The Sea, the Sea

I think this is Irish Murdoch's best novel, and its not so much unreliable as reliably deluded narrator, retired theatre director Charles Arrowby, the most perfect of her self-sabotaging middle-aged male protagonists. Arrowby casts himself as Prospero in his seaside retreat (characters enter and exit Shruff End the way they do a stage), but unlike in the theatre, his power over other people is limited. He's a wizard whose staff has been broken; as his cousin James, the mystic who is also the only character in touch with reality, says to him of the idolised, idealised first love whom he takes captive, "she does not coincide with your dream figure. You were not able to transform her." Charles is a visionary — his hallucination of the show more sea monster opens our eyes, if not his, to the untrustworthiness of his vision — and his visions of himself and his friends and lovers are all that is real to him. But James again, of Charles' elaborate self-serving narrative of himself and Hartley: "you've made it into a story, and stories are false." Life isn't theatre, subject to the unifying vision of the director; it isn't a story written by an all-seeing third-person. Puppetteering has its limits, is actually rather ridiculous when practised on the stage of life. One of the many people abused and betrayed by Charles in the course of his lifelong rampage of egotism, his friend Peregrine, sums up his status as failed conjuror, ironically echoing the monster motif:

Your work wasn't any bloody good, it was just a pack of pretentious tricks, as everyone can see now that they aren't mesmerised any more, so the glitter's fading fast and you'll find yourself alone and you won't even be a monster in anybody's mind any more.

Mudoch's exquisite style is ever-present, in her iridescent, Protean descriptions of air, land, and especially sea; in her habit of evoking the passing of time (always from the perspective of her mad creation) through successive actions, like stage directions setting the pace of a play; in her facility with stacked adjectives and virtuosic variation of English adjective order: "the wet shorn moon-grey lawn" and "the gentle crafty lapping of the calm sea against the yellow rocks". She's an intensely visual writer (aptly for her name), especially in this novel of visions, so we get scalp-tingling sentences like "the sun was descending through a blue celebration of cloudless light" and motley adjective combos like "big lazy chryselephantine clouds that loafed around over the water exuding light". I'm going to quote a passage and try to explain why I think it's utterly brilliant:

There was no fog now. Twilight had been overtaken by darkness, and a bright fierce little moon was shining, dimming the stars and pouring metallic brilliance onto the sea and animating the land with the ghostly intent presences of quiet rocks and trees. The sky was a clear blackish-blue, entertaining the abundant light of the moon but unillumined by it. The earth and its objects were a thick fuzzy brown.

1. That peremptory first sentence. Five words, five syllables. A declaration.
2. The passive construction, with the twilight (Arrowby's favourite kind of light, one suspects) foregrounded, although the object rather than the subject.
3. Adjective order upending (size would normally come first), which combined with the use of "fierce" somehow gives the moon agency, renders it like a person or a malevolent sprite. It's like Charles is judging the moon, like he judges, in his frustrated paternalism, everyone. (As the vengeful Rosina sticks it to him, "you say you 'always wanted a son'. That's just a sentimental lie, you didn't want trouble, you didn't want to know. You never put yourself in a situation where you could have a REAL son. Your sons are fantasies, they're easier to deal with.")
4. Now the sparkling heart of the image, the "metallic brilliant" and the stunning verbs "animating" and "entertaining". The sky is like a theatre, an arena for the narrator's monstrous ego to cavort in.
5. The delicious "unillumined" — and then back to earth in that last dull, contemptuous sentence with its unappealing "thick fuzzy brown".

I adore the absurd comedy of Charles' food diaries ("for dinner I had an egg poached in hot scrambled egg, then the coley braised with onions and lightly dusted with curry powder, and served with a little tomato ketchup and mustard. Then a heavenly rice pudding") and his dicta on the same subject ("I am not a great friend of your peach, but I suspect the apricot is the king of fruit.") I love Murdoch's rich compulsive irony, her itching desire to pull the rug out from under characters and reader alike, and — the mark of many a great wrier, in my opinion — her sadism, how unflinchingly she watches these people careen around her carousel plots, bruising and breaking themselves almost beyond endurance. I love this clever, funny, and beautiful novel from the bottom of my heart. show less

Charles Arrowby, retired playwright, actor and director, purchases a lonesome home on the English seacoast. There he begins a diary in which he reflects back upon his life and the people he has known. Abruptly the novel then becomes like a bizarre episode of "This Is Your Life" as several of these people show up on his doorstep. Charles Arrowby handles himself with perfect aplomb, until the most unexpected person of all appears.

I can nearly relate to Charles' age, and certainly to his love for solitude. I hope I can't relate to his self-centeredness and insensitivity, his quick judgements that dismiss others as more shallow than himself. Other than his father there is no one he has revered, except for one woman - the one person he will show more only mention in passing and not write about at all. If you can recall a moment of love in your life that went left instead of going right, this novel stems from that kind of moment. If an opportunity comes that feels like a second chance, what then? Strange things begin to happen in and around Charles' home. A sea monster surfaces on the ocean. Decorations tumble and self-destruct. A face appears in a window and then is gone. And Charles gets his second chance.

