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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
The novel's centrepiece – the recently retired doyen of the theatre, Charles Arrowby – is an unlikable sort of chap. Given this, and the fact that the entire 600-plus page novel emerges from the immediate first person of Arrowby, I was amazed how much I enjoyed this behemoth.
Murdoch has done a magnificent job in first rendering our narrator in such unflattering terms, in which the vanities, jealousies and utter lack of compassion comes to the forefront, then slowly work towards finding some (faint) redemptive hope by the end.
Charles recounts events meticulously, filled with comic set-pieces involving a cast of luvvies set adrift on the remote English coast. Unable to recognise the egotism and selfishness of his romantic ideals, he pursues a bewildered old woman who once was his first love many years before.
As the title indicates, the sea (along with a decaying house and grounds) plays a significant role in the book. It's always beautifully described. One might complain that no character beyond Charles has any convincing inner life. For me, this Charles' egotism and failure to conceive of a world outside of his head explain the lack of depth around him.
The story comes from Arrowby, whose unreliability is constantly in the foreground; the book is variously sublime, ridiculous, complex, facile, profound and specious. Charles is at once talented but destructive and ridiculous. The absurdity of his self-importance renders any egocentrism somewhat more plausible.
The dark absurdity of the novel's centre – a 250-page extended nervous breakdown – showcases Charles’s desperate obsession to render his life meaningful through the pursuit of love is bleakly depressing. I’d never have believed that I would soften towards the chap by the story’s end, but I did.
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ½
The novel's centrepiece – the recently retired doyen of the theatre, Charles Arrowby – is an unlikable sort of chap. Given this, and the fact that the entire 600-plus page novel emerges from the immediate first person of Arrowby, I was amazed how much I enjoyed this behemoth.
Murdoch has done a magnificent job in first rendering our narrator in such unflattering terms, in which the vanities, jealousies and utter lack of compassion comes to the forefront, then slowly work towards finding some (faint) redemptive hope by the end.
Charles recounts events meticulously, filled with comic set-pieces involving a cast of luvvies set adrift on the remote English coast. Unable to recognise the egotism and selfishness of his romantic ideals, he pursues a bewildered old woman who once was his first love many years before.
As the title indicates, the sea (along with a decaying house and grounds) plays a significant role in the book. It's always beautifully described. One might complain that no character beyond Charles has any convincing inner life. For me, this Charles' egotism and failure to conceive of a world outside of his head explain the lack of depth around him.
The story comes from Arrowby, whose unreliability is constantly in the foreground; the book is variously sublime, ridiculous, complex, facile, profound and specious. Charles is at once talented but destructive and ridiculous. The absurdity of his self-importance renders any egocentrism somewhat more plausible.
The dark absurdity of the novel's centre – a 250-page extended nervous breakdown – showcases Charles’s desperate obsession to render his life meaningful through the pursuit of love is bleakly depressing. I’d never have believed that I would soften towards the chap by the story’s end, but I did.
⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ½
I told a friend that I was waiting for this book to come in at the library, and she told me she had a copy and she'd loan it to me. Of course I said, "Great, thanks!" but inside I was thinking "Oh dear", because I actually wasn't expecting to enjoy it, and she has literary pretensions that I don't (e.g. despite being a New Zealander born and bred, she doesn't read NZ fiction because she thinks we're not up to standard. This snobbery, of course, is what my generation and our parents' generation were brought up with, and it's sad that it still exists (but not, happily, in such great numbers any more)). Now, I read a number of Iris Murdoch's novels when I was at secondary school (the year I was 15) and I honestly can't remember if I liked them or not. What I do remember was my mother being concerned that I was reading them - "Iris Murdoch is so gloomy," she said - and I certainly haven't read any in between then and now. But for some reason I had put this book on my to-read list.
Well, I read it. And today I returned it to my friend. She asked me (as I knew she would) what I thought of it. I had decided to be honest, and if she thought lesser of me then so be it. But her tone of voice, in the asking, reassured me, and when I said "Er", and did that hand wobble thing you do when you mean that something was so-so, she agreed. She even said she was so glad that I felt the same as her.
