The Sea (Vintage Classic Iris Murdoch Series) - The Sea

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.

The tone in this book is extremely heavy and intense. It deals with the human psyche and how the story's dysfunctional characters tackle with their personal relationships. I savored every page and found the storyline totally fascinating.

While relying on the characters' behaviors as the main ingredients, the book is laced with a little thrill, some tension, and a tad bit of humor; plus it has a whopping dollop of cynicism by the main character. After reading it, I felt as if I had read and swallowed an anchor that had been sunk off the sea at Scruffs End, the seaside location where the story mainly takes place.

This was my first experience reading anything written by Iris Murdoch, an author I have wanted to read since I saw the movie Iris staring Dame Judi Dench. While reading this, I kept on thinking over and over in my mind of the tremendous imagination and creativity that Ms. Murdoc combined in this intense story witten in the form of a diary or chronicle by Charles Arrowby. He is the main character, a retired actor/director longing to give up everybody and practically everything and retire peacefully to live as a hermit at his newly purchased home, Scruffs End, along the seashore. Unfortunately, he is also rude, egotistical, nasty, cynical, bitter, conniving, obsessed, and "bossy". He to me was the most dysfunctional and twisted of all the characters--although a couple of others (Rosina and Hartley) were runners up.

As I read page after page, I kept trying to sort out the characters in my mind and see if by the end any would come across as being "normal" in terms of dealing with their personal relationships. I know "normal" is relative and rather hard to define, nevertheless based on my standards of "normalcy" there was only one character whom I could call sensible and rational. The rest of the bunch was a totally dysfunctional lot of misfits with tons of baggage. I'm not criticizing the book or characters, I'm just voicing my opinion of what Ms. Murdoch wrote, as in fact the dysfunctional characters and their personal relationships are the meat of the story.

What was so cleverly woven into the story was the gradual change that you can feel taking place over the different phases of Charles' life at Scruffs End. The first, entitled "Prehistory", is the time right after Charles has just moved to the seaside and when his daily life remains out of contact with people. He lives in Utopia spending his time all to himself swimming, writing, and fixing his simple meals. The reader can sense the calm, the tranquility with a little envy, in fact.

The next phase is called "History" and it introduces contact with other humans from his past. During the chapters in this phase, Charles begins to loose a grip on his freedom. The reader senses that his tranquil lifestyle is being compromised and his Utopia shows signs of crumbling. The further you read, the heavier and more intense the tone becomes, reaching a culminating point in which Charles' Utopia gets shattered by incidents involving various people from the past who draw out his obsessive, cynical, abusive, and rude behavior. The story depicts how his dysfunctional personality deals with very complex personal relationships that he himself wrought and which he now has to stew in. There is a lot to the story. As events unfolded and I eventually took a breather once in a while, I noticed my sweaty palms would unconsciously be gripping tightly to the book.

I can highly recommend this novel if you like this sort of mental intrigue and human drama, as in this respect it is superb. However, if you are looking for a delightful read in terms of frolicking characters written into a light and airy story, this is definitely not the book for you; it leaves no air to breath. The story telling is brilliant and I am convinced of the genius of Iris Murdoch. I stand in awe of her abilities to write so prolifically and yet with such imagination. It is no wonder she was so highly respected by peers, readers, and even the leaders of her country.

Having enjoyed this author's "The Bell" and especially "The Nice and the Good", I was thrilled to find "The Sea" at a used bookstore. As many reviewers have noted, this book gathered momentum slowly. The sometimes amusing, sometimes tedious beginning pages set the stage for a middle and ending that exceeded my expectations. With its vivid, ridiculous and painfully relevant scenes of blind hypocrisy and self-absorption, this book challenged me to look more closely and objectively at my own character, and in the process it made me laugh loudly more than a handful of times. I would read it again later.

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.

