The Sea, the Sea (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Even though I gave this five stars, that does not mean that everyone will like this book.

You are more likely to enjoy this book if you can enjoy a book with long, wandering descriptions, stream of consciousness such as Ulysses, or a meandering through someone else's life,. . I think that older people will understand the book better than younger people.

If you need a plot, excitement, or need to understand what is going on at all times, this is not the book for you.

I had to interrupt my reading of this book several times. I read it on Kindle and highlighted, not the great passages, but items that seemed significant in terms of understanding the characters and what was going on. In fact, after reading about 100 pages, I went back and skimmed/highlighted. This was helpful, especially since my reading was interrupted. I read the last 10% after a break of almost 5 months and was able to pick right up on the story. It seems that this would be a good way to read the book: read a bit and put it aside, then go back and read a bit more, or flip through the earlier parts and re read. If you are the type of person who thinks about life, and meaning, then you will enjoy this. I don't think I would have enjoyed this when I was younger, although, who knows? I have gone back and read many books that I read in my 20s and they seem to be different books. Maybe this book would be the same: one book for a young person and another for an older person. If a young person can get through it, it might be very educational and even helpful- not as a moral guide, but to put perspective on one's own life as it is lived.

I'm going to make a stab at saying what this book is about. There are several summaries of the "plot". The interesting thing is that many of them vary except in the basic outlines. That is because one's reaction to this book is going to vary according to the level at which one reads it. I have only a superficial acquaintance with philosophy or mythology and several other areas of knowledge. I sense that there are many levels of understanding this book and no one will have access to all of them. What I do have is a broad experience of life, so that is what I was able to understand in this book.

What I think is going on here is that Charles is talking about parts of his life, with an emphasis on his obsession with Hartley, a woman whom he loved as a young man, and whom he may still love. That is the superficial story. Meanwhile, other people come and go in his life. Many of them are also obsessed, often with him. Sometimes they are obsessed with other aspects of life: the theater, Buddhism, patriotism. Each time they come into his life, he thinks differently about them and often they are thinking differently about him. Unlike many novels, in this book, many of the "minor" characters have a character arc. The the arc is not like one that is satisfying in a Hollywood movie, it is an arc that is more closely aligned with the arc of one's life. It can be satisfying, or surprising, or stupid.

As different things happen in his life, he reflects upon his relationship with Hartley differently,which serves to inform us,not so much about Hartley, as about the lead character and his own development. In the same way, the sea is not an objective inanimate object, but Charles' relationship with the sea reflects his mood and his thoughts. Charles also has many relationships with others. They start out at one point and continue to grow and develop in their own, separate lives. As they develop, they relate to him differently and he also changes his opinion about them, sometimes based on a re-thinking of past events, and sometimes in reaction to changes in that person. In the end, perhaps there is an answer, or perhaps it is random and doesn't make a neat story-like life.

Nabokov once said something along the lines of that one needs to read a novel at least twice to truly understand it. This is one of the books that will bear re-reading and will probably give gifts on a second, third, or even fifth reading. It is great literature, and a great experience, but not for everyone.

