The Sea, The Sea

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Nonetheless she has lumbered her characters with some of the more choice (i.e. insoluble, fascinating, humiliating) problems her philosophical alter ego has been exploring lately. Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.

Without really gauging how Hartley feels about him, Charles becomes obsessed with reviving their past relationship—or, at least, his idealized version of it. His endeavor is sidelined by several of his past lovers, who incessantly visit him. At the same time, Hartley is threatened by her emotionally abusive husband, and her son, Titus. Titus runs away when family tensions become too difficult. Though part of Hartley wants to end her marriage, she has mixed feelings about trying to return to an inaccessible, innocent, and naive past. When she rebuffs Charles, he reacts desperately, shutting her in his house to forcibly isolate her from her other life. Hartley nearly suffers a psychotic break and begs Charles to let her go. After her repeated requests, he complies. I could have told you the country is the least peaceful and private place to live. The most peaceful and secluded place in the world is a flat in Kensington.”

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Murdoch’s novels are not merely cerebral exercises in ideas about moral philosophy, ethics and aesthetics, although those ideas shape her fiction. They are also shot through with the dark energies of occult forces, variously figured as Eros, the id, the unconscious, the repressed, the monstrous, the supernatural, the libidinous: all that the conscious mind cannot comprehend stalks her hapless protagonists, as their precarious fantasies of control are exposed for the delusions they are. Murdoch’s fictional experiments, as admirers such as AS Byatt have written, fuse realism with the mystical, producing a very English magical realism at the point where 19th-century realism meets myth and fable. For Murdoch, artistic form was a temptation and compensation, a remedy for the contingent messiness of life, but also a consolatory falsification. She wrote that the novel was caught between the “journalistic” and the “crystalline”, the loose baggy monster that Henry James saw in the 19th-century novel, and modernist experiments in controlled, limited artifice. What feels to the characters like the forces of contingency battering away at them is just as likely to be their author’s implacable design, creating ruthless comedies of manners, and various manners of comedy. Around her intricate plotting orbit satires of art and morality, accountability and guilt, ethics and erotics. The Sea, The Sea is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1978, it was her nineteenth novel. It won the 1978 Booker Prize. The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999) was the prolific British author’s nineteenth novel. Following is a review and analysis from 1978, the year in which it was published. Profound and delicious for many reasons . . . a multilayered working out of her feelings about the intensity of romantic experience. . . [it] also happens to be intelligently and sympathetically concerned with four of my favorite things: swimming, eating, drinking and talking . . . it is an ideal beach book—especially if you enjoy the cooler and pebblier and spookier northern sort of beach.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Murdoch can be considered an Irish author even though she grew up in and went to school in England. She was born in Ireland and both her parents were Irish.

This book earned the author the Booker Prize in 1978. It’s a powerful book. I had seen it forever at library sales and for years I thought I should read it. Finally, I did, and I wish I had read it earlier. I’m giving it a rating of 5 and adding it to my favorites. Much is made of the dynamic between good and evil and the question of morality. Arrowby's cousin, James, is presented as a saint and a symbol of good while Arrowby himself can be seen as a sinner. His actions in the book and what is alluded to about his past life in the theatre suggest that he is deceptive and often unkind. Arrowby's move to the countryside is an attempt to become a better person, but his journey to goodness is often obscured by his own bad behaviour. Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea: quotes Occasionally he tries to refocus his thoughts, and we get a potted history of his early rather dull life with his mother and father, and his more glamorous and outgoing Aunt Estelle, Uncle Abel and cousin James, whom he says he detests, but clearly envies. He tells us about his theatrical life with charm, and describes his many relationships with women, professing to not understand his undeniable attraction and appeal for any female he meets, yet obviously making sure he leaves us in no doubt about it. He has bought a place by the sea -- Shruff End, "upon a small promontory" --, hoping to abandon his old world and life. What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.”

