What do you think?
Rate this book
The Sea, the Sea
Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor both professionally and personally, and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors--some real, some spectral--that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.
In exposing the jumble of motivations that drive Arrowby and the other characters, Iris Murdoch lays bare "the truth of untruth"--the human vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Played out against a vividly rendered landscape and filled with allusions to myth and magic, Charles's confrontation with the tidal rips of love and forgiveness is one of Murdoch's most moving and powerful novels.
In exposing the jumble of motivations that drive Arrowby and the other characters, Iris Murdoch lays bare "the truth of untruth"--the human vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Played out against a vividly rendered landscape and filled with allusions to myth and magic, Charles's confrontation with the tidal rips of love and forgiveness is one of Murdoch's most moving and powerful novels.
528 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
About the author
Iris Murdoch
108 books2,180 followersDame Jean Iris Murdoch
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.
"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...
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.
"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,083 reviews
October 28, 2018
5 Jungian Stars !
2015 Gold Award - Tie (First Favorite Read)
Over the weekend I was sitting with a friend, having a tea and we were reading. She said, "How is the Murdoch book?" I looked up and without pausing or thinking and said "Simply wondrous". She tilted her head in her adorable way and said "Whatsitabout?"
I took a moment, sighed and exclaimed, "Everything"
This book is a psycho-spiritual masterpiece of the highest caliber. I decided to sit down and come up with a laundry list of what it is about:
-the stars and earth
-isolation, connection, misunderstandings, avoidance
-narcissistic men and histrionic women
-misunderstood boys and romantic girls
-wine, cheese, mushrooms and biscuits
-tea even when its not drunk
-Buddhist demons and Christian saints
-dreams, concussions, drownings, death
-petty cruelties, belittlement and acts of supreme generosity
-heterosexual passions and homosexual cravings
-theatre, woodworking, cooking and music
-merboys, seals, ghosts and sea dragons
-vengeance and apathy
-interpretations, neurosis and delusions
-minutiae and momentary insights
-sullen villagers and grandiose urbanites
-dogs, cats and many roses
-lost loves and childhood musings
-churches, taxis and pubs
-murderous rages and spiritual awakenings
-vulgarities and tender exchanges
-stagnation, repetition and momentary joy
Most of all it is about the depth and changeability of the Sea. The Sea that with one swoosh can take away all that we hold dear and understanding that we never held it in the first place.
Absolutely amazing. Thank you Ms. Murdoch.
2015 Gold Award - Tie (First Favorite Read)
Over the weekend I was sitting with a friend, having a tea and we were reading. She said, "How is the Murdoch book?" I looked up and without pausing or thinking and said "Simply wondrous". She tilted her head in her adorable way and said "Whatsitabout?"
I took a moment, sighed and exclaimed, "Everything"
This book is a psycho-spiritual masterpiece of the highest caliber. I decided to sit down and come up with a laundry list of what it is about:
-the stars and earth
-isolation, connection, misunderstandings, avoidance
-narcissistic men and histrionic women
-misunderstood boys and romantic girls
-wine, cheese, mushrooms and biscuits
-tea even when its not drunk
-Buddhist demons and Christian saints
-dreams, concussions, drownings, death
-petty cruelties, belittlement and acts of supreme generosity
-heterosexual passions and homosexual cravings
-theatre, woodworking, cooking and music
-merboys, seals, ghosts and sea dragons
-vengeance and apathy
-interpretations, neurosis and delusions
-minutiae and momentary insights
-sullen villagers and grandiose urbanites
-dogs, cats and many roses
-lost loves and childhood musings
-churches, taxis and pubs
-murderous rages and spiritual awakenings
-vulgarities and tender exchanges
-stagnation, repetition and momentary joy
Most of all it is about the depth and changeability of the Sea. The Sea that with one swoosh can take away all that we hold dear and understanding that we never held it in the first place.
Absolutely amazing. Thank you Ms. Murdoch.
September 18, 2023
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.
The main character is a recently retired actor/playwright/theater director. He was a so-so actor, a better playwright, but a masterful director. In the last endeavor he achieved fame and made his money.
The main character is an egotist. The press has called him a tyrant and power-crazed monster. He’s a misogynist who has used and abused women all his life. A good friend, a male, tells him “the trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women.”
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?
He spends his time writing a memoir that is a kind of diary and autobiography mixed in with copies of letters he sent or received; basically that is this book. Of course, we can’t trust this unreliable narrator; even he tells us his letters are “partly disingenuous, partly sincere.”
He discovers miraculously, that his first love lives in the tiny village. (Critics have chastised the author for too many coincidences and 'bizarre' plot twists.) Charles feels that he has fallen in love with her again; or, that he never stopped loving her. She’s married in what he comes to consider an abusive relationship. Well, maybe, maybe not. Without giving away too much plot, I'll say that basically he 'kidnaps' her away from her husband and tries to berate her into loving him again.
Marriage relationships become a major theme of the book:
In a bad marriage, can you really “…live on half dead and even have pleasures in your life.”
On spousal abuse: “She felt herself guilty of his sins against her…”
“Of course a marriage can look terrible, but be perfectly all right.”
To which we can all add, there are also, perfect, ideal marriages that everyone talks about, praises and seek to emulate. Until they break up.
An ethical question: can we say that a child’s death can ‘strengthen’ a troubled marriage, if the child, now an adult, was the cause of most of the trouble?
“They’ve got their own way of hating each other and hurting each other, they enjoy it.”
There’s a lot of melodrama. Of course these are theater folks. Many of the women he abused throughout his life, wooing them and then abandoning them, still seem to be willing to move back in with him, now that he is alone. They seem to still hate him, despite their willingness to come back to him. All his old loves (he never married) come back to haunt him with dramatic, unannounced entrances (he has no phone). They come dragging their chains like the ghosts of Christmas past. They appear at his door at the most inopportune times, creating a theater-like farce - Enter stage left. (I wonder if a male author could get away with this scenario as well as this female author has.)
At times the women talk and act more like they are mentally ill than in love. He tells us “I had witnessed hysterical screaming before, but nothing like this.”
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.’
Passages I liked:
“Guilt feelings so often arise from accusations rather than from crimes.”
Of his parents: “We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.”
On bad press: “Even if readers claim they ‘take it with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’.”
She “…pulled the blanket up over her head as if she were a corpse covering itself.”
“The thunder made some sounds like grand pianos falling downstairs…”
“He was a brave man. I cannot pretend I ever really loved him, but I do admire him for trying to kill me…”
This is a really good book. And it is another ‘beach house’ book by an Irish author. Consider several of William Trevor’s; Banville’s The Sea; Colm Toibin’s The Heather Blazing and Blackwater Lightship. Of course the classic beach house novel is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but she is not Irish.
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 was the first novel I read by Iris Murdoch. I have since read about a half-dozen and I still think this is my favorite.
Photos from top:
thewordtravels.com
e-architect.co.uk
countryandtownhouse.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk
Edited for typos and spoilers 2/3/2022 and 9/18/23]
The main character is a recently retired actor/playwright/theater director. He was a so-so actor, a better playwright, but a masterful director. In the last endeavor he achieved fame and made his money.
The main character is an egotist. The press has called him a tyrant and power-crazed monster. He’s a misogynist who has used and abused women all his life. A good friend, a male, tells him “the trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women.”
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?
He spends his time writing a memoir that is a kind of diary and autobiography mixed in with copies of letters he sent or received; basically that is this book. Of course, we can’t trust this unreliable narrator; even he tells us his letters are “partly disingenuous, partly sincere.”
He discovers miraculously, that his first love lives in the tiny village. (Critics have chastised the author for too many coincidences and 'bizarre' plot twists.) Charles feels that he has fallen in love with her again; or, that he never stopped loving her. She’s married in what he comes to consider an abusive relationship. Well, maybe, maybe not. Without giving away too much plot, I'll say that basically he 'kidnaps' her away from her husband and tries to berate her into loving him again.
Marriage relationships become a major theme of the book:
In a bad marriage, can you really “…live on half dead and even have pleasures in your life.”
On spousal abuse: “She felt herself guilty of his sins against her…”
“Of course a marriage can look terrible, but be perfectly all right.”
To which we can all add, there are also, perfect, ideal marriages that everyone talks about, praises and seek to emulate. Until they break up.
An ethical question: can we say that a child’s death can ‘strengthen’ a troubled marriage, if the child, now an adult, was the cause of most of the trouble?
“They’ve got their own way of hating each other and hurting each other, they enjoy it.”
There’s a lot of melodrama. Of course these are theater folks. Many of the women he abused throughout his life, wooing them and then abandoning them, still seem to be willing to move back in with him, now that he is alone. They seem to still hate him, despite their willingness to come back to him. All his old loves (he never married) come back to haunt him with dramatic, unannounced entrances (he has no phone). They come dragging their chains like the ghosts of Christmas past. They appear at his door at the most inopportune times, creating a theater-like farce - Enter stage left. (I wonder if a male author could get away with this scenario as well as this female author has.)
At times the women talk and act more like they are mentally ill than in love. He tells us “I had witnessed hysterical screaming before, but nothing like this.”
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.’
Passages I liked:
“Guilt feelings so often arise from accusations rather than from crimes.”
Of his parents: “We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.”
On bad press: “Even if readers claim they ‘take it with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’.”
She “…pulled the blanket up over her head as if she were a corpse covering itself.”
“The thunder made some sounds like grand pianos falling downstairs…”
“He was a brave man. I cannot pretend I ever really loved him, but I do admire him for trying to kill me…”
This is a really good book. And it is another ‘beach house’ book by an Irish author. Consider several of William Trevor’s; Banville’s The Sea; Colm Toibin’s The Heather Blazing and Blackwater Lightship. Of course the classic beach house novel is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but she is not Irish.
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 was the first novel I read by Iris Murdoch. I have since read about a half-dozen and I still think this is my favorite.
Photos from top:
thewordtravels.com
e-architect.co.uk
countryandtownhouse.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk
Edited for typos and spoilers 2/3/2022 and 9/18/23]
August 31, 2018
”Even a middling novelist can tell quite a lot of truth. His humble medium is on the side of truth. Whereas the theatre, even at its most ‘realistic’, is connected with the level at which, and the methods by which, we tell our everyday lies. This is the sense in which ‘ordinary’ theatre resembles life, and dramatists are disgraceful liars unless they are very good. On the other hand, in a purely formal sense the theatre is the nearest to poetry of all the arts. I used to think that if I could have been a poet I would never have bothered with the theatre at all, but of course this is nonsense. What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world. The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimise 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. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.”
Schruff End. Charles Arrowby’s place by The Sea.
Charles Arrowby has retired from the theatre to a damp, drafty, but dramatic home by the sea. His plan is to live on his own, read, and eat well while he writes his memoirs. He is famous, certainly well known enough to be recognized on the street from his days acting and directing on the stage. He wants to be anonymous, but as I can tell anyone from personal experience the last place one can be anonymous is in a small town.
”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.”
I found myself liking him. I especially enjoyed reading about him figuring out this life of reading, eating, and writing. It sounds ideal. As the plot advances it will take many shattering blows for me to let go of the Arrowby I liked and replace him with a man that is on the verge of lunacy. Charles may miss the drama of the stage, but he doesn’t miss it for long because his life becomes a stage play. It all starts to unwind when he goes to the village and sees his first love, Hartley appear as if by magic. As it turns out he is the only one that calls her Hartley everyone else calls her Mary. He knew her briefly before the war and during the war, as happened with many people, he lost track of her. Her life is a Mary life not a Hartley life. Charles can not accept the person he sees before him. She must metamorphosize and he is the man to make it happen
”I saw: a stout elderly woman in a shapeless brown tent-like dress, holding a shopping bag and working her way, very slowly as if in a dream, along the street, past the Black Lion in the direction of the shop. This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changing in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs.”
Oh good lord!
Now Clement, who he actually talks the least about of all his lovers seems to be the woman that made him into the successful man he is today.
”Clement was the reality of my life, its bread and its wine. She made me, she invented me, she created me, she was my university, my partner, my teacher, my mother, later my child, my soul’s mate, my absolute mistress.”
Clement made him feel so good that he did not attempt to find Hartley. She kept him from his one true love by...being...so...terrific. The Poor Bastard.
Lizzie visits him, another one of his ex-lovers. She has decided to move in with their mutual friend Gilbert. ”Lizzie is half Scottish, half Sephardi Jew. Although she has the most adorable breasts of any woman I ever made love to, she is not really beautiful, and never was even when she was young, but she has charm.” Unfortunately Lizzie is still in love with Charles and even though he really doesn’t want her back he doesn’t want her with Gilbert either.
”Jealousy is born with love, but does not always die with love.”
Rosina shows up as well yet another ex-lover. They can’t let him go any better than he can let them go. She is a famous actress almost as obsessed with Charles as Charles is becoming with Hartley. She breaks into house not once, but several times and soon knows all there is to know about this silly Hartley business. It seems that Charles broke up her marriage and then casually tossed her aside, but Rosina as it turns out is not the type to be so casually flung anywhere. She is more likely to pick Charles up and fling him into the sea or run over him with her car or brain him with a rock.
Charles seems to have a most powerful effect on women, but his charms are having no influence on Hartley. Despite being resoundingly rebuffed his fantasy continues to grow.
”Her large brow, which looked white in the candlelight, was puckered and pitted with little shadows, but the way she had turned up the collar of her green cotton coat behind her hair gave her a girlish look. Perhaps that was what she used to do with her mackintosh collar in the days when we went bicycling. And even as I was listening intently to her words. I was all the time gazing with a kind of creative passion at her candlelit face, like some god reassembling her beauty for my own purposes.”
Own purposes indeed.
”She did not have to join my grand intimidating alien world. To wed his beggar maid the king would, and how gladly, become a beggar too. The vision of that healing humility would henceforth be my guide. This was indeed the very condition of her freedom, why had I not seen this before? I would at last see her face changing. It was, I found, a part of my thought of the future that when she was with me Hartley would actually regain much of her old beauty: like a prisoner released from a labour camp who at first looks old, but then with freedom and rest and good food soon becomes young again.”
Okay so he is losing all grip on reality, but isn’t that what actors do? They make the role their own and transcend the script.
This book won the Booker Prize in 1978. This is the first Iris Murdoch I’ve read and I’ve got to say how impressed I am by her writing style and ability. I can’t believe I’ve never read her before. She wrote twenty-five works of fiction until 1995 when she began to experience the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease which she at first attributed to writer’s block. There is something so sad about a woman who thinks her writing ability has simply shut down only to learn that her body is failing her. She had more stories to tell us, but unfortunately they became locked up in the corridors of her mind with doors without knobs and crooked, meandering hallways.
Iris Murdoch
When we first meet Charles he seems like a man that we would love to know, a favorite uncle or a friend to grab a beer with occasionally. As we get to know him better his selfishness, his egotism, his dramatic persona turns him into a person that I would avoid as if he were sporting bubonic plague. Murdoch brings us along, masterfully, through the dementia of Charles’s growing obsession with possessing something that frankly no longer exists. By the end he has proved to be as chimeric as the youthful Hartley. ”Last night someone on a BBC quiz did not know who I was.”
Schruff End. Charles Arrowby’s place by The Sea.
Charles Arrowby has retired from the theatre to a damp, drafty, but dramatic home by the sea. His plan is to live on his own, read, and eat well while he writes his memoirs. He is famous, certainly well known enough to be recognized on the street from his days acting and directing on the stage. He wants to be anonymous, but as I can tell anyone from personal experience the last place one can be anonymous is in a small town.
”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.”
I found myself liking him. I especially enjoyed reading about him figuring out this life of reading, eating, and writing. It sounds ideal. As the plot advances it will take many shattering blows for me to let go of the Arrowby I liked and replace him with a man that is on the verge of lunacy. Charles may miss the drama of the stage, but he doesn’t miss it for long because his life becomes a stage play. It all starts to unwind when he goes to the village and sees his first love, Hartley appear as if by magic. As it turns out he is the only one that calls her Hartley everyone else calls her Mary. He knew her briefly before the war and during the war, as happened with many people, he lost track of her. Her life is a Mary life not a Hartley life. Charles can not accept the person he sees before him. She must metamorphosize and he is the man to make it happen
”I saw: a stout elderly woman in a shapeless brown tent-like dress, holding a shopping bag and working her way, very slowly as if in a dream, along the street, past the Black Lion in the direction of the shop. This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changing in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs.”
Oh good lord!
Now Clement, who he actually talks the least about of all his lovers seems to be the woman that made him into the successful man he is today.
”Clement was the reality of my life, its bread and its wine. She made me, she invented me, she created me, she was my university, my partner, my teacher, my mother, later my child, my soul’s mate, my absolute mistress.”
Clement made him feel so good that he did not attempt to find Hartley. She kept him from his one true love by...being...so...terrific. The Poor Bastard.
Lizzie visits him, another one of his ex-lovers. She has decided to move in with their mutual friend Gilbert. ”Lizzie is half Scottish, half Sephardi Jew. Although she has the most adorable breasts of any woman I ever made love to, she is not really beautiful, and never was even when she was young, but she has charm.” Unfortunately Lizzie is still in love with Charles and even though he really doesn’t want her back he doesn’t want her with Gilbert either.
”Jealousy is born with love, but does not always die with love.”
Rosina shows up as well yet another ex-lover. They can’t let him go any better than he can let them go. She is a famous actress almost as obsessed with Charles as Charles is becoming with Hartley. She breaks into house not once, but several times and soon knows all there is to know about this silly Hartley business. It seems that Charles broke up her marriage and then casually tossed her aside, but Rosina as it turns out is not the type to be so casually flung anywhere. She is more likely to pick Charles up and fling him into the sea or run over him with her car or brain him with a rock.
Charles seems to have a most powerful effect on women, but his charms are having no influence on Hartley. Despite being resoundingly rebuffed his fantasy continues to grow.
”Her large brow, which looked white in the candlelight, was puckered and pitted with little shadows, but the way she had turned up the collar of her green cotton coat behind her hair gave her a girlish look. Perhaps that was what she used to do with her mackintosh collar in the days when we went bicycling. And even as I was listening intently to her words. I was all the time gazing with a kind of creative passion at her candlelit face, like some god reassembling her beauty for my own purposes.”
Own purposes indeed.
”She did not have to join my grand intimidating alien world. To wed his beggar maid the king would, and how gladly, become a beggar too. The vision of that healing humility would henceforth be my guide. This was indeed the very condition of her freedom, why had I not seen this before? I would at last see her face changing. It was, I found, a part of my thought of the future that when she was with me Hartley would actually regain much of her old beauty: like a prisoner released from a labour camp who at first looks old, but then with freedom and rest and good food soon becomes young again.”
Okay so he is losing all grip on reality, but isn’t that what actors do? They make the role their own and transcend the script.
This book won the Booker Prize in 1978. This is the first Iris Murdoch I’ve read and I’ve got to say how impressed I am by her writing style and ability. I can’t believe I’ve never read her before. She wrote twenty-five works of fiction until 1995 when she began to experience the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease which she at first attributed to writer’s block. There is something so sad about a woman who thinks her writing ability has simply shut down only to learn that her body is failing her. She had more stories to tell us, but unfortunately they became locked up in the corridors of her mind with doors without knobs and crooked, meandering hallways.
Iris Murdoch
When we first meet Charles he seems like a man that we would love to know, a favorite uncle or a friend to grab a beer with occasionally. As we get to know him better his selfishness, his egotism, his dramatic persona turns him into a person that I would avoid as if he were sporting bubonic plague. Murdoch brings us along, masterfully, through the dementia of Charles’s growing obsession with possessing something that frankly no longer exists. By the end he has proved to be as chimeric as the youthful Hartley. ”Last night someone on a BBC quiz did not know who I was.”
February 6, 2023
"Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure."
—Charles Arrowby, The Sea, the Sea
Charles Arrowby, a self-absorbed theatre director, retires to a shabby cottage by the sea to pen his memoirs. Like James Caan's character in the movie Misery, he eschews all modern comforts and settles down to write. Unlike James Caan's character, he's a misogynistic, bumptious individual – someone you would love to eavesdrop on for your own entertainment but wouldn't want to be stuck with at a cocktail party.
And so Charles, redolent of Ebenezer Scrooge, lives in bleak solitude until he's visited by a succession of past lovers, theatre luvvies, and one mystical cousin – the ghosts of his immoderate past. And, as was the case with Scrooge, Charles has no one to blame for his mismanaged life, other than himself.
It goes without saying that Iris Murdoch was an accomplished writer. Here, she perfectly captures the vagaries of human frailties with mellifluous prose, fashioning an intimate tale of one man's obsessions and delusions. Arrowby is skilfully depicted as being both Machiavellian and vulnerable - not an easy trick to pull off.
There are harebrained schemes aplenty and much of the story has the feel of a stage production as each character hams it up before exiting stage left.
And I loved the wilful ridiculousness of it all. The author must have had a great deal of fun purposely amalgamating farce and improbability with high culture.
While Charles takes leave of his senses and continues to tilt at windmills, the antagonistic sea taunts him, just as Moby Dick taunted Captain Ahab. It serves as an omnipresent literary device, immortal and phantasmic, haunting him - even endangering him.