Charles is not a nice man. His explanations for his renewed obsession are more like rationalizations, and there's a clear hypocricy in his reasoning. So long as it is others who are feeling driven to approach him and he who wants nothing to do with them, his responses are merely loathsome and unvarnished. When the shoe is on the other foot, he expects to be granted his desire and becomes a threatening figure. Lizzie and Rosina are fascinating externalizations of his own emerging issues: his blind indulgence in love, his jealous anger and irrationalism.

Memories and dreams are his primary drivers - like the sea, a wide placid surface into which he dives and swims, a sea that lets him go only reluctantly, often threatening to drown him, sometimes surprising with what rises to the surface. Mortality and rejection conspire to confront him with his egotism, but he is not remorseful even when he comes closest to penetrating his own illusions: "We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason." What doesn't accord can be shied away from, and there are always other illusions to be had. show less

This sorta-classic and Booker Prize winner is truly special and makes a wonderful audiobook.

That voice. All these voices. But especially Charles Arrowby, our disturbed and disturbing narrator. His voice is eloquent, precise, performative. He's our dark magician, our mage, our Prospero, our stage director, our monster. And he's consumed and fired by a sea monster of jealousy. The fire is lit.

Everything in this book is the diary of Arrowby, retired stage director and playwright. So all past tense, but without a future awareness. But he quotes everyone in such a manner that implies a precise accuracy. He gives us the stage, the spare cliffs along England's northeast coast, and characters, his friends, frenemies, lovers, admirers. He show more gives each of them a distinct and revealing voice. Whatever their hate, resentment, awareness or admiration, they are under his spell. Prospero is in control over everything. We cannot trust Arrowby, and yet we do, we must. And he gives us everything.

Arrowby has left the stage behind and come to his obscure house outside this little village to hide. His plays aren't published and wants them all to disappear, and he feels they were momentary illusions without real substance (and his colleagues agree). He wants to be alone. The house rests among the cliffs, a circa-1900 house in poor shape and with no electricity. There is an old tower of uncertain origin on the property. The town is a walk away. He doesn't know anyone and doesn't interact, and yet he goes into the pubs, famous enough to cause a silence, which he both welcomes and ignores, and then leaves, the door closing to the sound of laughter. But he has a gravity. People come to him, and they are immediately under his spell, and he takes full advantage of his powers, creating harm for selfish and momentary reasons.

This is truly and amazing novel. That voice and the language, first of all, is so striking. But Murdoch was a philosopher, and she weaves in endless complexity into what is maybe a simple story. Her control of the narrative never did not leave me in some awe. She plays on mythology, Shakespeare (Prospero!), psychology, and philosophy. It all feels like a stage presentation. Everything a performance. But we can see the cliffs come alive in grotesque forms. Andromeda lives here in this book, tied to the rocks without ever being mentioned, awaiting her Perseus, which Arrowby relates to himself. But Arrowby is love-struck. He is more like the dragon, which seems to have consumed him. And we can only watch him play that out, in his words. We are powerless. And how much can go wrong.

Published in 1978, I'm not sure I've read anything as well written as this published since.

2026
https://www.librarything.com/topic/378447#9165020 show less

Halfway through this book I discovered a receipt which suggested that it had been originally purchased in 1981 at Heathrow Airport for one pound ninety. No real point to make about that, just thought it was interesting.

So much of the English literary fiction I've read lately has featured protagonists who are fairly horrible people, or who come across that way. (Darley from the Alexandria Quartet comes across as massively pretentious and self-involved but turns out to be perfectly nice and personable and self-effacing in person.) Intellectual, superior, condescending, pungently opinionated, self-obsessed but compelling and, naturally, absolutely fantastic writers. Charles Arrowby is a particularly monstrous creation, his ego forged in show more the fires of the theatrical world where he dominated, god-like, over the productions he directed. Completely and thoroughly up himself in a way that is hard to credit, he takes routine, everyday joy in the failures and set-backs of his friends and contemporaries, and sets himself up as a self-exiled Prospero in his remote cliff-top cottage: statesman, sage and retired wizard, waiting for his spirits, malign and blessed, to come serve and appease him.

The first thing that happens is the vision of a sea-serpent rising from the waves. What this portends is ambiguous. Frankly it could symbolise anything, from a break with everyday reality to the devouring beast of jealousy that is about to consume Charles or the eastern mysticism of his cousin James. Assigning simple one-to-one correspondences seems almost vulgar, but perhaps in keeping with the theatrical backdrop.

The next thing that happens is the sprites duly arrive, separately, a Caliban and an Ariel in the form of two women, one of whom is afflicted with love, the other with hate, both upsetting his equanimity with their demands. Then, like a shipwreck crashing on his rocks, a childhood sweetheart appears, and the serpent of love and jealousy and obsession thrashes onto shore and starts to eat everything in sight.