Having recently seen the film Iris, and being disappointed inasmuch as it focused mostly on her personal life as a young woman and on her Alzheimer's as an older woman without featuring information about her many novels, I decided that I'd been remiss in never having read her works. I then proceeded to read The Sea, The Sea. This book is deep as the sea, inasmuch as it is about the mental processes of a not-so-good playwright who manages to become famous. The novel turns out to be quite interesting; in fact, fascinating; though at one point, somewhere around page 100, I felt that I didn't give a whit about it all. That was temporary. I returned to the book, read the remaining 4/5ths, and found it rewarding. It starts out on an intimate basis, as if you are reading a letter from a friend, and I utterly loved that ploy. Then, it changes; suddenly, all kinds of twists and turns occur, and though the reader has at first seen Charles, the protagonist, as a humorous man who withdraws from society to a home by the sea (I chuckle, for this house on a cliff in rugged terrain is definitely not the haven which a home should be), circumstances plunge him into temporary madness. The word "sea" conjures so many images of all that the sea can be: wild, calm, loving, cruel. Charles gets to see every aspect of the sea's personality, and we get to see every aspect of his. At one point in the book, Charles' madness is hard to take, as we are drawn in to experience it. In other words, since Charles has chosen a craggy environment in his quest for peace, peace is hard to come by. Charles undergoes an epiphany -- in fact, more than one. He turns out to be a lucky man, inasmuch as he is given the unique opportunity of learning that he was wrong in many ways, and in many of the impressions which he formed, thoughout his earlier years, and thus he is able to look at life in a new light. Murdoch adds charm to the sometimes grim account in the way she brings in ordinary details of day-to-day life. This serves to bring in an element of humor which sometimes caused me to laugh out loud. The character of James, Charles' cousin with whom he had a kind of sibling rivalry all his life, is the soul of the book. We laugh at Charles' description of James early on, but we are quite sober at the picture of the true James at the end. Symbolism abounds in this book. Though one doesn't have to know the myth on which it is based in order to appreciate it, it doesn't hurt to have as much knowledge as possible to heighten one's understanding. I found myself wondering if this book was autobiographical, because I saw some similarities between the Iris of the film and the Charles of the book. Though the protagonist in The Sea, The Sea is a male, we know from the film, Iris, that Iris was bisexual. I also wondered if there was any reason why several of the women in Charles' life had male names, if there was any meaning behind those names. Why Charles' voice sounded more feminine, at times, than masculine. But that is secondary to the more important issues of this book, and the fact that this is a novel very much worth reading, certainly raising many more issues than I have summed up briefly in this review.

The first section of this novel, "Prehistory," seems interminable at times. The British director Charles Arrowby has retired to a drafty old house by the sea to write his memoirs. He begins in diary form, relating his daily regime, detailing his fastidiously prepared meals, recalling with fondness (and condescension) people in his life, dismissing others who have crossed him, and reminiscing about the one "true love" of his life, who inexplicably left him when he was a youth. With the exception of one or two mysterious incidents (at one point, he thinks he sees a dragon in the sea), so little happens in the first 87 pages that anyone will wonder, why am I reading this?
It's a set-up. After this lengthy prologue, people from Arrowby's past begin arriving at his doorstep or in the nearby village, shattering the tranquil atmosphere of his retirement and belying the gist of his memories. As the one character who Arrowby had earlier described as "very attached to me" says in anger: "You're an exploded myth.... You never did anything for mankind, you never did a damn thing for anybody but yourself." The reader quickly realizes that Arrowby is an egotistical boor who, under the guise of "love," wielded power and fear over the people in his life. Then, as the horde of Londoners from his past continue to invade his new home and complicate his life, he unexpectedly runs into his adolescent flame--and he convinces himself that, trapped in a marriage he regards as repulsive, she still has feelings for him.
What follows is both hilarious and heart-rending--and often excruciating to read. Charles Arrowby is not a likeable character; he is, in fact, detestable. And the life he remembers is not how his "friends" recall it. As his cousin asks him, "What is the truth anyway...? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions." In the scene previous to this conversation, Arrowby is in a museum, examining Titian's "Perseus and Andromeda," which depicts Perseus rescuing Andromeda from a dragon. Murdoch's novel asks (and here I oversimplify): who's really the monster? who's the rescuer? who indeed needs to be rescued? and at what expense?
Be warned: For this Penguin edition Mary Kinzie has provided one of those annoying introductions that would make an excellent afterword. Much of her essay is incomprehensible unless you've read the novel, and it gives away many important plot elements, including the pivotal climax. Happy is the reader who waits until finishing the novel to read this incisive summary.