Was the book hard going at times?
Truthfully, yes.
But Murdoch's writing is too good to ignore and here she conjures up a philosophical tour de force with a heterogeneous cast contrived to cover all bases. And she even throws in a few unexpected surprises for good measure!
There are fewer fish in the sea than there are adjectives needed to define this inscrutable read, so a deserved five stars from me!
—Charles Arrowby, The Sea, the Sea
Charles Arrowby, a self-absorbed theatre director, retires to a shabby cottage by the sea to pen his memoirs. Like James Caan's character in the movie Misery, he eschews all modern comforts and settles down to write. Unlike James Caan's character, he's a misogynistic, bumptious individual – someone you would love to eavesdrop on for your own entertainment but wouldn't want to be stuck with at a cocktail party.
And so Charles, redolent of Ebenezer Scrooge, lives in bleak solitude until he's visited by a succession of past lovers, theatre luvvies, and one mystical cousin – the ghosts of his immoderate past. And, as was the case with Scrooge, Charles has no one to blame for his mismanaged life, other than himself.
It goes without saying that Iris Murdoch was an accomplished writer. Here, she perfectly captures the vagaries of human frailties with mellifluous prose, fashioning an intimate tale of one man's obsessions and delusions. Arrowby is skilfully depicted as being both Machiavellian and vulnerable - not an easy trick to pull off.
There are harebrained schemes aplenty and much of the story has the feel of a stage production as each character hams it up before exiting stage left.
And I loved the wilful ridiculousness of it all. The author must have had a great deal of fun purposely amalgamating farce and improbability with high culture.
While Charles takes leave of his senses and continues to tilt at windmills, the antagonistic sea taunts him, just as Moby Dick taunted Captain Ahab. It serves as an omnipresent literary device, immortal and phantasmic, haunting him - even endangering him.
Was the book hard going at times?
Truthfully, yes.
But Murdoch's writing is too good to ignore and here she conjures up a philosophical tour de force with a heterogeneous cast contrived to cover all bases. And she even throws in a few unexpected surprises for good measure!
There are fewer fish in the sea than there are adjectives needed to define this inscrutable read, so a deserved five stars from me!
December 13, 2017
An extraordinary novel, at once page-turner and philosophic, comic and melodramatic, one of the best that I've read. Murdoch is remarkably skilled at inhabiting the minds of her protagonists, and Charles Arrowby, a late-middle-aged, bumbling, morally dubious, veteran of theater, is a wondrous creation. The first 100 pages of this novel shouldn't work, as Charles, in journal form, moves to Shruff's end and inhabits a lonely house by the sea, wanders around town, experiences visions that he blames on LSD (about which, more soon), goes on lengthy diatribes about food:
"For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil. (really good olive oil is essential..." (this goes on for another 15 lines)
and thinks about his life. Though this early section is essentially pure exposition, it works, and I was oddly gripped. I was especially fascinated by what Murdoch left under the surface. THE SEA THE SEA has to be record-holder for characters mentioned who never appear - you can track the sub-narratives of at least a dozen acquaintances of Charles, such as a chauffeur who he feels he's wronged who shows up for exactly three paragraphs 400 pages in but is discussed incessantly beforehand.
And then, at the end of these 100 pages, the twist, one of the greatest twists in literature. All along, the journal hints at a lost love from childhood, one who comes up over and over again.
“All a child’s blind fear was there, the fear that my mother so early inspired in me: the kiss withheld, the candle taken. Hartley, my Hartley. Yes, I see her quickly jumping over a rope, higher and higher it was raised, Hartley still flew over, the watchers sighing each time with sympathetic relief; and I hugging my heart in secret pride. She was the champion jumper of the school…Hartley always first, and I cheering with the rest and laughing with secret joy. Hartley, in a breathless stillness, crouched upon a parallel bar, her bare thighs gleaming. The games master spoke of the Olympics."
A sequence of jilted lovers visits and leaves, and the last's headlights reveals the woman herself: Hartley, now old, in the woman in town who Charles has kept walking by without noticing.
And then a string of completely insane coincidences begins. It's a bit difficult to summarize - there's Charles's cousin James, who might have magical powers (I can't believe this book pulls off a mysticism sub-plot); Hartley's estranged adopted son; Hartley's husband, surely, surely the model for Albert in "The Bear Comes Over The Mountain," Lizzie the love obsessed actress, and her gay partner Gilbert Opian, the novel's saving grace, who has a 50 page lite-BDSM sequence where he intentionally debases himself as Charles's Butler; Rosina, who is also in love with Charles and wants to kill him, and HER husband who Charles stole her from, though their friendship is unaffected; Clement Makin, who is dead and quite possibly the actual love of Charles's life; and of course Hartley, who Charles stalks and eventually kidnaps.
It's as good a cast as I can remember in a book, and they function like Shakespearean ghosts. Shruff's End is clearly meant to be thought of as a stage, with exits on all sides and a clear set, and characters come crashing into it at all hours of the night. As with her punchier, slightly less ambitious SEVERED HEAD, we tolerate this madness because the characters are so fully realized, because it is so madcap, so fun to read. Things slow down in the third act, which bears some resemblances to Proust's THE CAPTIVE, as the book achieves a stasis that it doesn't want to have. An extraordinary night party sequence brings the energy back up, and the ending, totally bizarre, is virtually perfect.
I regret, greatly, not reading Murdoch sooner. This is a big, sloppy, flawed book, and I couldn't sleep for 3 straight nights until I finished reading it. Make the time for it.
"For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil. (really good olive oil is essential..." (this goes on for another 15 lines)
and thinks about his life. Though this early section is essentially pure exposition, it works, and I was oddly gripped. I was especially fascinated by what Murdoch left under the surface. THE SEA THE SEA has to be record-holder for characters mentioned who never appear - you can track the sub-narratives of at least a dozen acquaintances of Charles, such as a chauffeur who he feels he's wronged who shows up for exactly three paragraphs 400 pages in but is discussed incessantly beforehand.
And then, at the end of these 100 pages, the twist, one of the greatest twists in literature. All along, the journal hints at a lost love from childhood, one who comes up over and over again.
“All a child’s blind fear was there, the fear that my mother so early inspired in me: the kiss withheld, the candle taken. Hartley, my Hartley. Yes, I see her quickly jumping over a rope, higher and higher it was raised, Hartley still flew over, the watchers sighing each time with sympathetic relief; and I hugging my heart in secret pride. She was the champion jumper of the school…Hartley always first, and I cheering with the rest and laughing with secret joy. Hartley, in a breathless stillness, crouched upon a parallel bar, her bare thighs gleaming. The games master spoke of the Olympics."
A sequence of jilted lovers visits and leaves, and the last's headlights reveals the woman herself: Hartley, now old, in the woman in town who Charles has kept walking by without noticing.
And then a string of completely insane coincidences begins. It's a bit difficult to summarize - there's Charles's cousin James, who might have magical powers (I can't believe this book pulls off a mysticism sub-plot); Hartley's estranged adopted son; Hartley's husband, surely, surely the model for Albert in "The Bear Comes Over The Mountain," Lizzie the love obsessed actress, and her gay partner Gilbert Opian, the novel's saving grace, who has a 50 page lite-BDSM sequence where he intentionally debases himself as Charles's Butler; Rosina, who is also in love with Charles and wants to kill him, and HER husband who Charles stole her from, though their friendship is unaffected; Clement Makin, who is dead and quite possibly the actual love of Charles's life; and of course Hartley, who Charles stalks and eventually kidnaps.
It's as good a cast as I can remember in a book, and they function like Shakespearean ghosts. Shruff's End is clearly meant to be thought of as a stage, with exits on all sides and a clear set, and characters come crashing into it at all hours of the night. As with her punchier, slightly less ambitious SEVERED HEAD, we tolerate this madness because the characters are so fully realized, because it is so madcap, so fun to read. Things slow down in the third act, which bears some resemblances to Proust's THE CAPTIVE, as the book achieves a stasis that it doesn't want to have. An extraordinary night party sequence brings the energy back up, and the ending, totally bizarre, is virtually perfect.
I regret, greatly, not reading Murdoch sooner. This is a big, sloppy, flawed book, and I couldn't sleep for 3 straight nights until I finished reading it. Make the time for it.
April 12, 2021
Esta fue mi segunda inmersión en el universo Murdoch y, sin resultar tan gratificante como la primera (El libro y la hermandad), volvió a ser un gran placer: la misma calidad, la misma inteligencia. La diferencia entre ambas experiencias creo que reside en que la historia de esta me ha interesado menos o, quizás, que Murdoch la ha estirado en demasía.
Nuevamente aquí todo gira en torno a la figura de un hombre tan desagradable como interesante, con un atractivo y un poder sobre las mujeres que solo otra mujer puede llegar a describir sin que se la sepulte bajo miles de improperios proferidos desde un feminismo mal entendido. También aquí se cuestiona la posibilidad de llegar a conocernos y, con mayor motivo, de conocer al otro.
Nuevamente aquí todo gira en torno a la figura de un hombre tan desagradable como interesante, con un atractivo y un poder sobre las mujeres que solo otra mujer puede llegar a describir sin que se la sepulte bajo miles de improperios proferidos desde un feminismo mal entendido. También aquí se cuestiona la posibilidad de llegar a conocernos y, con mayor motivo, de conocer al otro.
”Tal como nos conocemos, somos objetos falsos, imposturas, ramilletes de ilusiones”Y como esta es una imposibilidad insalvable, la imagen, siempre distorsionada en mayor o menor medida, que construimos de nosotros mismos y de los demás, así como la idea subjetiva que nos formamos de las relaciones personales que mantenemos con ellos y que los demás mantienen entre sí, se aconseja la máxima prudencia ante posibles injerencias en vidas ajenas.
“Los juicios sobre las personas no son jamás decisivos, surgen de resúmenes que inmediatamente hacen pensar en la necesidad de una reconsideración. Los arreglos humanos no son otra cosa que cabos sueltos y cálculos nebulosos, independientemente de cualquier cosa que para consolarnos pueda fingir el arte”
June 30, 2018
I struggled with this for a while, mainly because I was so irritated by Charles Arrowby, the main character and unreliable narrator. Arrowby is a retired actor, director and playwright who has moved to a remote cottage by the sea and is tentatively writing his memoirs. Whole successions of characters, many of them former lovers, arrive and depart and Charles encounters his first love Hartley who has also retired to the area with her husband.
Like many of Murdoch’s characters Arrowby is not very likeable and seems completely oblivious to the mayhem he creates among his nearest and dearest. I also found myself increasingly irritated by what he did with food (nothing kinky here!); if Murdoch meant him to be annoying, she wrote him very well. There is moral complexity and ambiguity as Arrowby tries to recapture his first love (literally). The cast of secondary characters are strong and are not there for mere ornament. Cousin James is an interesting counterpoint to Arrowby.
The Sea is an ever present and the title comes from Xenophon’s Anabasis, an account of the travels of 10,000 Greek mercenary soldiers who end up getting stranded in the middle of the Persian Empire. They have to fight their way through hostile areas to the Black Sea coastline near Greece. The cry of The Sea, The Sea is one of joy and relief; it is symbolic of home; the home Arrowby wants in his twilight years. However there is a French poem which has the line “The Sea, The Sea, forever restarting” and that also has resonance as Arrowby tells his story.
It will be no surprise to know Murdoch’s favourite Shakespeare play is The Tempest and there are parallels; Arrowby is an odd Prospero. The sea serpent is a strange addition and the Freudians have had a field day with that one. However, the principal idea here, the key to all Murdoch’s fiction is contingency. Murdoch usually has purpose in her literature; she argued that religion and philosophy had lost their oomph (a technical term) and potency in explaining the human condition and can be described as dry (see her essay called Against Dryness). It is up to literature to provide what religion and philosophy now cannot; an interesting argument. Murdoch stresses the importance of the accidental, unpredictable and life’s sheer messiness; this is what she means by contingency. Contingency invades Charles Arrowby’s life with monotonous regularity and the ending is unresolved, messy and indeed contingent.
Like many of Murdoch’s characters Arrowby is not very likeable and seems completely oblivious to the mayhem he creates among his nearest and dearest. I also found myself increasingly irritated by what he did with food (nothing kinky here!); if Murdoch meant him to be annoying, she wrote him very well. There is moral complexity and ambiguity as Arrowby tries to recapture his first love (literally). The cast of secondary characters are strong and are not there for mere ornament. Cousin James is an interesting counterpoint to Arrowby.
The Sea is an ever present and the title comes from Xenophon’s Anabasis, an account of the travels of 10,000 Greek mercenary soldiers who end up getting stranded in the middle of the Persian Empire. They have to fight their way through hostile areas to the Black Sea coastline near Greece. The cry of The Sea, The Sea is one of joy and relief; it is symbolic of home; the home Arrowby wants in his twilight years. However there is a French poem which has the line “The Sea, The Sea, forever restarting” and that also has resonance as Arrowby tells his story.
It will be no surprise to know Murdoch’s favourite Shakespeare play is The Tempest and there are parallels; Arrowby is an odd Prospero. The sea serpent is a strange addition and the Freudians have had a field day with that one. However, the principal idea here, the key to all Murdoch’s fiction is contingency. Murdoch usually has purpose in her literature; she argued that religion and philosophy had lost their oomph (a technical term) and potency in explaining the human condition and can be described as dry (see her essay called Against Dryness). It is up to literature to provide what religion and philosophy now cannot; an interesting argument. Murdoch stresses the importance of the accidental, unpredictable and life’s sheer messiness; this is what she means by contingency. Contingency invades Charles Arrowby’s life with monotonous regularity and the ending is unresolved, messy and indeed contingent.
October 11, 2023
Ah, the sea, the sea, the glorious sea! That wonderful spectacle bringing joy to countless many; whether swimming, diving, surfing, fishing, boating, splashing about in waist high water or just simply strolling along the shoreline hand in hand with your love whist the tide tickles your feet. But for some, all thanks to a certain Spielberg film, it's a panic attack no-go-zone. For Iris Murdoch's fictional character Charles Arrowby, getting munched on by a killer shark is not likely, and the last thing on his mind; after all, this is the British coast we are dealing with here. The former theatre playwright and actor just wanted to escape and retire by the sea, away from London, away from everyone, to be left the hell alone. Could he have foreseen the life ahead of him? Seeing a sea serpent; believing a ghost is wondering around his home; running into women from his past - good and bad; nearly drowning through an apparent attempted murder; or ending up with a houseful of unwanted guests, apart from the one he does want: Hartley, his childhood love.
This 1978 Booker prize-winning novel - not that I care for book awards, but I thought I'd just mention it - was a feast of reading; rich, textured, deep characters, great writing, and a story that keep me intrigued throughout. It was a study of vanity and self-delusion more than anything else, with Arrowby the egomaniac narrator, not one I'd like to have a pint with really, moving to Shruff End, a house with a tower by the cliffs - "How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life," Arrowby writes. He would clamber down the rocks and take to the sea come rain or shine for a swim, letting the calm of the water engulf him. Arrowby is writing his memoirs, and his attempt to chronicle his successful career in the histrionic arts, he wants to be a hermit and indulge in fine wine, gourmet food, whist pondering over his history.
But with nothing but his writings, it is inevitable that Arrowby will create some sort of high drama in his boring life; even in this isolated spot, and this he does, by attempting to draw his former lover Lizzie into his new life while trying to destroy the marriage of his childhood sweetheart, Hartley, the one he really loves. Other visitors would appear on the scene to congregate at his new abode, shedding light on Arrowby's past and present: including his Buddhist armed forces cousin, James, and various theatrical ex-lovers and ex-friends. Their relationships start to reveal the shallow ways of Arrowby's self-knowledge, as well as his ability to be a manipulating bully, and a complete belligerent asshole. I always argue that you simply don't have to love, or even just like characters to greatly enjoy and appreciate a novel. In intricately charting the multifaceted deceptions of Charles Arrowby, Murdoch adeptly elaborates on a motif that followed her in her lifelong concern with Good, with Love, and with Freedom: to be good one must transform the personal into the impersonal, one must escape one’s private self and concern oneself with others. Inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, The Sea, The Sea brilliantly depicts the risks and self-deceptions of life, the precarious and important distinction between imagination and fantasy, and the vital importance of negotiating these dangers.
Murdoch's subtly and blackly humorous digs, periodically build into waves of hilarity, and Arrowby is without doubt a brilliant creation: such an intriguing narrator that I just couldn't get enough of, leading to one of the finest character studies in regards British lit from the second half of the 20th century. But Murdoch also uses a cast of supporting characters to great effect too; Hartley, a gray, worn and distraught woman living through the pain of a marriage than doesn't seem just; the jealous, raging ex-lover Rosina; Peregrine, an old friend who may have alternative motives for his visit; Titus, a young man that turns out to be Hartley's son; and cousin James, who may or may not have some sort of Tibetan superhuman ability, they all work into the story tremendously well.
I found this such a brilliant novel, and it's certainly one of my favourites by a female writer.
April 2, 2023
Rarely has a character exasperated and delighted me as much as Charles Arrowby, the narrator of this fictional memoir, did. He is a renowned theatre director, playwright and actor who in his sixties decides to retire not only from the stage but from the world itself in order to write his recollections in much coveted isolation. He leaves his apartment in London for a godforsaken village somewhere in the north and a quaint house surrounded by the sea. The sea provides the perfect backdrop for this new stage of his life. The one where the inescapable question of “what was it all about” is urgently demanding an answer.
The answer doesn’t come, as is usually the case with such existential questions, but a throng of uninvited guests show up instead. A Buddhist cousin, a vitriolic ex lover, another ex, decidedly more doting, an old buddy with enough grudges to kill a friendship, an actor dying to serve his old master and commander, even a teenage boy eager to play the role of the son that never was. Most surprisingly of all, his first love, a woman from his distant past, turns up living a few doors up the hill. His isolation goes out the window but the irresistible prospect of reviving the purity of his long-lost youth rushes in, if only in his mind alone. It turns out that the woman (a rather dull creature compared to all the other colorful characters) doesn’t want to play the role of the resuscitator.
Ever the director, Arrowby keeps casting himself and the people that surround him as if they were characters in one of his plays. The casting agrees with his desires but not necessarily with those of the others. Life is and is not a stage. We so want to believe that we can control it, that we can play the part of the director in our tragicomedies. The truth is that there are many players involved and they all have their own scripts in mind. Our hero spends the entire novel trying to reconcile himself to the idea. Does he? In his own words:
"Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one. I cannot think of any tiny good thing to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow."
On the cover of my edition this is described as ‘A rich, crowded, magical love story.’ Rich it is. In aphorisms, humor, theatricality, psychological exploration and philosophical allusions. Crowded, too. There is enough mysticism and demons (in the most literal sense) to make it magical. But a love story? I don’t know. An obsession story, more likely. Or a delusional one. Arrowby insists a couple of pages before the end that "one can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story."
That emphatic ‘of course’ makes me think he has his doubts. He’s too intelligent not to. Up to the readers to decide for themselves. Iris Murdoch is generous enough to allow us at least this sliver of direction in our reading experience.
One thing I know, though: the timing has to be right for this one. I wasn’t even thirty when I first read it. I could see then the brilliance of the writing but couldn’t relate to the hero's frame of mind, one that sets in later in life. Or the comedy of it all.
Off to cook a Sunday meal now. Not surprisingly, food has as much a major part in the novel as it has in real life. All these musings are fine and dandy but one has to eat. As cousin James says at the end of a particularly dramatic scene: “Yes, well, I must go. See you at lunch. I suppose there will be lunch.”
The answer doesn’t come, as is usually the case with such existential questions, but a throng of uninvited guests show up instead. A Buddhist cousin, a vitriolic ex lover, another ex, decidedly more doting, an old buddy with enough grudges to kill a friendship, an actor dying to serve his old master and commander, even a teenage boy eager to play the role of the son that never was. Most surprisingly of all, his first love, a woman from his distant past, turns up living a few doors up the hill. His isolation goes out the window but the irresistible prospect of reviving the purity of his long-lost youth rushes in, if only in his mind alone. It turns out that the woman (a rather dull creature compared to all the other colorful characters) doesn’t want to play the role of the resuscitator.
Ever the director, Arrowby keeps casting himself and the people that surround him as if they were characters in one of his plays. The casting agrees with his desires but not necessarily with those of the others. Life is and is not a stage. We so want to believe that we can control it, that we can play the part of the director in our tragicomedies. The truth is that there are many players involved and they all have their own scripts in mind. Our hero spends the entire novel trying to reconcile himself to the idea. Does he? In his own words:
"Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one. I cannot think of any tiny good thing to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow."
On the cover of my edition this is described as ‘A rich, crowded, magical love story.’ Rich it is. In aphorisms, humor, theatricality, psychological exploration and philosophical allusions. Crowded, too. There is enough mysticism and demons (in the most literal sense) to make it magical. But a love story? I don’t know. An obsession story, more likely. Or a delusional one. Arrowby insists a couple of pages before the end that "one can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story."
That emphatic ‘of course’ makes me think he has his doubts. He’s too intelligent not to. Up to the readers to decide for themselves. Iris Murdoch is generous enough to allow us at least this sliver of direction in our reading experience.