So, why do we - two 60-something (closer to 70, in truth), reasonably well-educated and well-read women - give this Booker Prize Winning novel (oh yes, that's why I put it on my to-read list - I thought I ought to tackle all of the winners) a less than resounding review? It's quite simple really - we didn't like the man. Not liking him meant we really were not interested in his life and his obsessions. We thought the descriptive prose was excellent. We found the setting really interesting. But we just didn't like the narrator, nor most of the people he talked about and communicated with. My friend said, "Maybe that's why I never really like Iris Murdoch - none of her characters are likable." For me, I'm pleased to have read it but I didn't like it. And that's that.
Well, I read it. And today I returned it to my friend. She asked me (as I knew she would) what I thought of it. I had decided to be honest, and if she thought lesser of me then so be it. But her tone of voice, in the asking, reassured me, and when I said "Er", and did that hand wobble thing you do when you mean that something was so-so, she agreed. She even said she was so glad that I felt the same as her.
So, why do we - two 60-something (closer to 70, in truth), reasonably well-educated and well-read women - give this Booker Prize Winning novel (oh yes, that's why I put it on my to-read list - I thought I ought to tackle all of the winners) a less than resounding review? It's quite simple really - we didn't like the man. Not liking him meant we really were not interested in his life and his obsessions. We thought the descriptive prose was excellent. We found the setting really interesting. But we just didn't like the narrator, nor most of the people he talked about and communicated with. My friend said, "Maybe that's why I never really like Iris Murdoch - none of her characters are likable." For me, I'm pleased to have read it but I didn't like it. And that's that.
Reading this made me feel Iris Murdoch's reputation as one of the foremost British novelists of the 20th century was a big hoax; it certainly feels like one of the big misunderstandings of 20th century literature to me.
This novel started out rather interesting, as a curious mix of a haunted house novel and an 'unreliable narrator' novel, with a protagonist so monstrously egotistical you immediately know you shouldn't take him at face value. (Some readers tend to respond so emotionally, saying they 'couldn't like' him. I don't know what's not to like: he's rather a funny rascal. Fun to read about certainly.)
But it drags on an on and develops into a kind of hysterical melodrama. 'Intellectual soap opera' is a term often used to refer to Murdoch's work, but I'm surprised it seems to be taken as a compliment: do people forget how bad and utterly boring soap opera's usually are?
I certainly started to find this narrative rather boring, with it's weird dreamlike logic: all the main characters in the narrator's life suddenly popping up at his seaside village and wandering round there as though they're in the forest of Arden.
No doubt that's part of Murdoch's point, at some level. The book is drenched in direct and more subliminal Shakespeare references, from repeated and purposely trite quotes ('All's well that's end's well') to oblique correspondences in structures and motifs (especially that of the sea, brothers and sisters, twins, love triangles, stuff with letters, etc. etc.) – to witty lines like these:
A telling quote comes at the end, when the narrator's appetite is gradually coming back to him after having been thoroughly spoiled by the emotional turmoil of his unsuccesful love that takes up most of the action of the book:
I think Murdoch is also commenting here on what she's been trying to do in the novel herself.
Allusions like this probably made the novels fun for the 'intellectuals' who cherished her work while she was still alive – and for all I know may still be cherishing it, although I get the feeling she's a lot less popular now than she used to be.
There certainly are lots of witty things. For instance, how's this for a literary allusion to the famous Petrarchan trope (cf. Love's Inconsistency:
Yes. Sly and funny.
But the story. And its length. And those hysterical dialogues. The weird unrealistic fancies the characters indulge in. The cardboard cutout depth of those very characters. The strange, dreamlike logic of the storyline. They only make me think: Murdoch is no Shakespeare. Clever allusions are not enough for an interesting narrative. And a novel is not a theatre play. (If you want to break out of the realist paradigm and slip into parable or allegory mode in a novel, you need to do something more creative or appealing in other ways to make it work, at least for me. Put more humour into it, be a more seductively brilliant stylist or have a more potent world view you want to force on the reader, like Kafka and Beckett and Thomas Bernhard at their best.)
So for all the wit and interesting stuff that was going on (much of which I probably also missed, partly because my interest in the story flagged and I started to speedread), I'm sorry to say this novel neither makes me freeze or burn, it just leaves me cold – and determined not to bother with the rest of Murdoch's oeuvre.
Sometimes I felt this read more like the work of an idiot savant than that of a bona fide author. As though her work has something in common with other compulsive writers I've read something of (Simon Vestdijk, Willem Brakman, Elmore Leonard). When I read something by them, it's always interesting up to a point, but it also always seems to lack something that I can't always quite put my finger on. In Murdoch's case, I'd say her narrative seems so divorced from reality I no longer understand what's she's talking about or what she's trying to say. It seems to lose all substance.