We have some surprising plot twists. There’s an accidental death, an attempted murder, and a death where it appears that the person ‘willed it.’ The most significant person, however, is one who had disappeared from Arrowby's life long ago: his lost first love, the woman he wanted to marry but who fled. Elements of fate, coincidences and brushes with the supernatural are present throughout. The coincidence of Charles moving to exactly the same small village where the elderly Hartley now lives is perhaps significant. Was there an underlying trigger for this? A hidden event, or a notion from their shared past, now forgotten by the conscious mind, but which Charles unknowingly latched onto when he bought the house? Perhaps this is intended to demonstrate the unknowable force and power of love. Perhaps it is part of the thread of mysticism which runs through the book; the idea that we generally only perceive things in a limited, logical way, and cannot see the whole picture. That the mind is, unknowably for most of us, larger. I suppose you must be Titus," I said. "I am very much in love with your mother and would like to adopt you." In that lowness, Murdoch found the subject of her novels, each to a greater or lesser degree peopled by delusionals and lunatics. Often, those who are compelled by the attempt to be good are the most dangerous, particularly when they have covered themselves in the cloak of mysticism, a recurring trope that allows Murdoch to study – in common with Muriel Spark – the devastating power of charisma.

There was something factitious and brittle and thereby utterly feminine about her charm which made me want to crush her, even to crunch her. She had a slight cast in one eye which gives her gaze a strange concentrated intensity. Her eyes sparkle, almost as if they were actually emitting sparks. She is electric. And she could run faster in very high-heeled shoes than any girl I ever met.” Increasingly Charles has little grumbles about the privations of his self-imposed exile, reporting spooky goings on. He half imagines there is a poltergeist, as things keep mysteriously getting smashed. In the event this turns out to be a red herring. An old girlfriend had been indulging in a spot of mischief-making. He reassures both himself and the reader that this could be due to a solitary experiment with mind-altering drugs in his youth, thus rationalising the weird "supernatural" experiences that he has. There is an ambiguous attitude to the supernatural here. Sometimes it seems as though there can be no logical explanation for the events; yet at other times a delayed reaction to LSD seems more than likely. Several of the horrific and malevolent impressions Charles reports, are bound up with his feelings about the sea. He is terrified of a monster of a creature - a thirty-foot eel-like serpent which coils up out of the sea. But is this after all merely what used to be called a "bad trip"? Lentil soup, followed by chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea, then dried apricots and shortcake biscuits… Fresh apricots are best of course, but the dried kind, soaked for twenty-four hours and then well drained, make a heavenly accompaniment for any sort of mildly sweet biscuit or cake. They are especially good with anything made of almonds, and thus consort happily with red wine.” A few days later we were out by the boiling sea, the sea. The next I remember is waking in my bed. Someone had tried to murder me! But who could it be? He was a brave man. I cannot pretend I ever really loved him, but I do admire him for trying to kill me…”So there it is, a book that has left me thoroughly divided. It's as flawed as it is wonderful and it took a brave jury to give it the prize. Or, at least, a very forgiving one. Further demonstrations of Murdoch's talent exist in the terrific comic set pieces involving the squabbles of actors who descend on the house, and many hilarious descriptions of the disgusting meals Arrowby makes for himself. More seriously, she takes great care to imbue the house, the sea, the surroundings – everything – with depth and significance. Now he has left the London scene to live by himself at a beach house in a tiny town, the first house he ever owned. Whatever will he DO there? All his friends ask him: How is someone like him, so used to the chaotic social scene of London’s theater world, seriously going to live in isolation in a small seaside village? Increasingly the reader becomes less aware that the novel is a journal, as it becomes a chronicle of the unfolding events. At each point the sea becomes more symbolic, both a portent and metaphor for both the action and the relationships. Take this powerful passage, which comes about three quarters of the way through the novel when arguably the most tragic event has taken place, and the viewpoint character is in despair,