One thing I know, though: the timing has to be right for this one. I wasn’t even thirty when I first read it. I could see then the brilliance of the writing but couldn’t relate to the hero's frame of mind, one that sets in later in life. Or the comedy of it all.
Off to cook a Sunday meal now. Not surprisingly, food has as much a major part in the novel as it has in real life. All these musings are fine and dandy but one has to eat. As cousin James says at the end of a particularly dramatic scene: “Yes, well, I must go. See you at lunch. I suppose there will be lunch.”
July 20, 2019
Be careful what you wish for
“Jealousy is born with love, but doesn’t always die with love.”
Do you yearn for your first love - to spend just a moment together?
What if your sighting was accidental, unexpected, and you were unprepared?
Do you really love them still - or is it your youthful self you love?
Is stalking a passive act, a safety-valve?
Or does it forge the innocent past into a twisted vision of the future?
Maybe cousin James is right:
“You’ve built a cage of needs and installed her in an empty space in the middle… using her image… as an exorcism.”
Image: The Gilded Cage of Female Oppression by Denise R Duarte (Source and details.)
“Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it.”
My 13th Murdoch is her best-known and most lauded; it’s also the one I enjoyed the least. I was not spellbound by this “story of death and moral smash-up” that the narrator likens to Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove. There are many interesting and worthwhile ideas, big characters, and some lovely phrases, but overall, a ludicrous number of coincidences, convoluted machinations, and individual or group introspections were dragged out over too many pages. The final “Postscript” added little of worth. Even the title is twice as long as it needs to be! 😉
“I am my well-known self, made glittering and brittle by fame.”
Charles Arrowby is a playwright, actor, and director who, in his sixties, retires to a remote coastal cottage - though he’s probably not as successful as he’d like readers to believe:
“Last night someone on a BBC quiz did not know who I was.”
The book is his memoir-cum-diary-cum-novel of a few eventful months at Shruff End. He bumps into his childhood sweetheart, Mary Hartley, who had disappeared in their teens. Cue quests, plots, reminiscences, and theatrical friends and ex lovers, plus mysterious cousin James, dropping in at crucial moments. There’s also incarceration, attempted murder, near death experiences, actual death, missing - and found - persons, possible supernatural events, a sea monster, and some strange meals.
Charles is a self-confessed unreliable narrator. He relishes the sight, sounds, and feel of the sea, as he looks back on his life and loves, including a formative relationship with a much older woman, Clement.
Murdoch’s narrator, written in 1978 reminded strongly of two of John Banville’s characters: Max Morden in The Sea of 2005 (see my review HERE) and especially retired actor Alex Cleave in Ancient Light of 2012, who had a formative relationship with a much older woman (see my review HERE).
But Murdoch’s writing is less sensuous than Banville’s, and Charles is a less sympathetic character. He’s not just a vain, self-centred, controlling, patronising, misogynist who slants and reinterprets events to fit what he wants to believe; he’s actively scheming, abusive, deliberately delusional, and switches between being oblivious to and relishing the disappointments and pain of others.
But I’ve long loved this quote, and recently found it very helpful. I forgive a lot, just for coming across it, in context:
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
Who’s Playing Whom?
Murdoch’s novels always have at least one Svengali figure. Charles is the obvious candidate: his career is highly relevant, he controls the narrative we read, and towards the end, he says “I was the dreamer, I the magician”. But there are several other contenders, and that was the most interesting puzzle for me: Rosina, James, even Titus or Hartley?
Image: Marionette on a theatrical stage, by Daniel Beauchamp (Source.)
Deep and Meaningful
Those more learned and enthused than I am can consider the symbolism of the serpent, the inner room, the broken mirror, and many nods to theatre, Shakespeare (Prospero, in The Tempest), and classical mythology (Perseus and Andromeda, Orpheus and Euridice, Plato’s cave), and whether freedom can be imposed. In addition:
“Every persisting marriage is based on fear.”
Don’t marry! Maybe don’t cohabit. There are no happy couples in this book, and marriage is a dark and unknowable institution.
“The awful crying of souls in guilt and pain, loathing each other, tied to each other! The inferno of marriage.”
Everyone is away from familiar territory (London, in most cases), and that shapes events, enhanced or exacerbated by the slight unreality of the liminal location between rocks and sea, in an isolated house with no electricity.
I’m sure whole theses have been written about Charles’ cousin, James: he’s a fellow only child, but raised in far more privileged circumstances. James is a successful retired general, a Buddhist mystic, possible spy, and may be gay. Charles was and is always competing with him, though realises James probably barely realised and certainly didn’t care.
“My own feeling that I have ‘won the game’ comes partly from a sense that he has been disappointed by life, whereas I have not.”
James also has a more mystical role as conscience, advisor, guardian, and saviour.
Fun Food
“Cook fast, eat slowly.”
An unexpected delight was Charles’ dedication to creative, simple gastronomy, including “liberal use of the tin opener”. It was entertainingly odd, pompous, and specific, and it reminded me of my late father’s approach, as well as the amusingly bizarre, but not hugely relevant, outfits described in detail in Philip K Dick’s Ubik (see my review HERE).
“Anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil… Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water-biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese. Of course I never touch foreign cheeses.”
And:
“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.”
Image: The meal described above, made by Valerie Stivers (Source, with notes.)
The fact Charles was limited in what he could buy, store, and cook, reminded me of Jack Munroe’s Tin Can Cook: 75 Simple Store Cupboard Recipes, being given away by food banks (support that HERE), and also on sale.
There’s a restaurant inspired by Murdoch’s book (see HERE), but nothing on the menu is remotely like anything described by Charles. In particular, he laments the lack of fresh fish, but it’s a fish restaurant HERE!
Quotes
• “Watching the waves come flying through [a rock bridge]... killing themselves in fits of rage.”
• “Of course the water is very cold, but after a few seconds it seems to coat the body in a kind of warm silvery skin, as if one had acquired the scales of a merman. The challenged blood rejoices with a new strength. Yes, this is my natural element.”
• “There is not a vestige of beastly sand anywhere. I have heard it called an ugly coast. Long may it be deemed so. The rocks… are sandy yellow in colour, covered with crystalline flecks, and are folded into large ungainly incoherent heaps.”
• “The mild hostility of the villagers does not worry me… They know who I am. But they have been at pains to exhibit indifference.”
• “We lived… upon a housing estate where loneliness was combined with lack of privacy.”
• “I hate the falsity of ‘grand’ dinner parties where, amid much kissing, there is the appearance of intimacy where there is really none.”
• “I want you to be the lord and the king as you’ve always been.” Yeah, right: she said that.
• “Felt a little depressed but was cheered up by supper: spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil. (Basil is of course the king of herbs.) Then spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill. Boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soya oil and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in. With these, a slice or two of cold tinned corned beef. (Meat is really just an excuse for eating vegetables.)”
• “Only a fool despises tomato ketchup.”
• “A bright fierce little moon was shining, dimming the stars and pouring metallic brilliance into the sea and animating the land with the ghostly intent presences of quiet rocks and trees.”
• “The grass… was a pollulating emerald green, the rocks that grew here and there among the grass were almost dazzlingly alight with little diamonds.”
• “The vivid dark light… The sea was menacingly quiet.”
• “Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements of people are never final.”
“Jealousy is born with love, but doesn’t always die with love.”
Do you yearn for your first love - to spend just a moment together?
What if your sighting was accidental, unexpected, and you were unprepared?
Do you really love them still - or is it your youthful self you love?
Is stalking a passive act, a safety-valve?
Or does it forge the innocent past into a twisted vision of the future?
Maybe cousin James is right:
“You’ve built a cage of needs and installed her in an empty space in the middle… using her image… as an exorcism.”
Image: The Gilded Cage of Female Oppression by Denise R Duarte (Source and details.)
“Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it.”
My 13th Murdoch is her best-known and most lauded; it’s also the one I enjoyed the least. I was not spellbound by this “story of death and moral smash-up” that the narrator likens to Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove. There are many interesting and worthwhile ideas, big characters, and some lovely phrases, but overall, a ludicrous number of coincidences, convoluted machinations, and individual or group introspections were dragged out over too many pages. The final “Postscript” added little of worth. Even the title is twice as long as it needs to be! 😉
“I am my well-known self, made glittering and brittle by fame.”
Charles Arrowby is a playwright, actor, and director who, in his sixties, retires to a remote coastal cottage - though he’s probably not as successful as he’d like readers to believe:
“Last night someone on a BBC quiz did not know who I was.”
The book is his memoir-cum-diary-cum-novel of a few eventful months at Shruff End. He bumps into his childhood sweetheart, Mary Hartley, who had disappeared in their teens. Cue quests, plots, reminiscences, and theatrical friends and ex lovers, plus mysterious cousin James, dropping in at crucial moments. There’s also incarceration, attempted murder, near death experiences, actual death, missing - and found - persons, possible supernatural events, a sea monster, and some strange meals.
Charles is a self-confessed unreliable narrator. He relishes the sight, sounds, and feel of the sea, as he looks back on his life and loves, including a formative relationship with a much older woman, Clement.
Murdoch’s narrator, written in 1978 reminded strongly of two of John Banville’s characters: Max Morden in The Sea of 2005 (see my review HERE) and especially retired actor Alex Cleave in Ancient Light of 2012, who had a formative relationship with a much older woman (see my review HERE).
But Murdoch’s writing is less sensuous than Banville’s, and Charles is a less sympathetic character. He’s not just a vain, self-centred, controlling, patronising, misogynist who slants and reinterprets events to fit what he wants to believe; he’s actively scheming, abusive, deliberately delusional, and switches between being oblivious to and relishing the disappointments and pain of others.
But I’ve long loved this quote, and recently found it very helpful. I forgive a lot, just for coming across it, in context:
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”
Who’s Playing Whom?
Murdoch’s novels always have at least one Svengali figure. Charles is the obvious candidate: his career is highly relevant, he controls the narrative we read, and towards the end, he says “I was the dreamer, I the magician”. But there are several other contenders, and that was the most interesting puzzle for me: Rosina, James, even Titus or Hartley?
Image: Marionette on a theatrical stage, by Daniel Beauchamp (Source.)
Deep and Meaningful
Those more learned and enthused than I am can consider the symbolism of the serpent, the inner room, the broken mirror, and many nods to theatre, Shakespeare (Prospero, in The Tempest), and classical mythology (Perseus and Andromeda, Orpheus and Euridice, Plato’s cave), and whether freedom can be imposed. In addition:
“Every persisting marriage is based on fear.”
Don’t marry! Maybe don’t cohabit. There are no happy couples in this book, and marriage is a dark and unknowable institution.
“The awful crying of souls in guilt and pain, loathing each other, tied to each other! The inferno of marriage.”
Everyone is away from familiar territory (London, in most cases), and that shapes events, enhanced or exacerbated by the slight unreality of the liminal location between rocks and sea, in an isolated house with no electricity.
I’m sure whole theses have been written about Charles’ cousin, James: he’s a fellow only child, but raised in far more privileged circumstances. James is a successful retired general, a Buddhist mystic, possible spy, and may be gay. Charles was and is always competing with him, though realises James probably barely realised and certainly didn’t care.
“My own feeling that I have ‘won the game’ comes partly from a sense that he has been disappointed by life, whereas I have not.”
James also has a more mystical role as conscience, advisor, guardian, and saviour.
Fun Food
“Cook fast, eat slowly.”
An unexpected delight was Charles’ dedication to creative, simple gastronomy, including “liberal use of the tin opener”. It was entertainingly odd, pompous, and specific, and it reminded me of my late father’s approach, as well as the amusingly bizarre, but not hugely relevant, outfits described in detail in Philip K Dick’s Ubik (see my review HERE).
“Anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil… Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water-biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese. Of course I never touch foreign cheeses.”
And:
“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.”
Image: The meal described above, made by Valerie Stivers (Source, with notes.)
The fact Charles was limited in what he could buy, store, and cook, reminded me of Jack Munroe’s Tin Can Cook: 75 Simple Store Cupboard Recipes, being given away by food banks (support that HERE), and also on sale.
There’s a restaurant inspired by Murdoch’s book (see HERE), but nothing on the menu is remotely like anything described by Charles. In particular, he laments the lack of fresh fish, but it’s a fish restaurant HERE!
Quotes
• “Watching the waves come flying through [a rock bridge]... killing themselves in fits of rage.”
• “Of course the water is very cold, but after a few seconds it seems to coat the body in a kind of warm silvery skin, as if one had acquired the scales of a merman. The challenged blood rejoices with a new strength. Yes, this is my natural element.”
• “There is not a vestige of beastly sand anywhere. I have heard it called an ugly coast. Long may it be deemed so. The rocks… are sandy yellow in colour, covered with crystalline flecks, and are folded into large ungainly incoherent heaps.”
• “The mild hostility of the villagers does not worry me… They know who I am. But they have been at pains to exhibit indifference.”
• “We lived… upon a housing estate where loneliness was combined with lack of privacy.”
• “I hate the falsity of ‘grand’ dinner parties where, amid much kissing, there is the appearance of intimacy where there is really none.”
• “I want you to be the lord and the king as you’ve always been.” Yeah, right: she said that.
• “Felt a little depressed but was cheered up by supper: spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil. (Basil is of course the king of herbs.) Then spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill. Boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soya oil and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in. With these, a slice or two of cold tinned corned beef. (Meat is really just an excuse for eating vegetables.)”
• “Only a fool despises tomato ketchup.”
• “A bright fierce little moon was shining, dimming the stars and pouring metallic brilliance into the sea and animating the land with the ghostly intent presences of quiet rocks and trees.”
• “The grass… was a pollulating emerald green, the rocks that grew here and there among the grass were almost dazzlingly alight with little diamonds.”
• “The vivid dark light… The sea was menacingly quiet.”
• “Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements of people are never final.”
September 24, 2016
I’m fairly certain no one writes, or ever has written, exactly like Iris Murdoch. Reading her prose is like listening to Frank Sinatra sing--you might have heard the song before, but never like that. In the first 200 pages of this book, I could not decide where it was going. Charles seemed an egocentric misogynist, not worthy of the interest I was showing in him. The plot seemed desperately thin and a bit all over the place, but the writing was exquisite, the descriptions were musical, and there was something fascinating that meant I never thought of putting the book down.
Then, with a suddenness that was surprising, all the bits began to fall together, Charles became someone intricate and complicated and the plot started to develop into a gripping story of love, obsession, misdirection, mystery and human foibles. Minor characters took on hidden meaning and became central to the story and Charles became someone you could laugh at and cry for simultaneously. I succumbed to emotions that bubbled up like the surf of Murdoch’s raging sea. I felt the tension of the situation, I struggled to think how it could be resolved and leave anyone intact, I worried for the sanity of everyone involved, and I mourned for the things that might have been if any of these characters had lived life with their eyes open. If there is one thing I could say is unique in Murdoch’s writing, it is that you feel her story as much as read it.
”It’s not an eternal thing, nothing human is eternal. For us, eternity is an illusion. It’s like in a fairy tale. When the clock strikes twelve it will all crumble to pieces and vanish. And you’ll find you are free of her, free of her forever, and you can let the poor ghost go. What will remain will be ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. And you’ll feel relief, you’ll feel free. At present you’re just obsessed, hypnotized.”
How much of life is exactly that? Obsession and invention. How often in life do we substitute our realities, our possibilities, for dreams, which are unreachable? Is it worth anything to us if we recognize the truth of love when life is all but done? And how much like the ever-changing, unfeeling, often cruel sea, is life? Charles romanticizes both, and plays a dangerous game with both, and each of us must decide for himself if the price Charles pays is worth the knowledge he gleans.
Charles is a complete character. He grows and morphs, despite all his efforts not to. And, while he is growing, so do we. This is the only Murdoch I have ever read, but I have no hesitation in labeling her “genius”.
Then, with a suddenness that was surprising, all the bits began to fall together, Charles became someone intricate and complicated and the plot started to develop into a gripping story of love, obsession, misdirection, mystery and human foibles. Minor characters took on hidden meaning and became central to the story and Charles became someone you could laugh at and cry for simultaneously. I succumbed to emotions that bubbled up like the surf of Murdoch’s raging sea. I felt the tension of the situation, I struggled to think how it could be resolved and leave anyone intact, I worried for the sanity of everyone involved, and I mourned for the things that might have been if any of these characters had lived life with their eyes open. If there is one thing I could say is unique in Murdoch’s writing, it is that you feel her story as much as read it.
”It’s not an eternal thing, nothing human is eternal. For us, eternity is an illusion. It’s like in a fairy tale. When the clock strikes twelve it will all crumble to pieces and vanish. And you’ll find you are free of her, free of her forever, and you can let the poor ghost go. What will remain will be ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. And you’ll feel relief, you’ll feel free. At present you’re just obsessed, hypnotized.”
How much of life is exactly that? Obsession and invention. How often in life do we substitute our realities, our possibilities, for dreams, which are unreachable? Is it worth anything to us if we recognize the truth of love when life is all but done? And how much like the ever-changing, unfeeling, often cruel sea, is life? Charles romanticizes both, and plays a dangerous game with both, and each of us must decide for himself if the price Charles pays is worth the knowledge he gleans.
Charles is a complete character. He grows and morphs, despite all his efforts not to. And, while he is growing, so do we. This is the only Murdoch I have ever read, but I have no hesitation in labeling her “genius”.
January 26, 2024
The Sea the Sea by Iris Murdoch, is her 20th novel, which won the Booker prize in 1978. The author famously was an academic; a professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, who also wrote novels with a philosophical focus.
The novel is in the form of a journal. The viewpoint character throughout is a famous actor and director, Charles Arrowby. The impression we gain immediately is that he is a solitary, rather arrogant and egotistical individual. In the novel he has decided to retire to "Shruff End" a dilapidated and creaky old house on a rocky promontory next to the sea. He tells us that he has decided to get away from London life once and for all, and to follow his dream of living in seclusion, much to the bewilderment and scepticism of all his theatre friends.
The journal he writes, and which we are reading, is an attempt to form some structure to his life, and to be a memoir of sorts. But even though he professes to be writing details of the house and village, he seems to find it impossible to concentrate on the job he has set himself, which he says is the reason for being there in the first place. He becomes distracted inordinately easily; even the food he prepares is an excuse. He rambles on about his culinary activities - both past and present,
"guzzling large quantities of expensive, pretentious, often mediocre food in public places was not only immoral, unhealthy and unaesthetic, but also unpleasurable. Later my guests were offered simple chez moi. What is more delicious than fresh hot buttered toast, with or without the addition of bloater paste? Or plain boiled onions with a little corned beef if desired?"
This gives us the measure of the man; faddish and particular to the point of eccentricity. And given subsequent events in the novel, it is probably important for the author to get the reader on Charles's side, to enjoy his little foibles and forgive him what appears to be fanciful and conceited notions about himself.
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. 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. But is this after all merely what used to be called a "bad trip"?
The best parts in the first half of the book have to be the wonderful descriptions of the sea, which increasingly seems to have an organic, perhaps omniscient presence,
"The sea was covered by a clear grey light together with a thick rain curtain. The rain was exhibited in the light as if it were an illuminated grille, and as if each raindrop were separately visible like the beads upon my bead curtain. There it hung, faintly vibrating in the brilliant grey air, while the house hummed like a machine with the steady sound of pattering."
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.
We are very aware that Charles may be an unreliable narrator. His conquests of women seems very fanciful. Is every woman he has ever met really in love with him? At this point he also waxes lyrical about an old childhood romance with a girl called Hartley, his only "true love", and the readers gets the impression that Charles is impossibly unrealistic, viewing the world almost entirely through his imagination.
The journal is a useful device, telling us much of the history we need to know, and developing our ideas about Charles's character, as well as giving us an indication of his attitudes towards some of the other people who will enter the novel. It is also presented in a totally believable and authentic way. An amateur, unpractised writer, starting with a vague idea in retirement, may well start off with one idea, and go off at various tangents, being diverted by other ideas. However this early part of the novel does seem to be a little tedious and self-indulgent. It is rather too full of lengthy speeches and conversation; there are great long swathes of emoting from the characters, and it's all very angst-ridden. Nothing much seems to be happening, and a modern reader cannot help wishing this first part of the novel had been edited.
In this way the novel is very much of its time, the 1970s, when self-expression was all, with the Arts swamped with long unformed passages of "progressive" music, experimental literature, painting and sculpture. But then, to rescue the reader's attention, there are the magnificent and evocative descriptions of the sea in all its moods. There is an impending sense of doom. There are so many descriptions of the sea, and the whirling cauldron of foam. It is very symbolic, sometimes for the emotions and moods of the characters, sometimes perhaps for their stormy relationships, sometimes it seems to be Charles's "id". He often goes in search of the sea when he is in mental turmoil - once even desperately "checking" on it through his binoculars, as if he could somehow get a portent of how things would be from a glimpse of its state. Sometimes the sea seems like a live creature itself,
"It was as if the sun were shining through a mist, but a mist made out of the dark blue globules of the sky itself. I remember the lurid impression of that evening, the vivid dark light, the brilliant vibrating colours of the rocks ... There was no breath of wind, not the softest breeze. The sea was menacingly quiet, utterly smooth, glassy, glossy, oily, a uniform azure."