Not to end on a sour note here's one more quote I rather enjoyed. It's towards the end, when the poor narrator is looking for something to read to calm his mind after the emotional storms that have raged in this seaside cottage.
(Incidentally, the narrator's brother (and saviour) is called James. One of the first times the name crops up in the novel I mistakenly thought it referred to the novelist – who also famously lived in a house overlooking the sea in the last 20 years of his life. My mistake, but still: half-wondering if Murdoch is playing another sly game here.)
This novel started out rather interesting, as a curious mix of a haunted house novel and an 'unreliable narrator' novel, with a protagonist so monstrously egotistical you immediately know you shouldn't take him at face value. (Some readers tend to respond so emotionally, saying they 'couldn't like' him. I don't know what's not to like: he's rather a funny rascal. Fun to read about certainly.)
But it drags on an on and develops into a kind of hysterical melodrama. 'Intellectual soap opera' is a term often used to refer to Murdoch's work, but I'm surprised it seems to be taken as a compliment: do people forget how bad and utterly boring soap opera's usually are?
I certainly started to find this narrative rather boring, with it's weird dreamlike logic: all the main characters in the narrator's life suddenly popping up at his seaside village and wandering round there as though they're in the forest of Arden.
No doubt that's part of Murdoch's point, at some level. The book is drenched in direct and more subliminal Shakespeare references, from repeated and purposely trite quotes ('All's well that's end's well') to oblique correspondences in structures and motifs (especially that of the sea, brothers and sisters, twins, love triangles, stuff with letters, etc. etc.) – to witty lines like these:
I began to love Lizzie after I realized how much she loved me. As does sometimes happen, her love impressed me, then attracted me. I was directing a season of Shakespeare. She fell in love with me during Romeo and Juliet, she revealed her love during Twelfth Night, we got to know each other during A Midsummer Night's Dream. Then (but that was later) I began to love her during The Tempest, and (but that was later still) I left her during Measure for Measure (when Aloysius Bull was playing the Duke).
A telling quote comes at the end, when the narrator's appetite is gradually coming back to him after having been thoroughly spoiled by the emotional turmoil of his unsuccesful love that takes up most of the action of the book:
Or shall I simply sit by the fire and read Shakespeare, coming home to the place where magic does not shrink reality and turn it into tiny things to be the toys of fairies?
I think Murdoch is also commenting here on what she's been trying to do in the novel herself.
Allusions like this probably made the novels fun for the 'intellectuals' who cherished her work while she was still alive – and for all I know may still be cherishing it, although I get the feeling she's a lot less popular now than she used to be.
There certainly are lots of witty things. For instance, how's this for a literary allusion to the famous Petrarchan trope (cf. Love's Inconsistency:
It is odd that I now write down (and will not change) the word 'pain', for of course what it was was pure joy. Perhaps the point is that whatever it was was extreme and pure. (I am told that a blindfolded man cannot distinguish severe burning from severe freezing.)
Yes. Sly and funny.
But the story. And its length. And those hysterical dialogues. The weird unrealistic fancies the characters indulge in. The cardboard cutout depth of those very characters. The strange, dreamlike logic of the storyline. They only make me think: Murdoch is no Shakespeare. Clever allusions are not enough for an interesting narrative. And a novel is not a theatre play. (If you want to break out of the realist paradigm and slip into parable or allegory mode in a novel, you need to do something more creative or appealing in other ways to make it work, at least for me. Put more humour into it, be a more seductively brilliant stylist or have a more potent world view you want to force on the reader, like Kafka and Beckett and Thomas Bernhard at their best.)
So for all the wit and interesting stuff that was going on (much of which I probably also missed, partly because my interest in the story flagged and I started to speedread), I'm sorry to say this novel neither makes me freeze or burn, it just leaves me cold – and determined not to bother with the rest of Murdoch's oeuvre.
Sometimes I felt this read more like the work of an idiot savant than that of a bona fide author. As though her work has something in common with other compulsive writers I've read something of (Simon Vestdijk, Willem Brakman, Elmore Leonard). When I read something by them, it's always interesting up to a point, but it also always seems to lack something that I can't always quite put my finger on. In Murdoch's case, I'd say her narrative seems so divorced from reality I no longer understand what's she's talking about or what she's trying to say. It seems to lose all substance.