For first-time Murdoch readers, like myself, this novel is a bit of a chore. She seems to be square in the Post-Modernist camp on this one, challenging one's every sensibility through her odd assortment of characters that emerge from the pen of Charles Arrowby. This cynical English playwright is trying to piece his life together and has chosen a remote seaside town to pen his autobiography. Little does he know that an old flame had similarly migrated to this town, reawakening the sweet bird of youth in this old reprobate. The only problem is that she is no longer a beauty, nor seems to have much interest in him, which forces Charles into a series of regrettable actions that left this reader scratching his head as to "why?"
In reading Peter Conradi's essay on "The Sea, The Sea" in "The Saint and the Artist," I got a better sense of what Murdoch was after in this novel, which is widely regarded as her best. It seems that she purposely set herself to challenging one's sense and sensibilities. The themes rather loosely wrap around the stage and mythology, but one is warned not to put too much stock in them. The scenes are largely symbolic and I think should be read as such. There is rather limited plausibility to the actions. It is a philosophical book, seemingly written in the same didactic spirit as the great Russian authors. Turgenev comes to mind. It is certainly not an easy read, but I found myself rewarded in the end for my effort, although I can't say it was one of my favorite novels.
Murdoch never allows the reader to relax. This is such an unnerving story, not so much because of its implied Gothic air, but because one is left to question the actions of the characters, and even the characters themselves in this odd mix of mayhem and mischief. Charles is such a self-righteous old windbag that one has a very hard time identifying with him. The dowdy Hartley leaves much for the imagination. In fact the most compelling character is the one that seems to most elude Charles' pen, Clement, whom the reader is initially led to believe the novel is going to be about. Instead, we get Hartley, the old maid, who has lost her charm on just about everyone except Charles.

This is a rather difficult book to review. Mostly because, as the introduction so aptly puts it, Murdoch's main concern is with morality. This makes the book, like most of Murdoch's others, a bit of a throwback. But she does manage to pull it off. The "morality" of the situation is mentioned time and time again by Arrowby with no hint of irony or self-parody.

Perhaps the best way to approach this book is by realising what it is not: It is NOT Wuthering Heights. It is that book's antithesis. Like Arrowby, Heathcliff loses the childhood love of his life in Emily Bronte's classic, and the passion remains with him still to the end of his tortured life. But he does not relent to the world. He remains the Romantic, Byronic individualist to the end. Whatever you think of him , he is the book's hero and sine qua non.

Arrowby is the opposite. He gives into the world. He is weaker than Heathcliff and is overcome both by his own pettiness and the "withness" of the world, as Wordsworth would have it. I know that this is supposed by some to be a sort of "purifying" process for him. But I'm not buying. What this work is, then, is anti-Romantic, (capital R)and anti-individualistic.

If the Wuthering Heights comparison doesn't convince you, just think of what Nietzsche would have thought of Arrowby as compared to his Ubermensch.

But things are not quite so simply dichotomous. Murdoch has clearly read Proust, and she incorporates quite well the fleetingness of memory into Arrowby's, shall we say, past love and psyche, but to her own ends, which are again, the opposite of Proust's. Arrowby goes in search of lost time and gets defeated utterly. Proust goes in search of of lost time and comes upon a new sort of consciousness and becomes an artist-hero, very much as Nietzsche envisioned such a person.

In the end, as in all her books, Murdoch comes out against such enterprises as self destructive and MORALLY wrong. If you can swallow that about her, you'll fancy the books she seemed to churn out like a sausage machine during her lifetime. If not, you shan't.

Proust's avowed concept in writing his 3,000 page magnum opus was in demonstrating "the unreality of the perceptible world". Murdoch, who was, after all, a Philosophy, not Literature, professor, has quite a different aim. As Wordsworth puts it, "The world is too much with us" and we lay waste our powers, so he rhymes it, by allowing such to be the case. So it is with Murdoch and her characters. The world, society and an odd sort of morality have too much power over them and her characters.

There is also her recurrent reliance on The Tempest here, which makes so many of the other reviewers get the feeling that it is "contrived." It is. If she only used The Tempest in one book, all good and well. But she uses it as a crutch in every book.

In the end, a good morality tale, for those who like such, but not great literature.

I will not dispute Iris Murdoch's talent as a writer. She is brilliant because she is able to sketch an intricate psychological portrait of a deeply flawed and frankly, despicable character. Some readers (most) will be thoroughly engaged with the narrator Charles Arrowby, a retired theatre director, who is writing an autobiography. What is remarkable about this novel is that the reader is always privy to the character's self-deception - his excuses, his motives, and his questionable actions although Charles is often oblivious to them.
My contention with this novel is with its entertainment value. My admiration of Murdoch's style increased as my dislike for Charles built. Only a truly talented writer could created and persist with a character as loathsome as Charles Arrowby. His encounters with characters from his past illuminated just what a monster he is and reminded me of people I knew in my own life.
So it was an ironic situation where in the end, I had to abandon the book at pg 148 because I no longer wanted to keep company with Charles. I found him too intolerable. My criticism is a double-edged sword - on one hand, it demonstrates the power of Murdoch's writing. She is able to infuse the character with so much life that I couldn't stand him anymore. On the other hand, it made me stop reading. It's a strange situation.
I would not recommend this novel to those who have never read any of Murdoch's novels at all.