Inevitably, about half way through, something is bound to happen. Charles is not left in his isolation. Starting with a letter, his acting friends, all unbearable "luvvies" begin to descend on him in ones and twos. Parts of this are very funny, and one part where they are all wondering where on earth they can camp out in Charles's ramshackle house, is almost farcical. The interrelation between characters is pure Iris Murdoch. Each seems absorbed in their own little middle-class world; each professing attitudes and ideas the reader suspects are dissembling. Who is manipulating whom? It is not clear.
These events serve two purposes, because they also show another side to Charles. At one point, an ex-girlfriend remarks acidly, "you know you can't keep your hands off women", yet throughout so far Charles has claimed he has a scrupulously fair and respectful attitude to females, even using the word "unsexed" to describe his fastidious, ascetic attitude. the way this is achieved is a whopping, fairly unbelievable coincidence. It does strain credulity. Yet this is a novel, and such deus ex machina abound, from Greek tragedies right through to the works of Charles Dickens, so perhaps we should allow Iris Murdoch this one. the subsequent events in this novel follow the pattern of a slightly bizarre thriller, with aspects of cruelty, mental instability, jealousy, manipulation, entrapment, imprisonment, abduction, domination, tyranny, corruption, perversion of love, obsession, and brain-washing.
"Sheer hatred can be a commanding form of madness."
"Jealousy is born with love, but does not always die with love."
The comic interventions of the minor characters, Charles's friends, begin to take on a grotesque quality. Neither they, nor, it has to be said the reader, can quite believe the tenacity with which Charles clings to his idealistic notions. We quickly revise our opinion that he seemed to be a mildly eccentric but likeable ageing actor, who liked to have his ego massaged every now and then. His friend Perry tries to bring him back down to earth advising,
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,
"The rain came down, straight and silvery, like a punishment of steel rods. It clattered onto the house and onto the rocks and pitted the sea. The thunder made some sounds like grand pianos falling downstairs, then settled to a softer continuous rumble which was almost drowned by the sound of the rain. The flashes of lightning joined into long illuminations which made the grass a lurid green, the rocks blazing ochre."
So how does this novel, written 36 years ago now, hold up? Surprisingly well, actually. It is not as dated as one might expect, perhaps since the "luvvie" actor types of personality which the author renders so accurately are, unfortunately, timeless. Of course the flow of writing, that particular style, is of its time. During the 1960s and 70s there was much interest in self-development and a search for meaning. The prevailing attitude, especially amongst the young, was that there was a purpose in finding a new approach to leading a good life. There seemed to be all the time in the world for such introspection. The Western world was not as concerned with acquisitiveness, and appearances, as it is now. Increasingly more people were searching for a deeper meaning, a significance, which would lead to a knowledge of one's purpose in life.
To some extent, we have lost the positive side of that now with our busy, materialistic 21st century world of superficiality, our overly competitive society where cooperation has been sacrificed for boastful procrastinations and gloss. Yet the downside of that time, was that there was scope for a lot of self-indulgence and pretentiousness amongst the search for deeper meanings. Such philosophical and esoteric musings are at the core of this book. There are both supremely tragic and comedic events, yet we have a journey running though the novel. In many ways it is Charles's journey to becoming more self-aware, and beginning to stop his self-delusions, and gain a moral compass. Very near the end, he muses,
"How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality ... Yes of course I was in love with my own youth ... Who is one's first love?"
Elements of fate, coincidences and brushes with the supernatural are present throughout. The coincidence of 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.
Near the end of the book, Charles's older cousin James tells him about "bardo", a kind of limbo or holding place for souls who are in between their journeys on the wheel of life.
The elements of mysticism in the book all come together and are given expression by James. Through having a position of command in the Army, he has spent a great deal of his live travelling through Tibet. He is a Buddhist, deeply involved yet rather secretive about the various ancient religious traditions he has experienced there. Towards the end of the novel, This impressionistic, esoteric, thoughtful type of writing is rarely found in modern literary novels, which have lost this dimension. They may be full of in-depth analysis and lyrical writing, but are necessarily less elusive, contemplative and illusory.
The skill of the novel is that it is possible to read and understand the indication of an alternative mystical interpretation of events, all interconnecting and determining the wheels of others' lives. Or it can be read as completely explicable by earthly, known logical precepts. Iris Murdoch leaves it open to the reader to decide which. Yes, it resonated even more for the time it was written. But it is well worth reading now too.
The novel is in the form of a journal. The viewpoint character throughout is a famous actor and director, Charles Arrowby. The impression we gain immediately is that he is a solitary, rather arrogant and egotistical individual. In the novel he has decided to retire to "Shruff End" a dilapidated and creaky old house on a rocky promontory next to the sea. He tells us that he has decided to get away from London life once and for all, and to follow his dream of living in seclusion, much to the bewilderment and scepticism of all his theatre friends.
The journal he writes, and which we are reading, is an attempt to form some structure to his life, and to be a memoir of sorts. But even though he professes to be writing details of the house and village, he seems to find it impossible to concentrate on the job he has set himself, which he says is the reason for being there in the first place. He becomes distracted inordinately easily; even the food he prepares is an excuse. He rambles on about his culinary activities - both past and present,
"guzzling large quantities of expensive, pretentious, often mediocre food in public places was not only immoral, unhealthy and unaesthetic, but also unpleasurable. Later my guests were offered simple chez moi. What is more delicious than fresh hot buttered toast, with or without the addition of bloater paste? Or plain boiled onions with a little corned beef if desired?"
This gives us the measure of the man; faddish and particular to the point of eccentricity. And given subsequent events in the novel, it is probably important for the author to get the reader on Charles's side, to enjoy his little foibles and forgive him what appears to be fanciful and conceited notions about himself.
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. 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. But is this after all merely what used to be called a "bad trip"?
The best parts in the first half of the book have to be the wonderful descriptions of the sea, which increasingly seems to have an organic, perhaps omniscient presence,
"The sea was covered by a clear grey light together with a thick rain curtain. The rain was exhibited in the light as if it were an illuminated grille, and as if each raindrop were separately visible like the beads upon my bead curtain. There it hung, faintly vibrating in the brilliant grey air, while the house hummed like a machine with the steady sound of pattering."
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.
We are very aware that Charles may be an unreliable narrator. His conquests of women seems very fanciful. Is every woman he has ever met really in love with him? At this point he also waxes lyrical about an old childhood romance with a girl called Hartley, his only "true love", and the readers gets the impression that Charles is impossibly unrealistic, viewing the world almost entirely through his imagination.
The journal is a useful device, telling us much of the history we need to know, and developing our ideas about Charles's character, as well as giving us an indication of his attitudes towards some of the other people who will enter the novel. It is also presented in a totally believable and authentic way. An amateur, unpractised writer, starting with a vague idea in retirement, may well start off with one idea, and go off at various tangents, being diverted by other ideas. However this early part of the novel does seem to be a little tedious and self-indulgent. It is rather too full of lengthy speeches and conversation; there are great long swathes of emoting from the characters, and it's all very angst-ridden. Nothing much seems to be happening, and a modern reader cannot help wishing this first part of the novel had been edited.
In this way the novel is very much of its time, the 1970s, when self-expression was all, with the Arts swamped with long unformed passages of "progressive" music, experimental literature, painting and sculpture. But then, to rescue the reader's attention, there are the magnificent and evocative descriptions of the sea in all its moods. There is an impending sense of doom. There are so many descriptions of the sea, and the whirling cauldron of foam. It is very symbolic, sometimes for the emotions and moods of the characters, sometimes perhaps for their stormy relationships, sometimes it seems to be Charles's "id". He often goes in search of the sea when he is in mental turmoil - once even desperately "checking" on it through his binoculars, as if he could somehow get a portent of how things would be from a glimpse of its state. Sometimes the sea seems like a live creature itself,
"It was as if the sun were shining through a mist, but a mist made out of the dark blue globules of the sky itself. I remember the lurid impression of that evening, the vivid dark light, the brilliant vibrating colours of the rocks ... There was no breath of wind, not the softest breeze. The sea was menacingly quiet, utterly smooth, glassy, glossy, oily, a uniform azure."
Inevitably, about half way through, something is bound to happen. Charles is not left in his isolation. Starting with a letter, his acting friends, all unbearable "luvvies" begin to descend on him in ones and twos. Parts of this are very funny, and one part where they are all wondering where on earth they can camp out in Charles's ramshackle house, is almost farcical. The interrelation between characters is pure Iris Murdoch. Each seems absorbed in their own little middle-class world; each professing attitudes and ideas the reader suspects are dissembling. Who is manipulating whom? It is not clear.
These events serve two purposes, because they also show another side to Charles. At one point, an ex-girlfriend remarks acidly, "you know you can't keep your hands off women", yet throughout so far Charles has claimed he has a scrupulously fair and respectful attitude to females, even using the word "unsexed" to describe his fastidious, ascetic attitude. the way this is achieved is a whopping, fairly unbelievable coincidence. It does strain credulity. Yet this is a novel, and such deus ex machina abound, from Greek tragedies right through to the works of Charles Dickens, so perhaps we should allow Iris Murdoch this one. the subsequent events in this novel follow the pattern of a slightly bizarre thriller, with aspects of cruelty, mental instability, jealousy, manipulation, entrapment, imprisonment, abduction, domination, tyranny, corruption, perversion of love, obsession, and brain-washing.
"Sheer hatred can be a commanding form of madness."
"Jealousy is born with love, but does not always die with love."
The comic interventions of the minor characters, Charles's friends, begin to take on a grotesque quality. Neither they, nor, it has to be said the reader, can quite believe the tenacity with which Charles clings to his idealistic notions. We quickly revise our opinion that he seemed to be a mildly eccentric but likeable ageing actor, who liked to have his ego massaged every now and then. His friend Perry tries to bring him back down to earth advising,
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,
"The rain came down, straight and silvery, like a punishment of steel rods. It clattered onto the house and onto the rocks and pitted the sea. The thunder made some sounds like grand pianos falling downstairs, then settled to a softer continuous rumble which was almost drowned by the sound of the rain. The flashes of lightning joined into long illuminations which made the grass a lurid green, the rocks blazing ochre."
So how does this novel, written 36 years ago now, hold up? Surprisingly well, actually. It is not as dated as one might expect, perhaps since the "luvvie" actor types of personality which the author renders so accurately are, unfortunately, timeless. Of course the flow of writing, that particular style, is of its time. During the 1960s and 70s there was much interest in self-development and a search for meaning. The prevailing attitude, especially amongst the young, was that there was a purpose in finding a new approach to leading a good life. There seemed to be all the time in the world for such introspection. The Western world was not as concerned with acquisitiveness, and appearances, as it is now. Increasingly more people were searching for a deeper meaning, a significance, which would lead to a knowledge of one's purpose in life.
To some extent, we have lost the positive side of that now with our busy, materialistic 21st century world of superficiality, our overly competitive society where cooperation has been sacrificed for boastful procrastinations and gloss. Yet the downside of that time, was that there was scope for a lot of self-indulgence and pretentiousness amongst the search for deeper meanings. Such philosophical and esoteric musings are at the core of this book. There are both supremely tragic and comedic events, yet we have a journey running though the novel. In many ways it is Charles's journey to becoming more self-aware, and beginning to stop his self-delusions, and gain a moral compass. Very near the end, he muses,
"How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality ... Yes of course I was in love with my own youth ... Who is one's first love?"
Elements of fate, coincidences and brushes with the supernatural are present throughout. The coincidence of 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.
Near the end of the book, Charles's older cousin James tells him about "bardo", a kind of limbo or holding place for souls who are in between their journeys on the wheel of life.
The elements of mysticism in the book all come together and are given expression by James. Through having a position of command in the Army, he has spent a great deal of his live travelling through Tibet. He is a Buddhist, deeply involved yet rather secretive about the various ancient religious traditions he has experienced there. Towards the end of the novel, This impressionistic, esoteric, thoughtful type of writing is rarely found in modern literary novels, which have lost this dimension. They may be full of in-depth analysis and lyrical writing, but are necessarily less elusive, contemplative and illusory.
The skill of the novel is that it is possible to read and understand the indication of an alternative mystical interpretation of events, all interconnecting and determining the wheels of others' lives. Or it can be read as completely explicable by earthly, known logical precepts. Iris Murdoch leaves it open to the reader to decide which. Yes, it resonated even more for the time it was written. But it is well worth reading now too.
August 21, 2020
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
Iris Murdoch
The Sea, the Sea is deep, is deep. Far out and deeply deep.
Rather than trying my unworthy hand at a thorough analysis of a psychologically complex 500 page novel, I lay a few grooves.
Near the beginning, I thought it might be a romance. No way, man. More like a Mystery of Mental Health and Well-being.
What is love? How is the idea or thought of it, especially young love, affected by the passage of time, what with our tendency to romanticize our youth?
The painful paradox of the ego (false pride), with its fang-ed sea serpent 'jealousy,' blinding us to reason. The green monster deprives us of patience and fills us with anger, all of which operates to ruin the very love that our innate sexuality tells us to cherish above all else.
The ways we lie to ourselves to enable the fantasy, even to the edge of insanity, that another loves us despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
This novel provokes thoughts down in the mind's murky places. Some readers may be turned off by the oft long-windedness of the first person narrator. It seems that maybe 50 pages could have been trimmed.
I could delve into the profundity of Iris Murdoch on damaged love's lassitudes, but such agony I cannot abide.
A surefire 4.5 stars on the water.
The Sea, the Sea is deep, is deep. Far out and deeply deep.
Rather than trying my unworthy hand at a thorough analysis of a psychologically complex 500 page novel, I lay a few grooves.
Near the beginning, I thought it might be a romance. No way, man. More like a Mystery of Mental Health and Well-being.
What is love? How is the idea or thought of it, especially young love, affected by the passage of time, what with our tendency to romanticize our youth?
The painful paradox of the ego (false pride), with its fang-ed sea serpent 'jealousy,' blinding us to reason. The green monster deprives us of patience and fills us with anger, all of which operates to ruin the very love that our innate sexuality tells us to cherish above all else.
The ways we lie to ourselves to enable the fantasy, even to the edge of insanity, that another loves us despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
This novel provokes thoughts down in the mind's murky places. Some readers may be turned off by the oft long-windedness of the first person narrator. It seems that maybe 50 pages could have been trimmed.
I could delve into the profundity of Iris Murdoch on damaged love's lassitudes, but such agony I cannot abide.
A surefire 4.5 stars on the water.
January 2, 2015
Here's the first thing I love about The Sea, The Sea: its title. Isn't it wonderful? Imagine how boring it would have looked on a shelf if it had just been called "The Sea." But with that profoundly simple decision to repeat itself, it suddenly drips horror and madness and obsession. It's just brilliant. Almost makes me wish Emily Bronte had called her book "The Moor, The Moor."
And then Murdoch plays this terrific game with the opening sentence:
And then Murdoch plays this terrific game with the opening sentence:
The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine.Which is the boring first sentence of a book that should be called "The Sea." It even says "bland"! Blahhhh, lame, until you get to the next paragraph:
I had written the above, destined to be the opening paragraph of my memoirs, when something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it even now after an interval of time and although a possible, though not totally reassuring, explanation has occurred to me.And there's the first sentence of a book called "The Sea, The Sea." Whee! Off we go, madness and horror.
March 30, 2018
The Sea, the Sea is the 1978 winner of the Booker Prize for good reasons. It is a brilliantly perspicacious exploration of human weakness in all its gory fullness. All the feelings that torment the soul are thrust into consciousness and displayed so well that the reading experience is so bad at times. Very few books that serve up a detestable self-serving cad as the main protagonist have succeeded in becoming for me a five-star read. This is an exception.
Charles Arrowby, an eminent theatre artiste in his sixties, has retired to Shruff End, a ‘seaside paradise’ he owned, to write a memoir and supposedly to ‘repent of a life of egotism.’ His intended subject is his love affair with Clement Makin, a deceased, older actress and mistress who has shaped his life both professionally and personally. Hailed in the popular press as a ‘tyrant ‘, a ‘tartar’, and a ‘power-crazed monster', Charles is worshipped by the actors and actresses whose career he makes or breaks but who both curiously love and fear him. Right from the beginning, Charles’ writing plans are haplessly and irrevocably derailed. He let on that ‘something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it even now after an interval of time...’ The memoir that Charles ends up writing is this book we are reading. It is an account of his life, in particular, his obsessive pursuit of a childhood love that encapsulates for him an ideal so pure that nothing must stand in the way of its resurrection.
After forty long years, Mary Hartley Smith remains in Charles’ heart as his one true and only love, or so he claims. Other women, by comparison, are mere shadows. Or so he claims, too. Charles despises women, uses them for his pleasure and discards them at will. His relationships are characterized by irrational jealousy, vampirish possessiveness, and guiltless glee in smashing other people’s marriages. His old flames – Lizzie and Rosina – show up at his seaside cottage to lay claims on his love despite having suffered humiliation and grand heartaches. The husbands of these actresses rock up as well. Their interactions are tense but marvelously hilarious. Charles has no qualms about exploiting each of his adoring colleagues until he bumps into Hartley in the village. This encounter with his lost love precipitated a devastating detour into unexpected experiences, which spin out of control. The crux of the story is Charles’ descent into increasing horror and tragedy, so bent is he on snatching at happiness at the expense of others’ misery.
Murdoch described the pain of yearning, confusion, jealousy, possessiveness, deception, manipulation and servitude with insightful candor. The internal chaos found a literal sounding board in the tempestuous sea, whose wildness and beauty were captured in myriad flashes of color and delight. It took Murdoch 500 odd pages to sift the main protagonist until he is finally able to separate the wheat from the chaff and allow the reader to perceive truth in all the falsehood that has thickened over time.
Characters loom larger than life and understandably so because they are actors by profession. They leave a deep impression as friends who matter, imperfect though they are. They become for Charles a source of light in the murky muddle he created for himself. Lizzie, Gilbert, Peregrine, Rosina and James are stars in their own right and far more likeable than Charles. Lizzie, whom I felt most tenderly toward, writes to Charles: “My love for you has always had a sad face. Oh the weakness of the power of love.” And yet, she makes one of the most touching supplications to Charles for his kindness: “Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth: these things matter more and more as one grows older.”
Read The Sea, the Sea. Like the fathomless sea, this novel has depth and profundity that promise to call forth a richer understanding of the natural impulses that underlie the best and worst in human behavior.
Charles Arrowby, an eminent theatre artiste in his sixties, has retired to Shruff End, a ‘seaside paradise’ he owned, to write a memoir and supposedly to ‘repent of a life of egotism.’ His intended subject is his love affair with Clement Makin, a deceased, older actress and mistress who has shaped his life both professionally and personally. Hailed in the popular press as a ‘tyrant ‘, a ‘tartar’, and a ‘power-crazed monster', Charles is worshipped by the actors and actresses whose career he makes or breaks but who both curiously love and fear him. Right from the beginning, Charles’ writing plans are haplessly and irrevocably derailed. He let on that ‘something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it even now after an interval of time...’ The memoir that Charles ends up writing is this book we are reading. It is an account of his life, in particular, his obsessive pursuit of a childhood love that encapsulates for him an ideal so pure that nothing must stand in the way of its resurrection.
After forty long years, Mary Hartley Smith remains in Charles’ heart as his one true and only love, or so he claims. Other women, by comparison, are mere shadows. Or so he claims, too. Charles despises women, uses them for his pleasure and discards them at will. His relationships are characterized by irrational jealousy, vampirish possessiveness, and guiltless glee in smashing other people’s marriages. His old flames – Lizzie and Rosina – show up at his seaside cottage to lay claims on his love despite having suffered humiliation and grand heartaches. The husbands of these actresses rock up as well. Their interactions are tense but marvelously hilarious. Charles has no qualms about exploiting each of his adoring colleagues until he bumps into Hartley in the village. This encounter with his lost love precipitated a devastating detour into unexpected experiences, which spin out of control. The crux of the story is Charles’ descent into increasing horror and tragedy, so bent is he on snatching at happiness at the expense of others’ misery.
Murdoch described the pain of yearning, confusion, jealousy, possessiveness, deception, manipulation and servitude with insightful candor. The internal chaos found a literal sounding board in the tempestuous sea, whose wildness and beauty were captured in myriad flashes of color and delight. It took Murdoch 500 odd pages to sift the main protagonist until he is finally able to separate the wheat from the chaff and allow the reader to perceive truth in all the falsehood that has thickened over time.
Characters loom larger than life and understandably so because they are actors by profession. They leave a deep impression as friends who matter, imperfect though they are. They become for Charles a source of light in the murky muddle he created for himself. Lizzie, Gilbert, Peregrine, Rosina and James are stars in their own right and far more likeable than Charles. Lizzie, whom I felt most tenderly toward, writes to Charles: “My love for you has always had a sad face. Oh the weakness of the power of love.” And yet, she makes one of the most touching supplications to Charles for his kindness: “Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth: these things matter more and more as one grows older.”
Read The Sea, the Sea. Like the fathomless sea, this novel has depth and profundity that promise to call forth a richer understanding of the natural impulses that underlie the best and worst in human behavior.