I read "The Sea, The Sea" during my Christmas break. I started out of a sense of duty. I had never read Murdoch, but knew that one ought to. A friend bought me a box set of Booker prize winners and, lured by a front cover that featured a moody, brooding seascape, I launched into the opening chapters. I had to work hard at first. As with so many "worthy" writers, Murdoch doesn't molly coddle the reader with early gratification. There is seductively beautiful description of a coastline that should be perfect, but is uncomfortably tainted in a way you can't quite put your finger on. A fictional world of theatreland populated by highly strung, egocentric luvvies is not immediately appealing. DON'T SKIP THIS PART THOUGH - it is vital to the completeness of the novel.
Part 2 begins on page 91. The gentle swell of Part 1 erupts into violent, threatening waves full of eddies and currents that shock, surprise, delight and toss you about disconcertingly like a piece of flotsam. At this point in the novel, I was drawn into Murdoch's world like a frightened child being drawn into a deep dark forest full of demons - terrified, but unable to conquer an overiding need to explore further.
The next two days of reading were the most unsettling I can remember since adolescence. There is a truth , a clarity of understanding of the destructive egoism in human nature that is truly chilling in its impact. The novel genuinely upset me in the way it peeled away the comforting skin of self delusion without any anaesthetic. One character alone, James, rises above a cacophony of self-centred, emotionally moribund personalities that are frustrated in their search for happiness by their inability to communicate. What is so depressing is that it all rings so true. Grand themes of morality, happiness, suffering, belief and almost anything else you can think of in the human condition are handled with astonishing assurance and understanding.
READ THIS NOVEL. It is upsetting, but it is also beautiful. It is big, it is gripping and you come away from it feeling you understand life a bit better than you did before. I can honestly say it has been the most significant book I have read since I first encountered "Moby Dick" twenty years ago! It has the same enormity of sweep and, like "Moby Dick", it luxuriates in the seemingly endless metaphorical possibilities and unlimited power of The Sea as an image.

You really have to start reading some of the great contemporary novels, which deal with one's childrens' fates, and how they interact with ours, and after a few of them, you start to realize, there are people out there who have been through it, really been through it, just as we are going through it. I suggest Barbara Kingsolver and Iris Murdoch, for instance. At first you think "WHAT?" but then you find out, they know what it is to endure marriage and child-raising, and THEY HAVE SEEN IT ALL. It's so important to read. Otherwise we think that we are keeping secrets that must not be revealed, for shame. But believe me, we women in-the-thick-of-it-with-not-much-time-to-read are not alone. There are those who broke through and wrote books for us. We owe it to them to read their books! This is one of those books.

I started reading The Sea, The Sea, and halfway through, my boyfriend left it on a plane. I couldn't find another copy for almost a year, but meanwhile I read some of Murdoch's other novels, which I enjoyed. I've now read about 10 of her books, and The Sea, The Sea was by far the best-written and most moving. Murdoch closely scrutinized the minutiae of everyday life and managed to make it beautiful and worthy of consideration and appreciation. After finishing this book, I was unable to read her other novels for a while, because I thought so highly of it, but luckily I'm over that now. This novel may not appeal to some because Charles can be an infuriating and unsympathetic narrator, but ultimately his pure intentions redeem his extreme actions.

This is an outstading work which explores in depth and detail the psychological underpinnings of the motivations of a well-known aging theatrical director as he faces the loneliness of his life when he retires from the theatre. The book shows how we try to make a last ditch effort to repair heartbreaks in our lives, even if that goal is in reality a dream which would not really make us happy and can literally destroy others. It also explores the growing closeness of two elderly cousins who have had a life-long difficult relationship but who are the sole remaining members of their families.

Without a doubt this is one of the most captivating books of love that I have come across and I'm normally a reader of history and non-fiction. Picked this novel up by chance back in the '90's and could not put it down making Iris Murdock one of my favorite author's of all time.

Beautiful literary exposition, but Hartley, although well described, is frequently not believable in the context of the plot. Worth reading for its literary qualities. Beautiful language in describing characters and scenery.

A maze of a character and relationship studies with jewel-like descriptions of seascapes and moods that put you right there. I actually don't like the narrator's personality but the author lets the reader understand him.

I found this book to be very ponderous reading with the descriptions going on and on. Characters did not become very real. The actions of Charles do not seem believable. I read this book because it was one that my book club had read before I joined. While I did not enjoy the book I think I would have been very interested in the book club's discussion of this book.

I found this book to be very ponderous reading with the descriptions going on and on. Characters did not become very real. The actions of Charles do not seem believable. I read this book because it was one that my book club had read before I joined. While I did not enjoy the book I think I would have been very interested in the book club's discussion of this book.

A tangled tale acting like an undertow, irresistably drawing people on shore and readers to participate. Like the rocks on the shore, little changes, despite the seemingly overwhelming power of the sea.

Just finished my first Iris Murdoch novel. I had heard what a great writer she was, oh what a disappointment. I felt that the story was very shallow; it was about an old guy who still thought he was young and his rather silly love affairs. I guess even Iris Murdoch didn't have the guts to end it on old Charles hitching up with a teenager, hence the hints about the two of them getting together.