The Sea, The Sea

Product Information

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. Still, he can't quite let go of his past -- even before he stumbles across Mary -- and his past won't let go of him either. In that lowness, Murdoch found the subject of her novels, each to a greater or lesser degree peopled by delusionals and lunatics. Often, those who are compelled by the attempt to be good are the most dangerous, particularly when they have covered themselves in the cloak of mysticism, a recurring trope that allows Murdoch to study – in common with Muriel Spark – the devastating power of charisma. 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.”

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. What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.” A few days later we were out by the boiling sea, the sea. The next I remember is waking in my bed. Someone had tried to murder me! But who could it be? My memory gets a little blurred at this point because people come and go from the house with extraordinary speed and with little explanation and now I find myself surrounded by Lizzie, Gilbert, Peregrine, Rosina, James and Titus. 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?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. Yet now we learn that he has broken up the marriage of Rosina, seemingly just because he can. He will jettison the ever-faithful Lizzie without a thought, at the drop of a hat, as he has done several times before. The reader now begins to wonder about the idolised Hartley. Could the relationship have possibly been as innocent, pure and altogether romantic as Charles has claimed? 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? 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:

Shaken but undefeated (indeed, rather roused by the challenges — this is where the real fun starts), Charles takes them all on, and tries mightily to fashion them into an Arrowby production.For Charlotte Mendelson, who has written the introduction to Under the Net (1954), Murdoch’s novels “work for everyone because she understood our secret lives: falling in love with exactly the wrong person, maddened with inconvenient lust and sadness and fear. Her books are full of passion and disaster; I loved her as a teenager and will never stop.” Although Murdoch consistently denied that her fiction explored her philosophical preoccupations, the project of forcing flawed protagonists to see beyond the blinkers of their own egotism defines most if not all of her 26 published novels, among which two of the best are A Severed Head (1961) and The Sea, the Sea (1978). Both are narrated by self-regarding middle-class men with aspirations to aesthetic mastery. Fastidious and complacent, less wise and less kind than they like to think, they find their lives thrown into turmoil by their inability to recognise the agency, and desires, of those around them. These desires are always in part, but never exclusively, sexual: they are also a will to power. “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Murdoch declared in “The Sublime and the Good”. “Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.” Echoing the prominent place that romantic love and sexual obsession often play in Murdoch's novels, the greatest obstacle to the self-understanding and maturity that Charles so falteringly strives for proves to be his accidental meeting with his first love, Hartley, who, after her abrupt cessation of their chaste yet intoxicating relationship, became a rather ordinary housewife. Contrasting the thoughts and motivations of Hartley and her all-too-banally brutal husband Ben with those of Charles and his many neurotic visitors, the novel descends into a whirlpool of opposing wills and thwarted stratagems. With a morbid fascination brought about by Murdoch's nimble control of this cast of idiosyncratic characters, we watch as serene reflection eludes Charles and he desperately grasps at the unrealistic phantoms spawned by the long lost object of his unconsummated childhood infatuation—leaving many victims in his wake. Throughout the novel, theatrical illusion, Tibetan magic, unconscious projections, supernatural interventions, and overripe fantasies all skew clear perception, distorting the characters' awareness of events and entangling them in a confused web of self-centered power relations, even as they try to be virtuous.

Arrowby writes grandly much of the times -- Murdoch the stylist does not disappoint -- but parts of the story are a bit much for this character to carry.The life he’d foreseen — the windy, wave-beaten promontory, the sketchy “nature study,” the small gourmet treats (Iris Murdoch does wonders of sneaky characterization by having him gloat over his solitary, greedy, unappetizing menus), the lighthearted pleasure of torturing infatuated ex-mistresses — all begins to disintegrate, as people and nameless things from the past crowd into his field of vision.

The opening sentence seductively draws you in: ‘The sea which lies before me glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine.’ The most significant person, however, is one who had disappeared from Arrowby's life long ago: his lost first love, the woman he wanted to marry but who fled. I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life.” 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. 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.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: Murdoch’s novels teem with characters who are opaque to one another, confusingly impulsive, acting out ruptures in their supposedly intimate relationships or with their personal histories. It is common for us to meet them in moments of crisis, sometimes entering a space already filled by a group of people at odds with one another. In The Bell, her fourth novel, a young woman, Dora, reunites with her estranged husband in the setting of a lay religious community. Among those she meets are a teenage boy who, unbeknown to him, has been strategically placed to watch over a dissolute drunk; a woman (the drunk’s twin sister) set on becoming a nun and a man once in love with the drunk, and disgraced in the process.