August 5, 2018
Charles Arrowby, as he portrays himself in this "autobiography" is undoubtedly as tragic, as comic, as mercurial as any of the roles he played in his successful career as a Shakespearian actor. He has come to the English seaside to peacefully retire but instead faces a series of tumultuous derailments.
Charles is a spectacular character. He is self-centered, erratic, delusional, arrogant, disingenuous, impetuous, eloquent, exhausting, narcissistic, foolish, grandiose, tempestuous, obsessional, cunning, imperious, deceptive, self-destructive, magnetic. I hated him, I loved him, my feelings about him changed with every page. Ultimately, the novel is about one man facing his past and coming to grips with the truths in his life. It is an extraordinary novel. I absolutely loved it! (I highly recommend the audiobook which is masterfully narrated by Simon Vance.)
Charles is a spectacular character. He is self-centered, erratic, delusional, arrogant, disingenuous, impetuous, eloquent, exhausting, narcissistic, foolish, grandiose, tempestuous, obsessional, cunning, imperious, deceptive, self-destructive, magnetic. I hated him, I loved him, my feelings about him changed with every page. Ultimately, the novel is about one man facing his past and coming to grips with the truths in his life. It is an extraordinary novel. I absolutely loved it! (I highly recommend the audiobook which is masterfully narrated by Simon Vance.)
April 29, 2024
الرواية الفائزة بجائزة بوكر لعام 1978، حيث يقرر بطل الرواية والراوي هنا "تشارلز آروبي"، وهو المؤلف والمخرج المسرحي الكبير المتغطرس؛ أن يتقاعد وينعزل عن العالم في قرية منعزلة نائية على بحر الشمال الإنجليزي، ويشت��ي بيتًا يطل على البحر وأن يبدأ حياة جديدة بسيطة بعيدًا عن صخب مدينة "لندن"، وأيضًا كتابة مذكراته الشخصية أملًا في الانعتاق من ماضيه وطلب هدنة لكي يرمم روحه وعالمه المسلط عليه أضواء الشهرة والعلاقات الغرامية.
يبدأ النص ببداية بديعة في وصف البحر والأجواء المحيطة بالمنزل المطل على البحر الهادر ووصف جميل وممتع خلاب قلما أجده في مقدمات الروايات، يدخلك في عالم البحر والعزلة بكل سلاسة واقتدار، حيث يتخذ البحر عنصرًا مهمًا على مدار السرد، وخلفية لكل الأحداث المحورية مع استرجاع ذكريات الطفولة، والعلاقات العاطفية، والأصدقاء، وعلاقته المهمة بإبن العم "جيمس"، ذو الميول البوذية وعلاقتهما منذ الطفولة، وتشاء الصدف أن يشاهد في تلك القرية حب حياته الضائع "هارتلي"، ولكنها متزوجة الآن وأصبحت ربة منزل بسيطة في نفس القرية المعزولة. وتسيطر عليه أواهم وهواجس أنها ليست سعيدة وأنها ماتزال تحبه، بل الرغبة في اختطافها والهرب معها وإنقاذها من ذلك الزوج القاسي. ظهور شخصيات عديدة في السرد تجئ وتذهب؛ ومنهم ابن "هارتلي" بالتبني وشكوكه نحوه. فنجد هنا أن "آروبي" مازال مكبل بالماضي والعزلة لم تعمل على نسيانه لماضيه ولكن جعلته أكثر هوسًا وانفعالًا، ويتصرف تصرفات صبيانية وشعوره بالعظمة وأنه الرجل القوي الذي يطال أي شئ يرغب في الوصول إليه.
نلاحظ أن البحر طوال الرواية هو الحاضر في الخلفية وهو اللاعب المحوري في مصير بعض شخصيات الرواية، كما تمكنت "مردوك" من رسم شخصية "آروبي" المخادعة المراوغة مع روح الكوميديا السوداء المعروفة بها، وصراع الخير والشر والحب والجمال والحرية. حولت روح البحر لسحر يغلف جو الرواية والتماهي بين الحقيقي والمتخيل، كما سلطت الضوء على الصراع الذكوري بين "آروبي" و"بِن" زوج "هارتلي" وبيان مدى شراسة تلك السيطرة الذكورية عليهما وعلى الأنثى المتصارع عليها. هل سينجح "آروبي" في خططه أم سيهزم أمام البحر؟
قد تجد الرواية عجيبة وقصتها التي على السطح والظاهرة للقارئ غير طبيعية ومبتذلة؛ ولكن في عمقها تكشف العديد من الفلسفة الحياتية: القوة والوهم؛ والمزيج بينهما وخداع الذات، وعلاقات الحب المتشابكة وموتها وإحيائها، حب التملك وشهوته، والعديد من خصال الإنسان التي لا تنتهي، مع بحر عميق في الخلفية ينظر لكل تلك الأحداث ويترقب.
"ولو انفسح الوقت للمرء حتى يكتب حياته كلها شيئًا فشيئًا في قالب رواية، فكم يكون هذا العمل مجزياً! ستكون الأجزاء المبهجة ذات بهجة مزدوجة، والأجزاء المضحكة أكثر إضحاكاً، أما الخطيئة والحزن فسيخف وقعهما في ضوء العزاء الفلسفي".
يبدأ النص ببداية بديعة في وصف البحر والأجواء المحيطة بالمنزل المطل على البحر الهادر ووصف جميل وممتع خلاب قلما أجده في مقدمات الروايات، يدخلك في عالم البحر والعزلة بكل سلاسة واقتدار، حيث يتخذ البحر عنصرًا مهمًا على مدار السرد، وخلفية لكل الأحداث المحورية مع استرجاع ذكريات الطفولة، والعلاقات العاطفية، والأصدقاء، وعلاقته المهمة بإبن العم "جيمس"، ذو الميول البوذية وعلاقتهما منذ الطفولة، وتشاء الصدف أن يشاهد في تلك القرية حب حياته الضائع "هارتلي"، ولكنها متزوجة الآن وأصبحت ربة منزل بسيطة في نفس القرية المعزولة. وتسيطر عليه أواهم وهواجس أنها ليست سعيدة وأنها ماتزال تحبه، بل الرغبة في اختطافها والهرب معها وإنقاذها من ذلك الزوج القاسي. ظهور شخصيات عديدة في السرد تجئ وتذهب؛ ومنهم ابن "هارتلي" بالتبني وشكوكه نحوه. فنجد هنا أن "آروبي" مازال مكبل بالماضي والعزلة لم تعمل على نسيانه لماضيه ولكن جعلته أكثر هوسًا وانفعالًا، ويتصرف تصرفات صبيانية وشعوره بالعظمة وأنه الرجل القوي الذي يطال أي شئ يرغب في الوصول إليه.
نلاحظ أن البحر طوال الرواية هو الحاضر في الخلفية وهو اللاعب المحوري في مصير بعض شخصيات الرواية، كما تمكنت "مردوك" من رسم شخصية "آروبي" المخادعة المراوغة مع روح الكوميديا السوداء المعروفة بها، وصراع الخير والشر والحب والجمال والحرية. حولت روح البحر لسحر يغلف جو الرواية والتماهي بين الحقيقي والمتخيل، كما سلطت الضوء على الصراع الذكوري بين "آروبي" و"بِن" زوج "هارتلي" وبيان مدى شراسة تلك السيطرة الذكورية عليهما وعلى الأنثى المتصارع عليها. هل سينجح "آروبي" في خططه أم سيهزم أمام البحر؟
قد تجد الرواية عجيبة وقصتها التي على السطح والظاهرة للقارئ غير طبيعية ومبتذلة؛ ولكن في عمقها تكشف العديد من الفلسفة الحياتية: القوة والوهم؛ والمزيج بينهما وخداع الذات، وعلاقات الحب المتشابكة وموتها وإحيائها، حب التملك وشهوته، والعديد من خصال الإنسان التي لا تنتهي، مع بحر عميق في الخلفية ينظر لكل تلك الأحداث ويترقب.
"ولو انفسح الوقت للمرء حتى يكتب حياته كلها شيئًا فشيئًا في قالب رواية، فكم يكون هذا العمل مجزياً! ستكون الأجزاء المبهجة ذات بهجة مزدوجة، والأجزاء المضحكة أكثر إضحاكاً، أما الخطيئة والحزن فسيخف وقعهما في ضوء العزاء الفلسفي".
February 9, 2019
This will be among my faves this year! At the start of the novel, the unlike-ability of the narcissistic narrator made me wonder why I was reading it. I generally prefer a protagonist that I like and can relate to. But, hanging in there, I began to enjoy the way the unreliable narrator propelled the action of this novel. And there is a lot of action.
I listened to the audible version read by Simon Vance. He was fantastic! He was a able to have each character’s voice different and realistic — women, men, a young man. But, moreover, he was so believably the main character. Someone must have optioned the book. It would make a great series.
High on my recommended list, read this one!
I listened to the audible version read by Simon Vance. He was fantastic! He was a able to have each character’s voice different and realistic — women, men, a young man. But, moreover, he was so believably the main character. Someone must have optioned the book. It would make a great series.
High on my recommended list, read this one!
March 19, 2024
Review soon. It blew my socks off. Do not read the Introduction to the book first, it will ruin the story. Save it for last if at all. I'm so glad I did.
“I live in long—times, not in sudden present moments, don’t you see—I’m married.”
I can’t begin to tell how much fun this book has made my daily walks. I’ve laugh and sighed and probably even talked to it while walking and then gotten back home and went straight to reading the print.
Murdock takes her time and drags one into the story slowly. I almost gave up in the early pages. (Thanks to several GoodReads friends who encouraged me to carry on)
I wasn’t sure I had the stamina or interest in a story about an aging man, a former theatrical artist, who moved to a small village on the sea to write his memoirs. He is slightly annoying at times but mostly so egotistical it was a little hard to stomach. But the writing, the descriptions of the sea, the rocks, the sky, I was in love with it all, just as in real life. The nuances of colors, how the weather and the sea is never the same and has its own special beauty from day to day.
“Perhaps it is a sign of age that I am busy all day without really doing anything.”
The real story within the story (at least for me) is about old age and how as one ages memories take on new shapes, at times with only a kernel of the truth. My other favorite example of this is Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. It is a hard lesson to learn in old age—that one can no longer believe our memories, a place that one lives in more and more, dwelling in the past trying to understand what a life has meant and what we might have missed or failed to examine or understand the meaning of, being too busy living.
I had to go right to the internet to see how old Murdoch was when she wrote it. It was published in 1978 and won the Booker in that same year. So Murdock was in her late 50’s during the writing of this novel. I wasn’t as impressed with the fact that she was a woman writing as an older man as I was totally impressed with the fact that she could describe so accurately the thoughts and mind of an old person.
It is early days yet but I do believe this book is one of the best I’ve ever read. Not sure I would recommend it as highly for the under 55 set but for those over it is one that should not be missed. The audio version narrated by Simon Vance was incredible and really was a pleasure for listening.
“I live in long—times, not in sudden present moments, don’t you see—I’m married.”
I can’t begin to tell how much fun this book has made my daily walks. I’ve laugh and sighed and probably even talked to it while walking and then gotten back home and went straight to reading the print.
Murdock takes her time and drags one into the story slowly. I almost gave up in the early pages. (Thanks to several GoodReads friends who encouraged me to carry on)
I wasn’t sure I had the stamina or interest in a story about an aging man, a former theatrical artist, who moved to a small village on the sea to write his memoirs. He is slightly annoying at times but mostly so egotistical it was a little hard to stomach. But the writing, the descriptions of the sea, the rocks, the sky, I was in love with it all, just as in real life. The nuances of colors, how the weather and the sea is never the same and has its own special beauty from day to day.
“Perhaps it is a sign of age that I am busy all day without really doing anything.”
The real story within the story (at least for me) is about old age and how as one ages memories take on new shapes, at times with only a kernel of the truth. My other favorite example of this is Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. It is a hard lesson to learn in old age—that one can no longer believe our memories, a place that one lives in more and more, dwelling in the past trying to understand what a life has meant and what we might have missed or failed to examine or understand the meaning of, being too busy living.
I had to go right to the internet to see how old Murdoch was when she wrote it. It was published in 1978 and won the Booker in that same year. So Murdock was in her late 50’s during the writing of this novel. I wasn’t as impressed with the fact that she was a woman writing as an older man as I was totally impressed with the fact that she could describe so accurately the thoughts and mind of an old person.
It is early days yet but I do believe this book is one of the best I’ve ever read. Not sure I would recommend it as highly for the under 55 set but for those over it is one that should not be missed. The audio version narrated by Simon Vance was incredible and really was a pleasure for listening.
April 7, 2024
1978 Booker Prize winner, The Sea, The Sea is my first introduction to the Irish author, Iris Murdoch. To tell the truth, I chose it as my first read because it won the prize so I could kill two birds with one stone: Read Iris Murdoch as well as reading a Booker Prize-winning novel. I'm so pleased that it worked well for me. Not only I enjoyed the novel, I also found an author whose writing is such a pleasure to read.
The Sea, The Sea narrates the story of a vain egoist, Charles Arrowby, who retires from his job as a theatre director and settles in a house near the sea. His retirement project is to write his memoir in the quiet seaside house, but both his present and past interfere with him and disrupt his plan. Acquaintances, mistresses from the past, his strained relationship with his cousin, and an obsessive illusory love of the past test his selfish self in more ways than one. Loss, grief, and loneliness teach him the lessons of redemption. Although a full transformation is not in line with the character of Charles Arrowby, the learning acquired through pain helps him to reflect on his many flaws and change as much as he humanely can.
The protagonist, Charles Arrowby, is not an easy character to like. But surprisingly, I didn't quite dislike him. Perhaps, it was her amazing writing skill that helped me overlook his egotism and his self-centered destructive conduct towards others. This doesn't mean that Murdoch deliberately mitigated his flaws through her writing; on the contrary, she presents him as truthfully as possible. But somehow, the Charles Arrowby stemming from Murdoch's pen was not completely despicable. This was a relief because the entire story is closely knitted around him. Arrowby was the central and key figure of the story, and the rest were minor characters. However, the minor characters contributed significantly to the story so as to balance the effect of the protagonist's overbearing actions. Murdoch's writing and the supporting characters held the thread tight not giving any room for Charles Arrowby to snap it with his unpleasant actions. Murdoch doesn't wholly absolve Charles which I thought was suitable because we humans cannot ever forgo our flaws completely even though we strive to reform through lessons we learn in life.
The book's credit goes much to Murdoch's polished writing skill as well as her philosophical reflections on life through Arrowby's character. There are religious, social, and political that run subtly underneath the story which were quite intelligent. I found them interesting and thought-provoking. Murdoch's writing is rich and poetic. The description of the sea setting was so magnificently and picturesquely done that the reader can visualise it through her words. Her writing utterly captured me. It smoothed my reading journey through some of Charles Arrowby's revolting actions. In truth, Murdoch's writing helped me endure Charles Arrowby and look beyond him to the story that is being told.
A significant contributor to the story, apart from its human actors, is the sea. The sea and the protagonist, Charles Arrowby, are closely linked. The sea brings calamity, destruction, and grief to Arrowby as well as healing and peace. The symbolic role played by the formidable sea reiterates the power of nature to both destroy and salvage.
Needless to employ more words to say how much I enjoyed reading this splendid novel though it is by no means a happy story. Sometimes, there is beauty in sorrow.
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
The Sea, The Sea narrates the story of a vain egoist, Charles Arrowby, who retires from his job as a theatre director and settles in a house near the sea. His retirement project is to write his memoir in the quiet seaside house, but both his present and past interfere with him and disrupt his plan. Acquaintances, mistresses from the past, his strained relationship with his cousin, and an obsessive illusory love of the past test his selfish self in more ways than one. Loss, grief, and loneliness teach him the lessons of redemption. Although a full transformation is not in line with the character of Charles Arrowby, the learning acquired through pain helps him to reflect on his many flaws and change as much as he humanely can.
The protagonist, Charles Arrowby, is not an easy character to like. But surprisingly, I didn't quite dislike him. Perhaps, it was her amazing writing skill that helped me overlook his egotism and his self-centered destructive conduct towards others. This doesn't mean that Murdoch deliberately mitigated his flaws through her writing; on the contrary, she presents him as truthfully as possible. But somehow, the Charles Arrowby stemming from Murdoch's pen was not completely despicable. This was a relief because the entire story is closely knitted around him. Arrowby was the central and key figure of the story, and the rest were minor characters. However, the minor characters contributed significantly to the story so as to balance the effect of the protagonist's overbearing actions. Murdoch's writing and the supporting characters held the thread tight not giving any room for Charles Arrowby to snap it with his unpleasant actions. Murdoch doesn't wholly absolve Charles which I thought was suitable because we humans cannot ever forgo our flaws completely even though we strive to reform through lessons we learn in life.
The book's credit goes much to Murdoch's polished writing skill as well as her philosophical reflections on life through Arrowby's character. There are religious, social, and political that run subtly underneath the story which were quite intelligent. I found them interesting and thought-provoking. Murdoch's writing is rich and poetic. The description of the sea setting was so magnificently and picturesquely done that the reader can visualise it through her words. Her writing utterly captured me. It smoothed my reading journey through some of Charles Arrowby's revolting actions. In truth, Murdoch's writing helped me endure Charles Arrowby and look beyond him to the story that is being told.
A significant contributor to the story, apart from its human actors, is the sea. The sea and the protagonist, Charles Arrowby, are closely linked. The sea brings calamity, destruction, and grief to Arrowby as well as healing and peace. The symbolic role played by the formidable sea reiterates the power of nature to both destroy and salvage.
Needless to employ more words to say how much I enjoyed reading this splendid novel though it is by no means a happy story. Sometimes, there is beauty in sorrow.
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
November 4, 2021
La mayoría de nosotros transitamos por la vida más o menos desapercibidos, pero existen personas singulares que, allá por donde pasan, dejan un recuerdo inolvidable. Cuando desaparecen, aquellos que los conocieron los recuerdan por mucho tiempo gracias a las huellas que dejaron en su camino. Hay otros, como Charles Arrowby, que más que huellas dejan cicatrices. De todos modos, Charles, aclamado autor y director teatral recién retirado de los escenarios, quiere asegurarse de que su memoria no se desvanecerá, así que ha abandonado Londres para recluirse en Shruff End, una remota casa junto a un acantilado en la costa inglesa, a escribir su autobiografía.
The Sea, the Sea es el cuaderno en el que Charles va apuntando las notas para su libro: recuerdos, cartas transcritas, reflexiones sobre su vida y su carrera, semblanzas de gente que conoció… todo ello, sin orden aparente y mezclado con la crónica de su día a día, encuentra su sitio en las páginas de este particular cuaderno de bitácora. ¿Podemos fiarnos del diario de alguien como Charles?
Los primeros días en Shruff End transcurren idílicos. Poco importa que la casa sea una ruina (“shruff” puede traducirse como “desecho” o “escoria”) sin electricidad ni calefacción; tras tantos años de actividad frenética, Charles por fin puede disfrutar de paz y tranquilidad. Y del mar, en el que, a pesar de su peligrosidad, nada cada día desafiando la amenaza de las olas que rompen con violencia contra las rocas, para después secarse plácidamente al sol. Las descripciones derrochan sensualidad: los baños, los paisajes… incluso las comidas; rápidas y con ingredientes limitados, son descritas en el diario como exquisitos banquetes. Pero hay algo en la voz de Charles que resulta artificioso, incluso teatral. ¿Es simplemente deformación profesional, un vestigio de su pasado como escritor y actor? ¿Es su vanidad la que habla, maquillando los hechos para mantener vivo su mito? ¿O es quizá que todo es sencillamente una gran mentira? Esos elogios del pescado congelado, de la casa que se cae a pedazos, de las noches solitarias a la luz de una lámpara de aceite... ¿Nos está engañando o se engaña a sí mismo?
A fin de cuentas, si él dice que le encanta su nueva vida tal y como es, ¿quién somos nosotros para dudar de algo que no podemos comprobar? Sin embargo, las entradas en el diario que describen las comidas ofrecen una pista valiosa porque, por mucho que Charles se empeñe en adornarlo, el lector sabe cuánto hay de delicioso en una sopa de lata enriquecida con salchichas, cebollas y manzana, en unas lonchas de corned beef acompañadas de coles hervidas y castañas encurtidas, o en unas tostadas untadas con pasta de anchoa, con judías cocidas de lata y apio encima. Y no lo digo yo, sino el propio Charles —“Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.”
Que Charles no es alguien de cuyo testimonio nos podemos fiar es evidente desde los primeros capítulos de The Sea, the Sea. Es tan obvio como que se trata de un personaje desagradable y egocéntrico. Sin duda, Murdoch no está jugando la carta de la identificación narrador-lector. (O quizá sí, y la autora nos está diciendo con guiño cómplice que en el fondo ambos somos como Charles, pero nuestro secreto está a salvo con ella.) De todos modos, para cuando el lector tiene conciencia de qué clase de individuo es Charles, la autora ha sabido crear tal expectación sobre él —aunque sea tan solo para desenmascararlo— que ya no podemos parar de leer.
