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A review by kirkrenerivera
The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
1.0
While reading this Booker Prize-winning novel, my first and last by the British grande dame Iris Murdoch, I curiously thought often of the concept of umwelten. Explained in a much-more enjoyable book I was simultaneously reading, An Immense World (by Ed Yong), umwelten is that sensory world that is particular to a particular species of animal, dependent on what senses that animal has to experience the world. Each animal experiences a specific unique slice of the world.
While it might be thrilling and magical to experience the world as other creatures do--think of the hero in T.H. White's The Once and Future King--it might also drive us mad. In novels told in the first person, as The Sea, the Sea is, the reader spends the length of narrative inside the narrator Charles Arrowby's head, or if you will, umwelten, and, in this 495-page account by a misogynist, self-absorbed egotist, that is a maddening place to be.
In fiction a gifted author can do anything, even producing a highly riveting account of a simple cell organism that devoid of all but the most basic of senses experiences the tiniest possible sliver of reality. All to say that my violent objection to this book is not to argue that the documented thoughts of an unrepentant narcissist are not possibly the fodder of good literature. I simply point out that if I perceived that you were about to start this book I would jump forward, tear it from your hands, and unheeding your protests, I would run to throw it off the nearest cliff.
Of course, it is a mystery I do not care to explain that, despite my inner screaming as I read the book, I still finished it.
While it might be thrilling and magical to experience the world as other creatures do--think of the hero in T.H. White's The Once and Future King--it might also drive us mad. In novels told in the first person, as The Sea, the Sea is, the reader spends the length of narrative inside the narrator Charles Arrowby's head, or if you will, umwelten, and, in this 495-page account by a misogynist, self-absorbed egotist, that is a maddening place to be.
In fiction a gifted author can do anything, even producing a highly riveting account of a simple cell organism that devoid of all but the most basic of senses experiences the tiniest possible sliver of reality. All to say that my violent objection to this book is not to argue that the documented thoughts of an unrepentant narcissist are not possibly the fodder of good literature. I simply point out that if I perceived that you were about to start this book I would jump forward, tear it from your hands, and unheeding your protests, I would run to throw it off the nearest cliff.
Of course, it is a mystery I do not care to explain that, despite my inner screaming as I read the book, I still finished it.