I so wanted to like this book. I was intrigued by the theme--confronting one's ego/vanity and the monstrous manifestations/distortions it can inflict--as described online in reviews and summaries...

In short, certainly Murdoch is a capable writer with occassional deep dips into evocative descriptions and a sense of the supernatural/psychological folds as related to memory, emotions, childhood, nature, etc. But it is in the PLOT that she falls far short and undercuts everything. I found the story itself totally implausible. The characters--all of them--insufferable, caricatures mostly. The lead character, as so many have correctly observed, is loathsome affair--but he is so driven, so obsessed, and so ridiculously irrational, that it renders him two-dimensional. I was also disappointed in the insultingly one-dimensional, misogynistic rendering of the female characters in the book: all of them either histrioncally weak and/or mad, or sexually voracious, and all of them obsessed with men as the basis of their identity.

More obviously and centrally, the lead character Charles' obsession and kidnapping of his "one true love" Hartley is a gross objectification of women. In fact most everything about Charles is sickly narcissistic and self-obsessed. He disrupts the private (and therefore sacred) institution of marriage to please his own ego/delusions. That may be the point of the writer but it is not entertaining or enlightening, it is nauseating. There is so much dysfunction in this book, in its characters' mentalities, relationships, etc. It's rife with a horrible sense of emptiness and dissidence. I understand if the author is making a point upon these "kinds" of people or lifestyles, but it doesn't make for a warm and enlightening read.

Couldn't wait to be done with it.

"The Sea, the Sea" is a 1978 Iris Murdoch novel. The book is quite lengthy at 495 pages in the Penguin Edition. The book won the Booker Prize which is Great Britain's most prestigious literary award. Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) is the prolific Irish-Anglo author of this searing work. The novel is slow moving as are many British novels but packs a powerful emotional punch as we delve deeply into the mind and life of the narrator who tells his own story.
The Plot: Charles Arrowby is the narrator of the novel. Arrowby is a famous playwright who is known for his longterm relationship with the deceased actress Clement Makin. He has also had many sexual relationships with prominent actresses. Among these women are Lizzie and Rosina who both visit Charles at his home called Shruff End. Charles Arrowby seeks to retire to a remote cliffside home in the north of Great Britain. There he plans on catching up on his reading, writing his autobiography and savoring the seaside atmosphere. Every day finds him swimming nude in the sea at his doorstep. This idyll is soon to be disturbed by several of his friends who visit from London and elsewhere.
One day while walking in the village (Arrowby does not like the villagers) he spies an older woman who turns out to be his first love. Her name is Mary Hartley Smith Fitch. Mary is married to the morose Ben Fitch. The couple have been married for years; they have an adopted son who is named Titus. Titus is a bright young man who has quit a course in electronics. His desire is to become an actor. Arrowby wants to adopt the lad and mentor him in an acting career. Ben Fitch believes that Titus is the natural son of Arrowby and that Hartely has proven unfaithful to him during their stormy marriage. Arrowby pleads with Hartely to run away with him. Hartley has grown fat and old lacking any intellectual acuity. She is highly emotional and easily disturbed. Charles' perceptive cousin James Arrowby a retired General in the British Army advises Charles to drop Hartley. She is his "Beatrice" whom he has idealized over a long life of playwrighting in the London theatre district. Charles keeps Hartely as a "prisoner" in his home for a few days. Will she leave her husband for Charles Arrowby or will she emigrate with Ben to a new life in Australia? In this midst of all this soap operish confusion there is a tragedy when one of the major characters dies in a horrendous accident. Charles who can be viewed as a rescuer of damsels in distress or as a puppet master selfish and jealous manipulator gives the reader a lot to analyze and consider when judging the narrator's tale.
Murdoch's plots are complex. There are long passages in which the Oxford philsopher author enjoys musing on the mysteries of love and death. Her major characters come from the upper and wealthier classes in England. Dialogue is well seasoned with literary and classical allusions. Symbols abound from the sea to the martello tower to the story of Icarus in mythology. Murdoch writes for an audience of bright and literary people. She is not everyone's cup of tea. Though the prose sparkles many will find the story a tedious slog. Those of us who enjoy Murdoch will be eager to introduce other readers to this fine author. Recommended.