Aun así, los primeros capítulos son relativamente inocentes. Su infancia humilde y bastante solitaria en Stratford-upon-Avon (algo que no solo encaminó sus pasos hacia el teatro, sino que le marcó con una imborrable fascinación por Shakespeare), marcada por el contraste entre unos padres (él, tímido y bondadoso, más un compañero que un padre; ella, estricta y religiosa) que apenas salían de casa, y sus tíos, ricos y mundanos. Y, por si fuera poco, su repelente primo James, predestinado a superarle en todo.
También aparece en estas notas preliminares Hartley, su primer (¿y tal vez único?) amor, perdido en la adolescencia. Y después, sus primeros pasos en el teatro (gracias a Shakespeare), el éxito, las mujeres (especialmente las de sus amigos). Charles confiesa, no sin un cierto orgullo, lo bien que siempre se le dio triunfar y divertirse, aun a costa de otros.
En el recuento de sus relaciones pasadas, especialmente con mujeres, sabe que ha hecho mucho daño, y, aunque no se siente especialmente culpable —a veces se diría que se muestra orgulloso—, decide que el propósito del libro, además de recoger esas memorias que él cree todos están deseando leer, va a ser redimirse de su egoísmo y arrogancia en el pasado.
Y, en ese momento, comienza el espectáculo. Como si un figurado telón acabara de levantarse, la mayoría de los personajes mencionados en el diario comienzan a desfilar por Shruff End sin invitación previa. De nuevo, todo resulta sumamente teatral: Charles se ha escondido en ese agujero sin avisar a nadie y, de repente, las tres mujeres más trascendentes en su pasado aparecen como por arte de magia, como si se tratase de un moderno Scrooge atormentado por el fantasma del amor perdido, el del despreciado y el del que salió terriblemente mal.
Pensándolo mejor, esta procesión de amantes despechadas, amigos traicionados, maridos celosos y familiares inoportunos, más que a una pesadilla dickensiana, recuerda al bardo tibetano. Allí los muertos, a la espera de la próxima reencarnación, son visitados por los espectros de aquellas personas que conocieron en vida. En función de cómo estas fuesen tratadas por el fallecido, sus apariciones se ensañarán con él con mayor o menor encono, lo que en el caso de Charles no augura una estancia muy agradable.
¿Son los visitantes reales, personajes en una retorcida ficción o fruto de una pesadilla? La narración de Charles, pomposa y retórica, subraya el efecto de que todo es una representación: su última gran obra teatral, puesta en escena y interpretada por todos esos actores involuntarios para mayor gloria del autor… aunque pronto degenere en una mezcla de culebrón y película de los hermanos Marx.
Es entonces cuando Charles cae en la cuenta de que no es suficiente con escribir una autobiografía maquillando sus faltas, reconociendo humilde que quizá no ha sido un ángel y, de un modo discreto, pidiendo perdón por el daño que haya podido causar. Ya que los personajes han venido a él, va a aprovechar la ocasión para reescribir el guion de su vida, aunque para ellos sea necesario cambiar la de los que le rodean. ¿Para qué arrepentirte de tus faltas si puedes borrarlas?
Él, que hasta este momento solo había pensado en sí mismo, va a conseguir ahora que todos sean felices. Para ello tendrá que romper parejas y crear nuevas, traer hijos de vuelta al hogar del que huyeron, someter a unos y engatusar a otros, pero no importa; el fin justifica los medios. Qué más da que se resistan, él sabe mejor que nadie qué es mejor para ellos. Casualmente, lo mejor para ellos coincide siempre con lo que Charles desea para él mismo.
Cuando Charles era malo, era egocéntrico y manipulador; ahora que trata de redimirse… es aún peor. Como el Próspero de La tempestad , Charles va a emplear toda su magia para ajustar cuentas con el pasado y, de paso, recuperar el amor, pero cuando dice “amor” está hablando de obsesión, de la necesidad de poseer, de la incapacidad de aceptar un rechazo. Lo peor es que como aspirante a Maquiavelo es bastante torpe, probablemente por su falta de empatía (¿cómo manipular a la gente si no los entiendes?) Sí, sus trucos funcionaron en el pasado debido a su fama y a su poder como director, pero ahora, aunque se resista a creerlo, todo eso ha desaparecido.
Aunque en el teatro fuese un director implacable, en la vida real Charles ha terminado por perder el control de esta representación. Los actores campan a sus anchas por Shruff End, cada uno siguiendo su propia versión del guion, a cuál más disparatada. Charles se desmorona, sus anotaciones en el diario pierden coherencia… incluso la comida ha dejado de ser un placer para convertirse en mera supervivencia. Es indudable que los acontecimientos se precipitan hacia un final inesperado —del que prefiero no contar nada.
¿Necesitaba Murdoch casi seiscientas páginas para desenmascarar a Charles como un manipulador egocéntrico y alertar sobre los peligros de inmiscuirse en vidas ajenas? La respuesta es no, pero la autora de The Sea, the Sea va más allá. Para ello aparece en el escenario el primo James que, con los años, se ha convertido en una persona sensata y ecuánime cuya reserva oculta una intensa faceta espiritual —el negativo de Charles, en resumen. Su mera presencia en la casa basta para traer una cierta cordura que equilibra los desvaríos de los demás. Pero, llegado el momento, él también se decide a intervenir. Apoyado en sus elevados principios morales, va a utilizar su capacidad de influir para enderezar la situación y evitar males mayores. El resultado no es menos desastroso que el patético caudillismo de Charles.
Esta es una de las claves de una novela repleta de ellas: los peligros del poder, incluso si se utiliza para hacer el bien. No hay mucha diferencia entre intervenir en las vidas de los demás buscando un beneficio personal o hacerlo por la vanidad de sentirse un santo: no son más que distintas maneras de manipular. Cualquier cosa que no sea aceptar que la gente es libre, incluso para equivocarse, terminará, tarde o temprano, en drama.
Hay muchos más temas que se pueden destacar en esta novela de infinitas lecturas. La pérdida de la juventud, por ejemplo, o de la libertad: Charles, que solo concibe como plena una vida calcada a la suya, se pregunta todo el tiempo cómo la gente vieja (o casada) puede ser feliz.
Pero Murdoch no ofrece respuestas a casi ninguno de los interrogantes que plantea; simplemente deja que la representación llegue a su fin y baje el telón, dejando al espectador con la boca abierta. Y entonces, tras completar esta gran novela sobre los monstruos que la vanidad, ya sea altruista o perversa, puede engendrar… Murdoch continúa escribiendo. A fin de cuentas, la vida, al contrario de la literatura, tiene la fea costumbre de no detenerse en lo que sería un buen final y continúa arrastrándose, cuestionando convicciones, cambiando decisiones, demostrando lo poco que dura un “para siempre.”
El largo epílogo niega prácticamente todo el libro —el amor de Charles por Hartley, la espiritualidad de James— y deja al lector con una sola certeza: en la vida, como en el mar, nada está fijo. Y no hay voluntad humana que pueda dominar a ninguno de los dos.
Leer una obra de ficción —especialmente una como esta, que adopta la forma de un diario— requiere alcanzar compromiso, un cierto grado de aceptación de los hechos ficticios que estamos leyendo; hasta cierto punto es preciso creer en el escritor o en el narrador. Cuando esto no sucede, el libro resulta ser poco más que una sucesión de frases sin mayor interés que, en la mayoría de las ocasiones, termina volviendo a la estantería antes de tiempo, acompañado del compromiso solemne de no volver a leer al autor. A nadie le gusta que le tomen el pelo. Sin embargo, algunas novelas narradas por sujetos poco fiables son obras maestras, no a pesar de ello sino precisamente por ello. Esta es una de ellas.
Al final, ya ni siquiera estoy seguro de si es mejor tratar de imponer tu criterio o dejarse llevar, si ser recordado o caer en el olvido; lo único claro es que la que es imposible de olvidar es esta fascinante novela.
The Sea, the Sea es el cuaderno en el que Charles va apuntando las notas para su libro: recuerdos, cartas transcritas, reflexiones sobre su vida y su carrera, semblanzas de gente que conoció… todo ello, sin orden aparente y mezclado con la crónica de su día a día, encuentra su sitio en las páginas de este particular cuaderno de bitácora. ¿Podemos fiarnos del diario de alguien como Charles?
I spoke of a memoir. Is that what this chronicle will prove to be? Time will show. At this moment, a page old, it feels more like a diary than a memoir. Well, let it be a diary then. How I regret that I did not keep one earlier, what a record that would have been! But now the main events of my life are over and there is to be nothing but ‘recollection in tranquillity’.
Los primeros días en Shruff End transcurren idílicos. Poco importa que la casa sea una ruina (“shruff” puede traducirse como “desecho” o “escoria”) sin electricidad ni calefacción; tras tantos años de actividad frenética, Charles por fin puede disfrutar de paz y tranquilidad. Y del mar, en el que, a pesar de su peligrosidad, nada cada día desafiando la amenaza de las olas que rompen con violencia contra las rocas, para después secarse plácidamente al sol. Las descripciones derrochan sensualidad: los baños, los paisajes… incluso las comidas; rápidas y con ingredientes limitados, son descritas en el diario como exquisitos banquetes. Pero hay algo en la voz de Charles que resulta artificioso, incluso teatral. ¿Es simplemente deformación profesional, un vestigio de su pasado como escritor y actor? ¿Es su vanidad la que habla, maquillando los hechos para mantener vivo su mito? ¿O es quizá que todo es sencillamente una gran mentira? Esos elogios del pescado congelado, de la casa que se cae a pedazos, de las noches solitarias a la luz de una lámpara de aceite... ¿Nos está engañando o se engaña a sí mismo?
A fin de cuentas, si él dice que le encanta su nueva vida tal y como es, ¿quién somos nosotros para dudar de algo que no podemos comprobar? Sin embargo, las entradas en el diario que describen las comidas ofrecen una pista valiosa porque, por mucho que Charles se empeñe en adornarlo, el lector sabe cuánto hay de delicioso en una sopa de lata enriquecida con salchichas, cebollas y manzana, en unas lonchas de corned beef acompañadas de coles hervidas y castañas encurtidas, o en unas tostadas untadas con pasta de anchoa, con judías cocidas de lata y apio encima. Y no lo digo yo, sino el propio Charles —“Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.”
Que Charles no es alguien de cuyo testimonio nos podemos fiar es evidente desde los primeros capítulos de The Sea, the Sea. Es tan obvio como que se trata de un personaje desagradable y egocéntrico. Sin duda, Murdoch no está jugando la carta de la identificación narrador-lector. (O quizá sí, y la autora nos está diciendo con guiño cómplice que en el fondo ambos somos como Charles, pero nuestro secreto está a salvo con ella.) De todos modos, para cuando el lector tiene conciencia de qué clase de individuo es Charles, la autora ha sabido crear tal expectación sobre él —aunque sea tan solo para desenmascararlo— que ya no podemos parar de leer.
Aun así, los primeros capítulos son relativamente inocentes. Su infancia humilde y bastante solitaria en Stratford-upon-Avon (algo que no solo encaminó sus pasos hacia el teatro, sino que le marcó con una imborrable fascinación por Shakespeare), marcada por el contraste entre unos padres (él, tímido y bondadoso, más un compañero que un padre; ella, estricta y religiosa) que apenas salían de casa, y sus tíos, ricos y mundanos. Y, por si fuera poco, su repelente primo James, predestinado a superarle en todo.
They did not in fact visit us very often, since my mother felt that we could not ‘entertain’ them in sufficient style, and would embarrass them, when they did come, with aggressive apologies concerning our humbler way of life. We, I should add, lived upon a housing estate where loneliness was combined with lack of privacy.
También aparece en estas notas preliminares Hartley, su primer (¿y tal vez único?) amor, perdido en la adolescencia. Y después, sus primeros pasos en el teatro (gracias a Shakespeare), el éxito, las mujeres (especialmente las de sus amigos). Charles confiesa, no sin un cierto orgullo, lo bien que siempre se le dio triunfar y divertirse, aun a costa de otros.
A theatre director is a dictator. (If he is not, he is not doing his job.) I fostered my reputation for ruthlessness, it was extremely useful. Actors expected tears and nervous prostration when I was around. Most of them loved it; they are masochists as well as narcissists.
En el recuento de sus relaciones pasadas, especialmente con mujeres, sabe que ha hecho mucho daño, y, aunque no se siente especialmente culpable —a veces se diría que se muestra orgulloso—, decide que el propósito del libro, además de recoger esas memorias que él cree todos están deseando leer, va a ser redimirse de su egoísmo y arrogancia en el pasado.
Y, en ese momento, comienza el espectáculo. Como si un figurado telón acabara de levantarse, la mayoría de los personajes mencionados en el diario comienzan a desfilar por Shruff End sin invitación previa. De nuevo, todo resulta sumamente teatral: Charles se ha escondido en ese agujero sin avisar a nadie y, de repente, las tres mujeres más trascendentes en su pasado aparecen como por arte de magia, como si se tratase de un moderno Scrooge atormentado por el fantasma del amor perdido, el del despreciado y el del que salió terriblemente mal.
Pensándolo mejor, esta procesión de amantes despechadas, amigos traicionados, maridos celosos y familiares inoportunos, más que a una pesadilla dickensiana, recuerda al bardo tibetano. Allí los muertos, a la espera de la próxima reencarnación, son visitados por los espectros de aquellas personas que conocieron en vida. En función de cómo estas fuesen tratadas por el fallecido, sus apariciones se ensañarán con él con mayor o menor encono, lo que en el caso de Charles no augura una estancia muy agradable.
¿Son los visitantes reales, personajes en una retorcida ficción o fruto de una pesadilla? La narración de Charles, pomposa y retórica, subraya el efecto de que todo es una representación: su última gran obra teatral, puesta en escena y interpretada por todos esos actores involuntarios para mayor gloria del autor… aunque pronto degenere en una mezcla de culebrón y película de los hermanos Marx.
Es entonces cuando Charles cae en la cuenta de que no es suficiente con escribir una autobiografía maquillando sus faltas, reconociendo humilde que quizá no ha sido un ángel y, de un modo discreto, pidiendo perdón por el daño que haya podido causar. Ya que los personajes han venido a él, va a aprovechar la ocasión para reescribir el guion de su vida, aunque para ellos sea necesario cambiar la de los que le rodean. ¿Para qué arrepentirte de tus faltas si puedes borrarlas?
Él, que hasta este momento solo había pensado en sí mismo, va a conseguir ahora que todos sean felices. Para ello tendrá que romper parejas y crear nuevas, traer hijos de vuelta al hogar del que huyeron, someter a unos y engatusar a otros, pero no importa; el fin justifica los medios. Qué más da que se resistan, él sabe mejor que nadie qué es mejor para ellos. Casualmente, lo mejor para ellos coincide siempre con lo que Charles desea para él mismo.
Cuando Charles era malo, era egocéntrico y manipulador; ahora que trata de redimirse… es aún peor. Como el Próspero de La tempestad , Charles va a emplear toda su magia para ajustar cuentas con el pasado y, de paso, recuperar el amor, pero cuando dice “amor” está hablando de obsesión, de la necesidad de poseer, de la incapacidad de aceptar un rechazo. Lo peor es que como aspirante a Maquiavelo es bastante torpe, probablemente por su falta de empatía (¿cómo manipular a la gente si no los entiendes?) Sí, sus trucos funcionaron en el pasado debido a su fama y a su poder como director, pero ahora, aunque se resista a creerlo, todo eso ha desaparecido.
They’ve forgotten you already. You were pretty old hat when you were still with us, now you’re ancient history. The young people have never heard of you, Charles. You’re exploded, you’re not even a myth. I can see it now, Charles dear, you’re old. Where’s all that charm we used to go on about? It was nothing but power really. Now you’ve lost your power you’ve lost your charm.
Aunque en el teatro fuese un director implacable, en la vida real Charles ha terminado por perder el control de esta representación. Los actores campan a sus anchas por Shruff End, cada uno siguiendo su propia versión del guion, a cuál más disparatada. Charles se desmorona, sus anotaciones en el diario pierden coherencia… incluso la comida ha dejado de ser un placer para convertirse en mera supervivencia. Es indudable que los acontecimientos se precipitan hacia un final inesperado —del que prefiero no contar nada.
¿Necesitaba Murdoch casi seiscientas páginas para desenmascarar a Charles como un manipulador egocéntrico y alertar sobre los peligros de inmiscuirse en vidas ajenas? La respuesta es no, pero la autora de The Sea, the Sea va más allá. Para ello aparece en el escenario el primo James que, con los años, se ha convertido en una persona sensata y ecuánime cuya reserva oculta una intensa faceta espiritual —el negativo de Charles, en resumen. Su mera presencia en la casa basta para traer una cierta cordura que equilibra los desvaríos de los demás. Pero, llegado el momento, él también se decide a intervenir. Apoyado en sus elevados principios morales, va a utilizar su capacidad de influir para enderezar la situación y evitar males mayores. El resultado no es menos desastroso que el patético caudillismo de Charles.
Esta es una de las claves de una novela repleta de ellas: los peligros del poder, incluso si se utiliza para hacer el bien. No hay mucha diferencia entre intervenir en las vidas de los demás buscando un beneficio personal o hacerlo por la vanidad de sentirse un santo: no son más que distintas maneras de manipular. Cualquier cosa que no sea aceptar que la gente es libre, incluso para equivocarse, terminará, tarde o temprano, en drama.
What innumerable chains of fatal causes one’s vanity, one’s jealousy, one’s cupidity, one’s cowardice have laid upon the earth to be traps for others. It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world. But one surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another. Perhaps in a way James and I had the same problem?
Hay muchos más temas que se pueden destacar en esta novela de infinitas lecturas. La pérdida de la juventud, por ejemplo, o de la libertad: Charles, que solo concibe como plena una vida calcada a la suya, se pregunta todo el tiempo cómo la gente vieja (o casada) puede ser feliz.
‘Every persisting marriage is based on fear,’ said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you put the boot in or whether it makes you cower. As for marriage, people simply settle into positions of domination and submission. Of course they sometimes “grow together” or “achieve a harmony”, since you have to deal rationally with a source of terror in your life.
Pero Murdoch no ofrece respuestas a casi ninguno de los interrogantes que plantea; simplemente deja que la representación llegue a su fin y baje el telón, dejando al espectador con la boca abierta. Y entonces, tras completar esta gran novela sobre los monstruos que la vanidad, ya sea altruista o perversa, puede engendrar… Murdoch continúa escribiendo. A fin de cuentas, la vida, al contrario de la literatura, tiene la fea costumbre de no detenerse en lo que sería un buen final y continúa arrastrándose, cuestionando convicciones, cambiando decisiones, demostrando lo poco que dura un “para siempre.”
El largo epílogo niega prácticamente todo el libro —el amor de Charles por Hartley, la espiritualidad de James— y deja al lector con una sola certeza: en la vida, como en el mar, nada está fijo. Y no hay voluntad humana que pueda dominar a ninguno de los dos.
Leer una obra de ficción —especialmente una como esta, que adopta la forma de un diario— requiere alcanzar compromiso, un cierto grado de aceptación de los hechos ficticios que estamos leyendo; hasta cierto punto es preciso creer en el escritor o en el narrador. Cuando esto no sucede, el libro resulta ser poco más que una sucesión de frases sin mayor interés que, en la mayoría de las ocasiones, termina volviendo a la estantería antes de tiempo, acompañado del compromiso solemne de no volver a leer al autor. A nadie le gusta que le tomen el pelo. Sin embargo, algunas novelas narradas por sujetos poco fiables son obras maestras, no a pesar de ello sino precisamente por ello. Esta es una de ellas.
Al final, ya ni siquiera estoy seguro de si es mejor tratar de imponer tu criterio o dejarse llevar, si ser recordado o caer en el olvido; lo único claro es que la que es imposible de olvidar es esta fascinante novela.
July 16, 2016
This is a five-hundred page diary of a madman. Vain, heartless, jealous, rude; all of these, and more, apply to Charles Arrowby, the central character of the novel. Charles is a retired actor who has left London and bought a house (Shruff End) hard by the sea, where he intends to write a memoir of his career, his life and loves. Low and behold he runs into his childhood sweetheart, Hartley, who lives nearby, and his little self-centered world runs completely off the tracks. He sets about trying to convince her to leave her husband and run away to him, and this is the scenario that plays out over most of the novel. Murdoch may be one of the few writers who could create such an unlikeable cast of characters, and still keep the reader interested in the story. She is a good writer, make no mistake about that. It was overly long but I liked it well enough to give it four stars.
1978 Booker Prize winner.
1978 Booker Prize winner.
June 23, 2023
Prospero in the bardo
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.
This fictitious autobiographical novel follows a former theatre director and actor Charles Arrowby, who retires to a solitary house on a promontory by the sea in order to live a quiet life away from the society and come to terms with his Shakespearean past. Leaving theatre behind, Charles recognizes its magical but evil and corrupting power:
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.
Now he believes that his only possible power lies in virtue, his ultimate goal is to become good.