Not to end on a sour note here's one more quote I rather enjoyed. It's towards the end, when the poor narrator is looking for something to read to calm his mind after the emotional storms that have raged in this seaside cottage.
I needed something a bit lurid and absorbing. It was a moment even for pornography, only I cannot really stand pornography. I eventually chose The Wings of the Dove, another story of death and moral smash-up.Well, why not. Same difference, after all.
(Incidentally, the narrator's brother (and saviour) is called James. One of the first times the name crops up in the novel I mistakenly thought it referred to the novelist – who also famously lived in a house overlooking the sea in the last 20 years of his life. My mistake, but still: half-wondering if Murdoch is playing another sly game here.)
I didn’t always enjoy this book while I was reading it, but I have to admire it. The writing is beautiful, the plot intricate and slightly Gothic, the characters all interesting, the viewpoint faithful. The main challenge is that the narrator is not a very likeable chap, and the reader spends a lot of time in his mind. Sometimes you just want to shout at him, “Get over it!” Because it’s a novel about obsession.
The narrator is Charles Arrowby, an elderly British theatrical director who’s achieved a certain amount of fame and distinction, and who has decided to retire and spend time in contemplation. He’s bought a large but rundown house in a little English coastal village, with rocky access to the sea, and he spends the first part of the book making himself at home. He writes about his life, introducing us to the various loves and influences he’s known, and he cooks (according to his very particular and eccentric tastes), and he regularly throws himself into the sea (and has some trouble getting out again, but always manages).
(After this point in this review, there are spoilers.)
Then Charles discovers that an old woman living in the village is actually his first love, Hartley, the one who inexplicably threw him over when he was just emerging into manhood. He’s never gotten over her, and he always thought she was the reason he never wanted to marry anyone else. He’s never understood why she abruptly broke it off, when he was absolutely sure she loved him as passionately as he loved her.
So our hero proceeds to stalk, badger and eventually kidnap this poor woman, who is married to someone else. When one approach yields no results, he tries another. Meanwhile, many of his London friends and former lovers have come down to see what he’s doing, and many of them get involved in his plots, or try to talk him out of them.
This sounds farcical, but Murdoch is really too skillful a writer for that. She handles the multiple cast of characters with great skill, but we always see them through Charles’ essentially egotistic and self-deluding eyes. He has a tendency to belittle and sometimes to throw people over when they no longer please him. In fact, it’s really clear that he’s still trying to be the director, with a great romance at the center of the drama, and the dangerous and exciting sea as the backdrop.
Among the characters is James, Charles’ wise Buddhist cousin, who seems to be able to perform magical feats of physical prowess. Since we see James through Charles’ eyes, it’s unclear whether he’s just an annoying younger cousin from Charles’ childhood, or a sage so evolved that he can conquer the laws of gravity. You can always see Charles assessing everyone for dramatic potential – and then, at the end of the novel, beginning finally to let go, to really retire from the stage. With heroism no longer so necessary, he goes back to London.
The narrator is Charles Arrowby, an elderly British theatrical director who’s achieved a certain amount of fame and distinction, and who has decided to retire and spend time in contemplation. He’s bought a large but rundown house in a little English coastal village, with rocky access to the sea, and he spends the first part of the book making himself at home. He writes about his life, introducing us to the various loves and influences he’s known, and he cooks (according to his very particular and eccentric tastes), and he regularly throws himself into the sea (and has some trouble getting out again, but always manages).
(After this point in this review, there are spoilers.)
Then Charles discovers that an old woman living in the village is actually his first love, Hartley, the one who inexplicably threw him over when he was just emerging into manhood. He’s never gotten over her, and he always thought she was the reason he never wanted to marry anyone else. He’s never understood why she abruptly broke it off, when he was absolutely sure she loved him as passionately as he loved her.
So our hero proceeds to stalk, badger and eventually kidnap this poor woman, who is married to someone else. When one approach yields no results, he tries another. Meanwhile, many of his London friends and former lovers have come down to see what he’s doing, and many of them get involved in his plots, or try to talk him out of them.