I used to think that the reader needed to have at least some sympathy for the central character in order to really enjoy it. This book has gone the closest of any that I have read to proving the theory wrong. Charles Arrowby was, for me, thoroughly unlikeable. A retired actor and director who has manipulated his way through a string of relationships throughout his life on the premise that his one true love had abandoned him while he was still young. The arrogant certainty that others would find happiness should they only bend their wills to his, leads him to abuse virtually every other character he comes across. He refuses to acknowledge that his long lost love could possibly be happy apart from him and resorts to kidnapping and imprisoning her to `bring her to her senses'. Only the deaths of two other characters seems to threaten his self assurance.
Yet Iris Murdoch was a brilliant writer. She captures both scenery and characters beautifully. Despite my distaste for Charles Arrowby I was compelled to read to find out what horrific thing he would do or say next. Some will find it too wordy no doubt, but this novel was well worthy of the accolades accorded it when it was written.

Hold on and keep yourself afloat for a stormy ride on the northwest coast of England. Shakespearean Actor and Director Charles Arrowby has left the glamorous theater world of London to retire in a damp drafty home by the sea, presumably to write his memoir. As the narrator/protagonist, Charles Arrowby rants with the tireless exasperation of a self-obsessed madman. He craves solitude, yet a surreal cast of characters from his former life in theater appears and reappears, coming and going like the ebb and flow of a churning sea. The people who inhabit Charles’ life include his loathsome cousin James, an English Military Intelligence Officer, numerous love interests from the theater crowd and their male sidekicks who play supporting roles with startling aplomb. The surreal weaving of these characters within this loose, rambling story takes emotional violence to its highest level. Every character, it seems, has, at one time or another, been very angry with Charles and has an axe to grind. Two former gal pals, Lizzie and Rosina will do anything to win over Charles and make him her husband, at last! His response is to exact bombastic revenge upon them.

The plot thickens and human entanglements grow more gnarly and grim when Charles discovers that Hartley, the love of his life from an unconsummated childhood crush, happens to live only minutes away in a charming cottage with her husband. Charles decides that his youthful love for Hartley is what kept him from getting married all these years and he is determined to win her back. The only problem is Hartley is married and is not interested in being rescued by the eager, adoring Charles. Still, he persists in his pursuit with passionate entreaties and declarations of love, launching into ridiculous soliloquies that go on and on and on. To make the matter even more improbable, Hartley has aged, albeit not well, and is not alluring intellectually, emotionally or physically. If anything, she lives up to the moniker assigned to her as the bearded lady. Charles kidnaps Hartley and imprisons her in a small stuffy upstairs bedroom in his cottage. Down below the four men who are visiting Charles, squatting no less, in the semi-squalor of the cottage, implore Charles to release Hartley. The bandying about of the four men who try to talk reason to Charles is among the most ludicrous and long-winded scenes to have ever appeared in literature.

The Sea, the Sea is an astonishing work in that Iris Murdoch’s genius as a writer shines forth as surely as the warm sun that appears in full force above the darkening sea. No other writer uses adjectives as rhythmically as Murdoch, rarely inserting anything as mundane as a comma in between her endless description of the clouds and the water. Her repetitive use of words for emphasis is often tedious, but hardly distracts from her masterful storytelling that unmasks all of the characters for who they really are with remarkable precision and fluency. Everyone is thoroughly unlikeable. The author does little to reveal goodness in anyone. Huge irreconcilable flaws overtake their humanity. Every attempt to be civil or courteous is cutthroat, steeped in verbal violence. But none of this matters. Murdoch succeeds in creating a story that compels, shocks and mesmerizes the reader to be riveted by the insanity until the bitter end. You might find yourself drowning in the endless details and unnecessary detritus, but don’t give up. Murdoch wisely imparts a powerful caveat to creative talents, especially actors, to never abandon the ability to work in live theater. Never stop acting! Never stop directing! In his quest to retire by the sea, Charles Arrowby creates his own personal theater, a dramatic hell replete with childish subplots and the pathetic ministrations of fools. Arrowby’s life becomes the theater of the absurd, where no one finds redemption. Ultimately, there is much ado about nothing. Ballyhoo!!