Between his exquisite observations on the ever changing sea and maybe less exquisite, yet interesting and unique meals, the scene is almost ideal. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
We all know that memories are haunted places and Time, like the sea, unties all knots - as Charles reminisces on his past, his successes and failures, he is soon visited by a bunch of guests. Former actors, friends and lovers - what a merry sort they turn out to be! In his quest to become good, Charles stars as the hero also known as the prince charming Perseus determined to save his beloved Andromeda from the evil and ugly sea monster. How noble.
Similarly to the deposed Prospero who uses his magic to maintain peace and order between the habitants of his isolated island, Charles uses his moral compass in order to cast and recast himself as well as the others in fairly honourable roles. All this in the name of goodness, of course.
But is goodness a kind of power? Will Prospero renounce his magical power in favour of true and honest vision?
Wait a moment, am I writing a review of The Sea, The Sea or The Tempest?
Ariel, Henry Fuseli
Iris Murdoch writes an extremely egocentric, manipulative and abusive narrator, whose self righteousness and self-deception can really get on the reader’s nerves! So why did I stay till the end of this play and did not slip away in between the acts? To be honest, whenever I could I kept coming back to the stage by sea!
Despite the absolute unlikability of the narrator, there is an addictive quality to his voice, a certain vulnerability in his confessions, which reminds the reader of his and their humane qualities. Many times I found myself laughing and cringing and enjoying the narrator’s or the author’s musings and observations.
Murdoch is a kind of literary sorceress who effortlessly excels in casting a spell on the reader. The writing does it. This novel is simultaneously philosophical, metaphoric, dramatic and comic. Incidentally, this is the third novel I read this year with a kind of piercing serpent symbolism. It ranges from the everyday to the occult, from the conversational to the lyrical, from the serious to the hilarious, from the insightful to the absurd.
Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
In addition, I believe it is a good example of intertextuality - unlike in some literary works, where the references are merely thrown into the reader’s face, here they are hidden somewhere between the lines. Having read The Tempest a few years ago, I could not but think about some parallels between Shakespearean play and Murdoch’s piece. Furthermore, it made me ruminate on a few themes in The Tempest and love its epilogue even more. It might be time for a re-read. In a way, I see The Sea, The Sea as a tribute to Shakespeare, theatre, art and literature.
Murdoch was a philosopher and there are many philosophical themes, even though she insisted that she wanted to separate the voice in her fiction works from the voice in her non-fiction works, regarding philosophy and literature as two separate activities. Sometimes the characters have to deal with moral and ethical issues, but I don’t believe her work in itself is moralistic or didactic. It’s said that Murdoch was influenced by the likes of Plato and Sigmund Freud, but the way she writes people in her novels reminds me of C.G. Jung’s ideas and especially his archetypes, who are both real and imaginary, exist somewhere between here and there, a state between dream and reality, inside and outside - the bardo, perhaps.
Just as in The Unicorn I read last year, the landscape is masterfully interwoven with the psychological landscape itself. The sea is not a mere setting or a background, it’s an infinite and ever-changing universe of human thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Even though I struggled with understanding some themes and details, this novel made me think and feel - it was such a soul-expanding experience. At first, I was going to give this novel four stars, because I felt Murdoch struggled with writing the ending. So while it may not be one of my favourite novels ever, it deserves a shelf of its own and definitely five stars in spirit. One day I will write a proper review, for now let me leave this naïve reaction and a few lines from the magicians:
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
(From The Tempest by William Shakespeare)
But this power is dreadful stuff. Our lusts and attachments compose our god. And when one attachment is cast off another arrives by way of consolation. We never give up a pleasure absolutely, we only barter it for another. All spirituality tends to degenerate into magic, and the use of magic has an automatic nemesis even when the mind has been purified of grosser habits. White magic is black magic. And a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. Demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. The last achievement is the absolute surrender of magic itself, the end of what you call superstition. Yet how does it happen? Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.
The Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich
4.5/5
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.
This fictitious autobiographical novel follows a former theatre director and actor Charles Arrowby, who retires to a solitary house on a promontory by the sea in order to live a quiet life away from the society and come to terms with his Shakespearean past. Leaving theatre behind, Charles recognizes its magical but evil and corrupting power:
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.
Now he believes that his only possible power lies in virtue, his ultimate goal is to become good.
Between his exquisite observations on the ever changing sea and maybe less exquisite, yet interesting and unique meals, the scene is almost ideal. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
We all know that memories are haunted places and Time, like the sea, unties all knots - as Charles reminisces on his past, his successes and failures, he is soon visited by a bunch of guests. Former actors, friends and lovers - what a merry sort they turn out to be! In his quest to become good, Charles stars as the hero also known as the prince charming Perseus determined to save his beloved Andromeda from the evil and ugly sea monster. How noble.
Similarly to the deposed Prospero who uses his magic to maintain peace and order between the habitants of his isolated island, Charles uses his moral compass in order to cast and recast himself as well as the others in fairly honourable roles. All this in the name of goodness, of course.
But is goodness a kind of power? Will Prospero renounce his magical power in favour of true and honest vision?
Wait a moment, am I writing a review of The Sea, The Sea or The Tempest?
Ariel, Henry Fuseli
Iris Murdoch writes an extremely egocentric, manipulative and abusive narrator, whose self righteousness and self-deception can really get on the reader’s nerves! So why did I stay till the end of this play and did not slip away in between the acts? To be honest, whenever I could I kept coming back to the stage by sea!
Despite the absolute unlikability of the narrator, there is an addictive quality to his voice, a certain vulnerability in his confessions, which reminds the reader of his and their humane qualities. Many times I found myself laughing and cringing and enjoying the narrator’s or the author’s musings and observations.
Murdoch is a kind of literary sorceress who effortlessly excels in casting a spell on the reader. The writing does it. This novel is simultaneously philosophical, metaphoric, dramatic and comic. Incidentally, this is the third novel I read this year with a kind of piercing serpent symbolism. It ranges from the everyday to the occult, from the conversational to the lyrical, from the serious to the hilarious, from the insightful to the absurd.
Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
In addition, I believe it is a good example of intertextuality - unlike in some literary works, where the references are merely thrown into the reader’s face, here they are hidden somewhere between the lines. Having read The Tempest a few years ago, I could not but think about some parallels between Shakespearean play and Murdoch’s piece. Furthermore, it made me ruminate on a few themes in The Tempest and love its epilogue even more. It might be time for a re-read. In a way, I see The Sea, The Sea as a tribute to Shakespeare, theatre, art and literature.
Murdoch was a philosopher and there are many philosophical themes, even though she insisted that she wanted to separate the voice in her fiction works from the voice in her non-fiction works, regarding philosophy and literature as two separate activities. Sometimes the characters have to deal with moral and ethical issues, but I don’t believe her work in itself is moralistic or didactic. It’s said that Murdoch was influenced by the likes of Plato and Sigmund Freud, but the way she writes people in her novels reminds me of C.G. Jung’s ideas and especially his archetypes, who are both real and imaginary, exist somewhere between here and there, a state between dream and reality, inside and outside - the bardo, perhaps.
Just as in The Unicorn I read last year, the landscape is masterfully interwoven with the psychological landscape itself. The sea is not a mere setting or a background, it’s an infinite and ever-changing universe of human thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Even though I struggled with understanding some themes and details, this novel made me think and feel - it was such a soul-expanding experience. At first, I was going to give this novel four stars, because I felt Murdoch struggled with writing the ending. So while it may not be one of my favourite novels ever, it deserves a shelf of its own and definitely five stars in spirit. One day I will write a proper review, for now let me leave this naïve reaction and a few lines from the magicians:
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
(From The Tempest by William Shakespeare)
But this power is dreadful stuff. Our lusts and attachments compose our god. And when one attachment is cast off another arrives by way of consolation. We never give up a pleasure absolutely, we only barter it for another. All spirituality tends to degenerate into magic, and the use of magic has an automatic nemesis even when the mind has been purified of grosser habits. White magic is black magic. And a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. Demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. The last achievement is the absolute surrender of magic itself, the end of what you call superstition. Yet how does it happen? Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.
The Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich
4.5/5
May 5, 2017
This is a wonderful novel about a playwright composing his memoirs, trying to escape to some remote outpost by the sea, only to have his former life find him again and again in hilarious, spectral, and sometimes tragic ways. An unreliable narrator so full of his own vanity, and yet so obviously frail and needy, that I was willing to follow him even when I felt sure he must be hallucinating. A remarkable narrative feat.
Read
October 23, 2023RTF
OK, now the "Review To Follow" part. Only, when you wait 10 days and come back to review a book, distance hurts hindsight. So mote it be. I'll just say this:
I started out liking the book because of the unique personality of Charles, even though he was a narcissist and a solipsist. Then the weight of his obsessions began to weigh on me. Here I was again, manacled to a protagonist I did not like and realizing that the sea crossing would take 500 pages. Could I stand it, Ben Franklin (or was it Mark Twain) notwithstanding? ("Like fish, guests start to smell after three days.") Or maybe it was two days? Counting a mother-in-law? One day.
But where was I? Oh, yes, in an almost haunted house on the sea, the sea, experiencing a fair amount of misery. Luckily Murdoch came to the rescue with some plot devices. This distracted me a bit from the oppressive character of our ex-actor Charles.
I got into it again despite the author's consistency in her characterization. Better still, I began to appreciate the way she was manipulating me through her writing. All this BAD was GOOD, seen through THAT lens.
By that time, I just wanted to see what she'd do with this pitiful clown. She'd already paired him with all manner of ex-loves and ex-actors, many holding the same opinion of his mental health as I did. Stakes were big, too. A death, an ambush, some gothic flourishes in the grand old house.
And, of course, the sea, always ready to serve. You know what I mean. Davy Jones' locker is always open. And me, I grew more open to Iris Murdoch's book during my stay, making it all OK.
OK, now the "Review To Follow" part. Only, when you wait 10 days and come back to review a book, distance hurts hindsight. So mote it be. I'll just say this:
I started out liking the book because of the unique personality of Charles, even though he was a narcissist and a solipsist. Then the weight of his obsessions began to weigh on me. Here I was again, manacled to a protagonist I did not like and realizing that the sea crossing would take 500 pages. Could I stand it, Ben Franklin (or was it Mark Twain) notwithstanding? ("Like fish, guests start to smell after three days.") Or maybe it was two days? Counting a mother-in-law? One day.
But where was I? Oh, yes, in an almost haunted house on the sea, the sea, experiencing a fair amount of misery. Luckily Murdoch came to the rescue with some plot devices. This distracted me a bit from the oppressive character of our ex-actor Charles.
I got into it again despite the author's consistency in her characterization. Better still, I began to appreciate the way she was manipulating me through her writing. All this BAD was GOOD, seen through THAT lens.
By that time, I just wanted to see what she'd do with this pitiful clown. She'd already paired him with all manner of ex-loves and ex-actors, many holding the same opinion of his mental health as I did. Stakes were big, too. A death, an ambush, some gothic flourishes in the grand old house.
And, of course, the sea, always ready to serve. You know what I mean. Davy Jones' locker is always open. And me, I grew more open to Iris Murdoch's book during my stay, making it all OK.
August 23, 2023
اگر انسان میتوانست تمام زندگیاش را ذره ذره مانند یک رمان بنویسد، چقدر حرفهای و خوب از کار در میآمد.بخشهای خوشایند دو برابر خوشایند جلوه میکردند و بخشهای بامزه، بامزهتر مینمودند و گناه و غم با نوری از تسلی التیام مییافتند.
کتاب در مورد مردی است به نام چارلز آروبای که از زندگی حال و گذشتهاش مینویسد. او از زندگیاش مینویسد مانند یک رمان. به قول خودش زمان زیادی را صرف این میکند که فکر کند و به یاد بیاورد، گریز بزند و فلسفه ببافد، اشتباهاتش را تعریف کند و خودش را توجیه کند، خاطرات تلخ و شیرین و عشقهای نافرجامش را بازبینی کند. پس این رمان علاوه بر اینکه میتواند دربارهی سرگذشتش باشد، یک دفترچه خاطرات نیز هست. گذشته و حال از دید او بسیار بهم نزدیکند و حتی میتوانند یکی باشند. او به اهمیت نوشتن و ماندگاری و جاودانگی اشاره میکند.
او روابط مبهم و ناپایدار متعددی داشته و حالا که بعد از سالها به خانهای کنار دریا رفته تا زندگی دور از دغدغهای را داشته باشد، نتوانسته از آنها رهایی یابد. یا او از آن روابط بیثمر یا آن روابط و اشخاص از دست او...
کتاب خیلی توضیح داره و آهسته پیش میره ولی چون به بررسی احساسات بین افرادی پرداخته بود که به نوعی حسی نسبت بهم دارند مثل خیانت، عشق، نوعدوستی، حسادت، رقابت، تنوعطلبی و .... برای من جالب بود.
برنده جایزه من بوکر سال ۱۹۷۸
کتاب در مورد مردی است به نام چارلز آروبای که از زندگی حال و گذشتهاش مینویسد. او از زندگیاش مینویسد مانند یک رمان. به قول خودش زمان زیادی را صرف این میکند که فکر کند و به یاد بیاورد، گریز بزند و فلسفه ببافد، اشتباهاتش را تعریف کند و خودش را توجیه کند، خاطرات تلخ و شیرین و عشقهای نافرجامش را بازبینی کند. پس این رمان علاوه بر اینکه میتواند دربارهی سرگذشتش باشد، یک دفترچه خاطرات نیز هست. گذشته و حال از دید او بسیار بهم نزدیکند و حتی میتوانند یکی باشند. او به اهمیت نوشتن و ماندگاری و جاودانگی اشاره میکند.
او روابط مبهم و ناپایدار متعددی داشته و حالا که بعد از سالها به خانهای کنار دریا رفته تا زندگی دور از دغدغهای را داشته باشد، نتوانسته از آنها رهایی یابد. یا او از آن روابط بیثمر یا آن روابط و اشخاص از دست او...
کتاب خیلی توضیح داره و آهسته پیش میره ولی چون به بررسی احساسات بین افرادی پرداخته بود که به نوعی حسی نسبت بهم دارند مثل خیانت، عشق، نوعدوستی، حسادت، رقابت، تنوعطلبی و .... برای من جالب بود.
برنده جایزه من بوکر سال ۱۹۷۸
October 17, 2023
“Who is one’s first love?”
Charles Arrowby, a moderately famous playwright, has retired to an old house on the edge of the sea and intends to write of Clement, the much older actress and former love who made him famous. She is one of many former loves he discusses, one of many theater people involved in the web of his life. Here in isolation, he considers them all, considers himself.
In the first section he is only musing to himself, but in the second, these people emerge onto the scene and in a series of strange coincidences we begin to see how the truth of his life is something more complex. Charles unexpectedly meets his long-lost first love, and his quest for her is central to the story.
“She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.”
We may not all be famous and have dramatic friends, but like Charles, we are the stars of our own lives. And we often act as such, as if we were the center of everything.
“How important it seems to continue one’s life by explaining oneself to people, by justifying oneself, by memorializing one’s loves.”
Charles is flagrantly selfish, and we see his faults clearly as we read. He is so easy to mock, yet there is something there, something relatable, something so human in that selfish human way we all have.
Or perhaps it isn’t Charles at all, but Murdoch and her writing skill. You wouldn’t think these self-obsessed ramblings and unlikely events would be interesting, but I found it gripping--all 500 or so pages. I found in each character a fully-formed, uniquely interesting (if often baffling) individual. His cousin James provides a whole philosophical subplot, and the photograph of James’ parents dancing, described with such subtle and tender detail, is something I see perfectly, and won’t soon forget. So writing, writing, writing is the key to why this novel succeeds.
Still, throughout the book, I kept wanting to know what was real, who to believe. I wanted illusions corrected somehow. But I don’t think the author is concerning herself with realism here. She’s laying out a landscape of our fickle minds.
Iris Murdoch was a philosopher novelist, and in this book she took that combo to an amazing height. I’ve enjoyed the three of her books I read previously but this … This one is special. It’s a wonderful convergence of character and subject matter and setting. The sea! It is tumult and danger, calming and healing, mysterious and unknowable. As complex as we are, as we think we are anyway. It reflects what’s going on in the sky, and like the never-ending conversation inside our heads, it unceasingly clamors on and on.
Charles Arrowby, a moderately famous playwright, has retired to an old house on the edge of the sea and intends to write of Clement, the much older actress and former love who made him famous. She is one of many former loves he discusses, one of many theater people involved in the web of his life. Here in isolation, he considers them all, considers himself.
In the first section he is only musing to himself, but in the second, these people emerge onto the scene and in a series of strange coincidences we begin to see how the truth of his life is something more complex. Charles unexpectedly meets his long-lost first love, and his quest for her is central to the story.
“She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.”
We may not all be famous and have dramatic friends, but like Charles, we are the stars of our own lives. And we often act as such, as if we were the center of everything.
“How important it seems to continue one’s life by explaining oneself to people, by justifying oneself, by memorializing one’s loves.”
Charles is flagrantly selfish, and we see his faults clearly as we read. He is so easy to mock, yet there is something there, something relatable, something so human in that selfish human way we all have.
Or perhaps it isn’t Charles at all, but Murdoch and her writing skill. You wouldn’t think these self-obsessed ramblings and unlikely events would be interesting, but I found it gripping--all 500 or so pages. I found in each character a fully-formed, uniquely interesting (if often baffling) individual. His cousin James provides a whole philosophical subplot, and the photograph of James’ parents dancing, described with such subtle and tender detail, is something I see perfectly, and won’t soon forget. So writing, writing, writing is the key to why this novel succeeds.
Still, throughout the book, I kept wanting to know what was real, who to believe. I wanted illusions corrected somehow. But I don’t think the author is concerning herself with realism here. She’s laying out a landscape of our fickle minds.
Iris Murdoch was a philosopher novelist, and in this book she took that combo to an amazing height. I’ve enjoyed the three of her books I read previously but this … This one is special. It’s a wonderful convergence of character and subject matter and setting. The sea! It is tumult and danger, calming and healing, mysterious and unknowable. As complex as we are, as we think we are anyway. It reflects what’s going on in the sky, and like the never-ending conversation inside our heads, it unceasingly clamors on and on.
February 24, 2023
The story is a series of diary entries by Charles Arrowby, a misogynistic, egocentric, impulsive, narcissistic, and selfish man with a saviour complex. He likes to think highly of himself and displays extreme self-conceitedness. The worst is that he thinks he’s in the right and does not doubt his intentions. He has a hyperactive imagination and projects a lifetime of drama and fantasies through machinations and scheming on other people. Charles is self-destructive and would annihilate not only himself but others around him.
Now, talking of the writing. It was brilliantly written. It had many philosophical discussions and great characterization. Though, to be honest, we can speak mainly of the narrator’s character because everyone else is viewed from his point of view, and his point of view can’t be trusted. In all the 500 pages of his narration, there may not be an ounce of truth. He agrees that he’s an unreliable narrator.
It is a great character study in obsession, living in the past, love and jealousy. The book conveyed a mine of emotions and a colourful cast of characters with unique characteristics.
The descriptions of the sea and the scenery were spellbinding. The drama was infused on each page.
There were great quotes and meditations on love, jealousy, life and death.
Falling, what the child fears, what the man dreads, is itself the image of death, of the defencelessness of the body, of its frailty and mortality, its absolute subjection to alien causes. Even in a harmless fall in the road there is a little moment of horror when the faller realizes that he cannot help himself; he has been taken over by a relentless mechanism and must continue with it to the end and be subject to the consequences. ‘There is nothing more I can do.’ How long, how infinitely expansible, a second is when it contains this thought, which is an effigy of death. A complete fall into the void, something which I had often imagined on aeroplanes, is of course the most terrible thing of all. Hands, feet, muscles, all the familiar protective mechanisms of the body are suddenly useless.
The enmity of matter is unleashed against the frail breakable crushable animal form, always perhaps an alien in this hard mineral gravitational scene.
Now, talking of the writing. It was brilliantly written. It had many philosophical discussions and great characterization. Though, to be honest, we can speak mainly of the narrator’s character because everyone else is viewed from his point of view, and his point of view can’t be trusted. In all the 500 pages of his narration, there may not be an ounce of truth. He agrees that he’s an unreliable narrator.
It is a great character study in obsession, living in the past, love and jealousy. The book conveyed a mine of emotions and a colourful cast of characters with unique characteristics.
The descriptions of the sea and the scenery were spellbinding. The drama was infused on each page.
There were great quotes and meditations on love, jealousy, life and death.
Falling, what the child fears, what the man dreads, is itself the image of death, of the defencelessness of the body, of its frailty and mortality, its absolute subjection to alien causes. Even in a harmless fall in the road there is a little moment of horror when the faller realizes that he cannot help himself; he has been taken over by a relentless mechanism and must continue with it to the end and be subject to the consequences. ‘There is nothing more I can do.’ How long, how infinitely expansible, a second is when it contains this thought, which is an effigy of death. A complete fall into the void, something which I had often imagined on aeroplanes, is of course the most terrible thing of all. Hands, feet, muscles, all the familiar protective mechanisms of the body are suddenly useless.
The enmity of matter is unleashed against the frail breakable crushable animal form, always perhaps an alien in this hard mineral gravitational scene.