This sounds farcical, but Murdoch is really too skillful a writer for that. She handles the multiple cast of characters with great skill, but we always see them through Charles’ essentially egotistic and self-deluding eyes. He has a tendency to belittle and sometimes to throw people over when they no longer please him. In fact, it’s really clear that he’s still trying to be the director, with a great romance at the center of the drama, and the dangerous and exciting sea as the backdrop.
Among the characters is James, Charles’ wise Buddhist cousin, who seems to be able to perform magical feats of physical prowess. Since we see James through Charles’ eyes, it’s unclear whether he’s just an annoying younger cousin from Charles’ childhood, or a sage so evolved that he can conquer the laws of gravity. You can always see Charles assessing everyone for dramatic potential – and then, at the end of the novel, beginning finally to let go, to really retire from the stage. With heroism no longer so necessary, he goes back to London.
I can't really figure out what to say about this book, so it's just as well there are already 555 Goodreads reviews to go on. I'd never read any Murdoch before and didn't really know what to expect. What I got was a roller-coaster of powerful writing. But what was it about? I'm still not sure, but I think different readers will appreciate different elements.
I loved the minutely detailed descriptions of the sea ... and laughed at the equally precise descriptions of Charles Arrowby's bizarre gastronomic tastes ("a salad of cold Italian tinned tomatoes with herbs" for example). A classic unreliable narrator, the narcissistic Charles is quite loathsome, but keeps us entertained. The mid-section of the book, with his delusional pursuit and sequestration of the blameless Hartley, I found quite creepy, but it was relieved by the French bedroom farce aspects of his crowd of theatrical visitors. There were ludicrous coincidences (even for someone like me who is very tolerant of coincidences in both fiction and real life) but it's clearly not intended to be a realistic novel -- or maybe Murdoch is saying something about fate? I couldn't help feeling there were many elements of Buddhist philosophy that were passing me by -- pity James was such a cipher -- but I did figure out that Charles' stay at Shruff End was some form of bardo (Buddhist limbo) between phases of his life. I suppose the novel is very much of its time (late 1970s) and might have seemed less odd then.
Anyway, I was never bored with this book, and I expect I will read more Murdoch at some point.
I loved the minutely detailed descriptions of the sea ... and laughed at the equally precise descriptions of Charles Arrowby's bizarre gastronomic tastes ("a salad of cold Italian tinned tomatoes with herbs" for example). A classic unreliable narrator, the narcissistic Charles is quite loathsome, but keeps us entertained. The mid-section of the book, with his delusional pursuit and sequestration of the blameless Hartley, I found quite creepy, but it was relieved by the French bedroom farce aspects of his crowd of theatrical visitors. There were ludicrous coincidences (even for someone like me who is very tolerant of coincidences in both fiction and real life) but it's clearly not intended to be a realistic novel -- or maybe Murdoch is saying something about fate? I couldn't help feeling there were many elements of Buddhist philosophy that were passing me by -- pity James was such a cipher -- but I did figure out that Charles' stay at Shruff End was some form of bardo (Buddhist limbo) between phases of his life. I suppose the novel is very much of its time (late 1970s) and might have seemed less odd then.
Anyway, I was never bored with this book, and I expect I will read more Murdoch at some point.
It's my favorite Murdoch, but that may be because I'm Buddhist and have spent my life in theatre; and then, I am passionate about the sea. My favorite bits of this one are the meals Arrowby cooks up for himself. His enjoyment of canned food with an herb here and there delights me.
adventurous
funny
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I am realizing now that Iris Murdoch wrote a bunch of novels. This was one of the prize-winning ones, I believe.
Retired stage director moves to a precarious seaside home, engages in scrapes, madcap schemes, and near-death experiences with 3 ex-lovers, and other ancillary people as well. First half of novel vastly different than second half. Readers who enjoy the first half may not feel tolerant of the second half and vice-versa.
Retired stage director moves to a precarious seaside home, engages in scrapes, madcap schemes, and near-death experiences with 3 ex-lovers, and other ancillary people as well. First half of novel vastly different than second half. Readers who enjoy the first half may not feel tolerant of the second half and vice-versa.
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
There was not a single likable character in this novel. I found Charles, a pompous theater director, wholly irritating. All of the sycophantic former actors who had been in his thrall were one dimensional. The novel was long and had several absurd/clunky plot points. There were some amusing satirical sketches of Charles’s attempt to acclimatize to rural seaside life, as well as lyrical descriptions of the sea. Was this enough to win the Booker Prize?