch's insight and wit, even the food is interesting and important. The people from his past, however, don't leave him alone. In particular, he runs into his first love, a seemingly unhappily married old woman. He becomes obsessed with taking her away and begining the life they should have begun some forty years ealier.

"What indeed was I planning to do? I was in a state which I well knew was close to a sort of madness, and yet I was not mad. Some kinds of obsessions, of which being in love is one, paralyse the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality. I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, cetain agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat-paths of fantasy and intent. But I was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even to desire to do so."

Arrowby is a despicable man--here he is telling a story that puts him and his life in such a high position that readers do not get to read the guilt, the pain, and the emptiness of his life, though it's there. Also, readers do not get a clear glimpse at the other characters because Charles himself does not fully comprehend those around him. While this may sound like a typical case of an unreliable narrator, Murdoch expertly uses this to explore the themes of egoism and jealousy, and even the unreliability of the whole narrative.

"Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hids the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage."

Murdoch is also a master of atmosphere: the bead curtain, the red room, the sea itself are all presences throughout the book. She uses them to great effect to create moods and to reflect the flow of the novel. There are some beautiful passages that I'd love to put into this review, but I will resist the temptation.
This book is not a straight forward story with a clear plot. One of the great things about this book is that whenever the narrator lets his reader know his intentions, he never complies, he never gets around to doing anything he says he is going to do. It's like a long list of failed plans. The symbolism and the psychology might not always be clear, but the book is worth exploring.
I give it 4/5.

Laura's Review - The Sea, the Sea

The Sea, the Sea
Iris Murdoch
495 pages


Charles Arrowby is a London theatre director who has recently retired to a seaside cottage in the south of England. He plans to write his memoirs, with particular focus on his lover-mentor, a woman named Clement. The book is written in the first person; Charles chronicles both day-to-day living in his cottage, and describes his life and loves. Vanity and jealousy are central themes. Charles spent his life immersed in theatre, entangled in complex relationships. His cousin James grew up in a more privileged environment and was a perennial cause of envy. Hartley was Charles' childhood sweetheart and, having been rejected by her as a young adult, Charles has been unable to deeply love anyone else. He toys with the affections of two actresses, Lizzie and Rosina, and fancies himself as having power over them when in fact, it is exactly the reverse.

The plot thickens when Charles meets up with Hartley, who surprisingly lives in the village near his cottage. She is married, with an adult son. But this does not stop Charles from pursuing her, and trying to re-create the happiness he felt as a teenager. Meanwhile James, Rosina, Lizzie, and others make frequent visits and try to talk sense into Charles. As Mary Kinzie writes in her introduction to the Penguin classic edition, Charles "violently and bullheadedly persists in all the wrong directions." None of his plans work out as he hopes. And as these plans unravel, he keeps trying to find another way to achieve his dreams. A climax of sorts occurs about 100 pages before the end, in which Peregrine, a theatre friend, calls him on his negative and manipulative behaviors: "You're an exploded myth. And you still think you're Genghis Khan! Laissez-moi rire. I can't think why I let you haunt me all these years. ... You never did anything for mankind, you never did anything for anybody except yourself." (p. 395)

Despite these character traits, Charles is not completely despicable. Iris Murdoch had a tremendous talent for portraying the middle-aged to older man and all his foibles, in a way that made the man mostly likeable. The Sea, the Sea also includes some interesting plot threads: Charles' pursuit of Hartley; Hartley's marriage; Hartley's son Titus; Charles' relationship with James, and so on. All in all, a satisfying read. ( )

My original review can be found here.