January 9, 2012
I found this both repelling and compulsive, and the more repulsed I became the less capable I seemed of putting it down. I was hooked just several pages in, enamored with the elegant, elegiac tone of Charles Arrowby's attempts at composing a memoir/diary after exiling himself to a remote seaside home to live in monastic isolation. Via Arrowby, Murdoch's prose takes on a sea-like quality, the ebb-and-flow of memories and musings churning together present and past to the point where the edges of reality and unreality begin to blur imperceptibly. I settled in for what I fully expected to be more or less an intelligent and eerie psychological thriller.
But just as it was not meant for Arrowby to enjoy his solitude, so I was quickly jumbled out of any conceptions that I was in for a graceful memory piece. Suddenly figures from Arrowby's past begin showing up uninvited at his doorstep, culminating with the unexpected reappearance of a lost first love, setting off a string of increasingly erratic behavior that quickly threaten to become dangerous.
It took a while for me to adjust to such a drastic change of narrative trajectory, but as it went along I began to appreciate the grand guignol absurdity of it all. And it wasn't, I admit, until just about the very end that I realized how the incongruent-seeming opening does indeed set up nicely the rest of the novel: reported to be the premiere interpreter of Shakespeare of his day, isn't it natural, maybe even inevitable that Arrowby's life takes on an expansive Shakespearian theatricality?
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
-Shakespeare, As You Like It
And that kind of sums up my final response to The Sea, The Sea—creaky, isolated Shruff End is not the place of escape and seclusion Arrowby intends it to be, but is merely an empty stage upon which the figures of his past, present and possibly his future appear with a theatrical punctuality, reciting their lines, performing their small roles and disappearing again into the wings again until called upon again to reappear on cue around Arrowby as he plays his "many parts," from a wizened Prospero to a tragic Lear to a pathetically misguided attempt at Romeo and Juliet that quickly deteriorates into a truly horrific parody of Taming of the Shrew.
Did I enjoy The Sea, The Sea? I can't honestly say that I did. I'm not even sure that I liked it per se. But it did compel me to descend into a unique type of claustrophobic madness, creating a literary experience of a type that I've never quite experienced before, which is saying something indeed. My true reaction is suspended somewhere between three and four stars, but considering that the only other Murdoch novel I've read has continued to grow in stature in my memory, I gladly give the novel the benefit of the doubt and round my rating up.
The past and the present are so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of."
But just as it was not meant for Arrowby to enjoy his solitude, so I was quickly jumbled out of any conceptions that I was in for a graceful memory piece. Suddenly figures from Arrowby's past begin showing up uninvited at his doorstep, culminating with the unexpected reappearance of a lost first love, setting off a string of increasingly erratic behavior that quickly threaten to become dangerous.
It took a while for me to adjust to such a drastic change of narrative trajectory, but as it went along I began to appreciate the grand guignol absurdity of it all. And it wasn't, I admit, until just about the very end that I realized how the incongruent-seeming opening does indeed set up nicely the rest of the novel: reported to be the premiere interpreter of Shakespeare of his day, isn't it natural, maybe even inevitable that Arrowby's life takes on an expansive Shakespearian theatricality?
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
-Shakespeare, As You Like It
And that kind of sums up my final response to The Sea, The Sea—creaky, isolated Shruff End is not the place of escape and seclusion Arrowby intends it to be, but is merely an empty stage upon which the figures of his past, present and possibly his future appear with a theatrical punctuality, reciting their lines, performing their small roles and disappearing again into the wings again until called upon again to reappear on cue around Arrowby as he plays his "many parts," from a wizened Prospero to a tragic Lear to a pathetically misguided attempt at Romeo and Juliet that quickly deteriorates into a truly horrific parody of Taming of the Shrew.
Did I enjoy The Sea, The Sea? I can't honestly say that I did. I'm not even sure that I liked it per se. But it did compel me to descend into a unique type of claustrophobic madness, creating a literary experience of a type that I've never quite experienced before, which is saying something indeed. My true reaction is suspended somewhere between three and four stars, but considering that the only other Murdoch novel I've read has continued to grow in stature in my memory, I gladly give the novel the benefit of the doubt and round my rating up.
The past and the present are so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of."
November 6, 2022
Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea is a biting tragic comedy about one of the most loathed of all personalities in the modern era: The Abusive Narcissist.
A topical, often hilarious and sometimes disturbing story: The Sea, the Sea takes the audience on a romp through one ageing man's delusional fantasy.
It also features one of the most pathetic and contemptible villains in the history of literature, the main character and narrator: Charles Arrowby.
Charles is a successful, vicious theatre director and a failed playwright obsessed with Shakespeare. He has retired to a house by the sea, where he intends to write his own life story. Charles wants to show his true inner nature to the world and to the great horror of everybody around him (and the reader) he succeeds.
Charles isn't like most fictional villains. The only power he has is his enormous inflated self-worth. He never really kills anybody (although you could say he attempts it with his horrible culinary skills), he doesn't want to rule the world, he doesn't skin a child, drown a kitten or kick a puppy. But Charles is a bonafide monster. Make no mistake.
Like a lot of abusers, Charles regulates most of the harm he does to the emotional kind. He is a type of abuser that is often overlooked in fiction as too banal, despite the sheer magnitude of damage people like him have been known to cause in the real world.
Yes, serial killers are obviously bad, and world dictators are fiends, but we do a great disservice when we overlook the harms of emotional manipulators. And Charles is the worst of the worst. He leaves no bruises, no cuts, no bloody lips, but in the wake of his cruelty there is a wreckage of humanity. An abattoir of shattered hearts, ruined lives, toppled marriages, destroyed careers and friendships on fire.
Charles is a lazy and loathsome social predator. The Sea, the Sea is his diary. A look into the void that not only looks back but occasionally comes up to lick your brain. In this book you will find his daily commentary on various subjects, sometimes asinine, sometimes poetic. Including his insight into the arts and writing and direction, and his hatred of music. But when he reaches out to an ex-girlfriend in a bored display of casual, cruel manipulation he kick-starts a collapsing domino effect of social devastation. Bringing him back into the life of the women he has hurt and leading him to the door of an ageing housewife who used to be his young teenage object of affection. This coincidental meeting with a past love sparks a preposterous quest that is one part ego-driven nightmare and one part shallow spiritual absurdity. The re-ignition of this casual crush becomes the centre of his whole world. A way to save his soul and regain his youth and in the woman's estranged son, a way to have a family and legacy.
The only thing Charles has to do is steal this family away from a disabled army vet husband.
Yikes.
Most of the novel is a build up to this calamity like a roller-coaster slowly climbing up a tall track leading to a plummeting chasm. The fall is all the more dramatic because the reader can see it coming from a mile away even as the narrator dances obliviously towards the edge. And by the time you get there you kinda want to push him over just to watch him bounce.
Charles sees himself as a magician capturing the world in his brilliant tricks only to slowly realise the world sees straight through his dull manipulations. He's a Caliban who believes he's a Prospero. A ghoulish, pathetic troll who carries himself like a wizard with ancient wisdom. But his grand illusions mostly consist of him tossing around people too exhausted by the despair of their lives to fight against his sheer abusive density.
In his quest to bed his teenage romance Charles sees himself as Perseus running to the rescue of the maiden fair. He imagines the disabled husband as an abuser. Charles projects more than a Drive-In Theatre, putting his own controlling nature and overcompensating insecurity onto the man. He doesn't see the truth of the husband, he sees a sea serpent. A Loch Ness Monster erupting from the depths threatening his promised romance. A beast that must be defeated for the sake of love unrequited.
But it takes no effort to realise that Charles is not the gallant knight racing to the rescue of the woman in peril. He is instead the Medusa. Freezing everything in his sight into cold stone. Objectifying his lovers, his friends, his family and random acquaintances into roles and concepts for the benefit of his whims. He even objectifies his own younger self. Every part of his life, every inch of his humanity is a stone surface sheen. Isolated from emotional and personal context. Set up on a pedestal. Put under lock and key to never be touched.
Charles does not so much fear intimacy, as he actively despises it. He wants nothing from other people except for them to be tools to be used for his amusement. He is a director casting everybody around him into a childish play that revolves around nothing but his own poisoned solipsism.
Like most villains (both real and fictional), Charles is at war with his own life. He is in a conflict with his history, his relationships, his weaknesses, his past. He wants to right the wrongs of his youth. Success was not enough for him, bedding beautiful women half his age, being a wrecking ball destroying families, careers, hopes and dreams. It is not enough. Being the center of attention, praised and raised as an artistic genius. None of it can fill the hole inside him. The emptiness of his wants is the proof of his sadism.
Charles is drawn to a life of being alone because that is the only life he has ever had. He cannot see a world outside of himself. His inability to connect with how anybody else sees him, leaves him both invulnerable and hollow. A husk. An empty titan. Incapable of being moved by anybody's judgement and incapable of truly moving. He is frozen in his immaturity. Too bored, too limited to find anybody interesting but himself.
He is successful as a director for the same reason he is a failure as a writer. It is born from him being incapable of seeing the value of others. Through his perspective his theatre friends are Goya-ish cartoons. Toys to be used. Unlike most writers he focuses on their appearance more than their personality, because their appearance is the only thing that really registers with him. He notices when they lose weight, get a tan, when they change their hair or are eating healthy. But he doesn't see their pain. He doesn't feel their loss. They are fully flushed out personalities flattened into one dimension by Charles' depthless flimsy. The reader knows that there is much more happening with these characters than what the narrator is telling us, but we are imprisoned in his superficial shell. Stuck in the blunted myopia of the narcissist.
Charles cannot see the truth of his friends, even as he chronicles trampling through their lives.
The best and most obvious example of this is Charles' cousin. A man Charles believes is either a government agent or an enlightened soul, a holy seer mixed with James Bond who can walk on water and battle sea beasts. But even this bizarre miracle that comes in and out of his life trying to constantly save him from himself is only seen as a trifle. Just a caricature, an empty thing to be jealously scorned or derided or envied. The biggest impact his cousin makes on Charles is when he reveals he slept with one of the narrator's girlfriends.
Saving Charles' life is nothing. Doing miracles is nothing. But sleeping with his ex? That shakes the foundations of Charles' whole worldview.
How dare someone else play with his toys?
Charles lives in a universe of masks and shadows. Barely moving objects that sometimes speak and cry out and whine (to his gradual annoyance and rage). To truly see people, he has to sympathise with them. See them as an equal. And he will never let that happen. Every thing he wants from other people is only an extension and reflection of himself. The focus of his affections is a woman and her son, but he wants them only as objects. Not as thinking, living people with experiences of their own who can enrich his life. They are nothing but a means to an end. Something to play with until he gets bored of them.
And he will.
This is Iris Murdoch's most celebrated work, but I think it is also her most difficult and challenging. She dedicates herself to capturing the internal engine of Charles' mind as a narrator and in doing so dulls her usually interesting insights. She is still Iris Murdoch, so her world is still spectacular and mythic and full of hidden meaning, but it is chained to the foot of a blustering ass. Murdoch's rich characters and her rich world are blunted considerably through the prism of the narrator's hollow worldview. But that is on purpose. And she still manages to make these characters engaging despite Charles' psychopathic lack of perspective. It's a tricky balance of characterisation and prose that showcases the control and range of Murdoch. The reader understands that the narrator's observations on the characters are thoroughly biased, especially during the final chapters when we start seeing his delusions fall apart even as he tries to build new ones to replace them.
In many ways this novel is kin to Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. In that film a director is attempting to stage his own life to bring order to something completely out of his control. And in doing so he sabotages everything that could possibly make him happy. In this book the same struggle is happening but Iris Murdoch's satire is both more specific and more general.
She takes aim at the abusive narcissist but she also takes aim at the ways we celebrate narcissism and abuse.
She uses this character study to question the value of celebrity and concepts like auteur theory and the exaggerated hyperbole of the celebrated artist. Nowhere is this more evident than in Charles constant adulation of Shakespeare and his casual dismissal of the feelings and the lives of his friends, family and lovers.
Charles doesn't really love anybody (not even Shakespeare) he just loves putting people on a pedestal. Making them statues in his personal collection. He loves the theatre for what it can give him (control of others and praise for doing it) and hates it because it is a reflection of the world. Because it reminds him that other people exist.
The theatre loves Charles because he is a character. And the theatre loves characters. But away from show business and celebrity gossip, the shape of his personality loses its glamour. The dirty, creeping reality emerges. What makes him capable at bringing people together to make a coherent play: his bullying, his critical eye, his invulnerable sense of self, his manipulation, his sheer ego? These are also his only tools for living in the world. Outside of his medium he is a plucked bird.
Flightless and pathetic.
In this sense Murdoch dissects the misogynist with their own misogyny. She lays the swine out in their own words and their own worlds and allows us to see them wallow in the shallow muck.
And nothing could condemn them more.
10/10
A topical, often hilarious and sometimes disturbing story: The Sea, the Sea takes the audience on a romp through one ageing man's delusional fantasy.
It also features one of the most pathetic and contemptible villains in the history of literature, the main character and narrator: Charles Arrowby.
Charles is a successful, vicious theatre director and a failed playwright obsessed with Shakespeare. He has retired to a house by the sea, where he intends to write his own life story. Charles wants to show his true inner nature to the world and to the great horror of everybody around him (and the reader) he succeeds.
Charles isn't like most fictional villains. The only power he has is his enormous inflated self-worth. He never really kills anybody (although you could say he attempts it with his horrible culinary skills), he doesn't want to rule the world, he doesn't skin a child, drown a kitten or kick a puppy. But Charles is a bonafide monster. Make no mistake.
Like a lot of abusers, Charles regulates most of the harm he does to the emotional kind. He is a type of abuser that is often overlooked in fiction as too banal, despite the sheer magnitude of damage people like him have been known to cause in the real world.
Yes, serial killers are obviously bad, and world dictators are fiends, but we do a great disservice when we overlook the harms of emotional manipulators. And Charles is the worst of the worst. He leaves no bruises, no cuts, no bloody lips, but in the wake of his cruelty there is a wreckage of humanity. An abattoir of shattered hearts, ruined lives, toppled marriages, destroyed careers and friendships on fire.
Charles is a lazy and loathsome social predator. The Sea, the Sea is his diary. A look into the void that not only looks back but occasionally comes up to lick your brain. In this book you will find his daily commentary on various subjects, sometimes asinine, sometimes poetic. Including his insight into the arts and writing and direction, and his hatred of music. But when he reaches out to an ex-girlfriend in a bored display of casual, cruel manipulation he kick-starts a collapsing domino effect of social devastation. Bringing him back into the life of the women he has hurt and leading him to the door of an ageing housewife who used to be his young teenage object of affection. This coincidental meeting with a past love sparks a preposterous quest that is one part ego-driven nightmare and one part shallow spiritual absurdity. The re-ignition of this casual crush becomes the centre of his whole world. A way to save his soul and regain his youth and in the woman's estranged son, a way to have a family and legacy.
The only thing Charles has to do is steal this family away from a disabled army vet husband.
Yikes.
Most of the novel is a build up to this calamity like a roller-coaster slowly climbing up a tall track leading to a plummeting chasm. The fall is all the more dramatic because the reader can see it coming from a mile away even as the narrator dances obliviously towards the edge. And by the time you get there you kinda want to push him over just to watch him bounce.
Charles sees himself as a magician capturing the world in his brilliant tricks only to slowly realise the world sees straight through his dull manipulations. He's a Caliban who believes he's a Prospero. A ghoulish, pathetic troll who carries himself like a wizard with ancient wisdom. But his grand illusions mostly consist of him tossing around people too exhausted by the despair of their lives to fight against his sheer abusive density.
In his quest to bed his teenage romance Charles sees himself as Perseus running to the rescue of the maiden fair. He imagines the disabled husband as an abuser. Charles projects more than a Drive-In Theatre, putting his own controlling nature and overcompensating insecurity onto the man. He doesn't see the truth of the husband, he sees a sea serpent. A Loch Ness Monster erupting from the depths threatening his promised romance. A beast that must be defeated for the sake of love unrequited.
But it takes no effort to realise that Charles is not the gallant knight racing to the rescue of the woman in peril. He is instead the Medusa. Freezing everything in his sight into cold stone. Objectifying his lovers, his friends, his family and random acquaintances into roles and concepts for the benefit of his whims. He even objectifies his own younger self. Every part of his life, every inch of his humanity is a stone surface sheen. Isolated from emotional and personal context. Set up on a pedestal. Put under lock and key to never be touched.
Charles does not so much fear intimacy, as he actively despises it. He wants nothing from other people except for them to be tools to be used for his amusement. He is a director casting everybody around him into a childish play that revolves around nothing but his own poisoned solipsism.
Like most villains (both real and fictional), Charles is at war with his own life. He is in a conflict with his history, his relationships, his weaknesses, his past. He wants to right the wrongs of his youth. Success was not enough for him, bedding beautiful women half his age, being a wrecking ball destroying families, careers, hopes and dreams. It is not enough. Being the center of attention, praised and raised as an artistic genius. None of it can fill the hole inside him. The emptiness of his wants is the proof of his sadism.
Charles is drawn to a life of being alone because that is the only life he has ever had. He cannot see a world outside of himself. His inability to connect with how anybody else sees him, leaves him both invulnerable and hollow. A husk. An empty titan. Incapable of being moved by anybody's judgement and incapable of truly moving. He is frozen in his immaturity. Too bored, too limited to find anybody interesting but himself.
He is successful as a director for the same reason he is a failure as a writer. It is born from him being incapable of seeing the value of others. Through his perspective his theatre friends are Goya-ish cartoons. Toys to be used. Unlike most writers he focuses on their appearance more than their personality, because their appearance is the only thing that really registers with him. He notices when they lose weight, get a tan, when they change their hair or are eating healthy. But he doesn't see their pain. He doesn't feel their loss. They are fully flushed out personalities flattened into one dimension by Charles' depthless flimsy. The reader knows that there is much more happening with these characters than what the narrator is telling us, but we are imprisoned in his superficial shell. Stuck in the blunted myopia of the narcissist.
Charles cannot see the truth of his friends, even as he chronicles trampling through their lives.
The best and most obvious example of this is Charles' cousin. A man Charles believes is either a government agent or an enlightened soul, a holy seer mixed with James Bond who can walk on water and battle sea beasts. But even this bizarre miracle that comes in and out of his life trying to constantly save him from himself is only seen as a trifle. Just a caricature, an empty thing to be jealously scorned or derided or envied. The biggest impact his cousin makes on Charles is when he reveals he slept with one of the narrator's girlfriends.
Saving Charles' life is nothing. Doing miracles is nothing. But sleeping with his ex? That shakes the foundations of Charles' whole worldview.
How dare someone else play with his toys?
Charles lives in a universe of masks and shadows. Barely moving objects that sometimes speak and cry out and whine (to his gradual annoyance and rage). To truly see people, he has to sympathise with them. See them as an equal. And he will never let that happen. Every thing he wants from other people is only an extension and reflection of himself. The focus of his affections is a woman and her son, but he wants them only as objects. Not as thinking, living people with experiences of their own who can enrich his life. They are nothing but a means to an end. Something to play with until he gets bored of them.
And he will.
This is Iris Murdoch's most celebrated work, but I think it is also her most difficult and challenging. She dedicates herself to capturing the internal engine of Charles' mind as a narrator and in doing so dulls her usually interesting insights. She is still Iris Murdoch, so her world is still spectacular and mythic and full of hidden meaning, but it is chained to the foot of a blustering ass. Murdoch's rich characters and her rich world are blunted considerably through the prism of the narrator's hollow worldview. But that is on purpose. And she still manages to make these characters engaging despite Charles' psychopathic lack of perspective. It's a tricky balance of characterisation and prose that showcases the control and range of Murdoch. The reader understands that the narrator's observations on the characters are thoroughly biased, especially during the final chapters when we start seeing his delusions fall apart even as he tries to build new ones to replace them.
In many ways this novel is kin to Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. In that film a director is attempting to stage his own life to bring order to something completely out of his control. And in doing so he sabotages everything that could possibly make him happy. In this book the same struggle is happening but Iris Murdoch's satire is both more specific and more general.
She takes aim at the abusive narcissist but she also takes aim at the ways we celebrate narcissism and abuse.
She uses this character study to question the value of celebrity and concepts like auteur theory and the exaggerated hyperbole of the celebrated artist. Nowhere is this more evident than in Charles constant adulation of Shakespeare and his casual dismissal of the feelings and the lives of his friends, family and lovers.
Charles doesn't really love anybody (not even Shakespeare) he just loves putting people on a pedestal. Making them statues in his personal collection. He loves the theatre for what it can give him (control of others and praise for doing it) and hates it because it is a reflection of the world. Because it reminds him that other people exist.
The theatre loves Charles because he is a character. And the theatre loves characters. But away from show business and celebrity gossip, the shape of his personality loses its glamour. The dirty, creeping reality emerges. What makes him capable at bringing people together to make a coherent play: his bullying, his critical eye, his invulnerable sense of self, his manipulation, his sheer ego? These are also his only tools for living in the world. Outside of his medium he is a plucked bird.
Flightless and pathetic.
In this sense Murdoch dissects the misogynist with their own misogyny. She lays the swine out in their own words and their own worlds and allows us to see them wallow in the shallow muck.
And nothing could condemn them more.
10/10
Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,083 reviews