A campaign of comic terror begins as Charles invades and disrupts his childhood sweetheart's married, though not blissfully, life. Charles is a Shakesperean idiot, plotting and manipulating and lying and interfering and speechifying and generally capering about in a self-deluded frenzy. Hartley and her husband are an Ortonian kitchen-sink drama married couple, locked in a possibly mutually abusive relationship, him with anger and jealousy and her with mental issues and a cringing meekness, both dependent on each other however bad things might seem. A missing adopted son rounds off the classically dysfunctional twentieth century British lower middle class nuclear family. It all culminates in kidnapping and captivity and it's sort of funny and sort of skin-crawling, which I suppose is very much the point.

The whole thing is told by Charles, an unreliable narrator utterly reliable in his self-serving delusions. He constantly uses flipping inverted commas for 'everyday phrases' or 'common cliches' as if to underline his remoteness from everyday reality and honest down-to-earth emotions that cannot compete with the flamboyancy of theatrical life. It drives you crazy, but a distinctive voice emerges and is sustained through to the end when Prospero finally returns, books drowned and staff snapped, to Milan, ego more or less intact and any moral development possibly on a scale too tiny for the human eye to appreciate.

This won the Booker, and it's as daft and peculiar as a brush. I shall look askance at 'literary types' who turn their noses up at 'genre fiction' in the future. No amount of lovely writing can disguise the fundamentally unreal oddness of this book. Not that I'm complaining. I'm just saying, is all. show less

Charles Arrowby retires from his life as a director, playwright, and actor to an isolated house by the sea, where he starts journalling what may turn into a memoir or autobiography. Although he's hoping for a quiet life, figures from his past and his own self-delusions ensure that it is anything but.

From the beginning the descriptions of the natural world of weather, sea, land, and wildlife and plants and the cataloguing of meals (written in the 1970s but you just know that given the chance he would be taking photos of every meal) really drew me in.

And then other people started appearing. First came Lizzie, whose preliminary letter left me feeling exhausted and dreading what she would be like in person. Then Arrowby's first love appears show more and the extent of his self-delusion soon becomes apparent. Yes, he wants to rescue her from what he sees as an abusive marriage, but, really, let the poor woman get a word in edgeways.

It inevitably all ends badly but even worse than I would have predicted. There were certain passages which seemed familiar so I might have read it a long time ago but forgotten most of it. show less

Bleurgh. This is both good and awful at one and the same time. Charles Arrowby has retired from the stage to a coastal house (in my head Cornwall, but it's not made explicit). He intends to write his memoires in some form, and starts with writing a diary. We hear a reasonable amount about the women in his life, from his first love Mary (called Hartley to distinguish her from the many other Marys in the class) through Clement, Rosina, Lizzie and others. In this sense he is a thoroughly bad hat. Just when you think that you're going to read his memoirs, the diary format gets derailed by his coming across Hartley, a now married woman who has also retired to the same locality. At this point he conceives the idea that he still loves her and show more the rest of the book is a set of ridiculous attempts to win her back (he fails, as he dammed well deserves to). He is pretty thoroughly unlikeable. He takes it into his head that Hartley's marriage in unhappy and that she is a fantasist, I think the pot is calling the kettle black there. In my estimation, Hartley is the only woman who left him, he seems to have tired and moved on from all the others, and this is at the root of his scheme.
He ends up alone, and deservedly so.
Having said all that, the writing and description is really impressive. The descriptions are vivid and she really gets inside Charles' head - it's just not a very nice place to be. He was a chore to read, the prose less so. A compromise 3 stars. show less

“Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summing up which at once suggest the need of reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend to console us.”

Protagonist Charles Arrowby, in his sixties, is a retired actor, playwright, and theatre director. He has purchased Shruff End, a home in a small isolated English town by the sea. In an unusual coincidence, he runs into his first love, Hartley, who lives in town with her husband, Ben. He claims that he has born a torch for Hartley for many years. Charles is writing a memoir in which he describes his many lovers, jealousy, search for perfection, and how he has often show more “stolen” women away from someone else. The storyline quickly focuses on Hartley, and how Charles plans to win her back, thus repeating a pattern he has exhibited for years. A few friends, his cousin, Hartley’s son, and a couple of former paramours find Charles at Shruff End and add to the mayhem.

I interpreted this book as a story of narcissism and self-deception. It quickly becomes apparent that Charles is a narcissist, though the term is not used. He convinces himself that he is still “in love” with Hartley, even after decades have passed and he does not really know her anymore. Charles is the epitome of an unreliable narrator. He writes his view of events, only to contradict himself a few pages later. He says he is going to “try to be good” but rarely succeeds.

I found it intriguing that Charles seems to be trying to fashion his own life into a play, casting himself as the hero, and Hartley as the hapless victim needing to be rescued. Of course, real life does not normally cooperate with such artificial manipulations. And here, the best laid plans are bound to (and do) go awry.

I am surprised at how much I enjoyed this rather lengthy and densely written book, filled with unlikeable characters. Toward the end, the characters respond in unlikely ways to major events, but I was not sure whether these responses were supposed to be real or just the unreliable narrator’s interpretation.

I recommend it for the author’s creative use of language and a convincing portrait of a narcissist. It is probably a “love it or hate it” type book. I am not sure how I missed out on reading Iris Murdoch before now. She was a prolific writer, and I plan to read more of her work. show less