The Sea, The Sea

The Sea, The Sea, novel by British writer Iris Murdoch. Published in 1978, it was her 19th novel and her only work to win the Booker Prize.

The Sea, The Sea is written in the first person, narrated by Charles Arrowby, a noted and self-satisfied thespian who retires from London to a dilapidated and isolated house by the sea to spend the rest of his life in quiet contemplation and to write his memoirs. The book he is writing is part diary, part memoir. As he writes about his current life and also reminisces about his family and his various loves and lovers, former colleagues and lovers, some invited, descend upon his coastal retreat.

For Arrowby, though, the most shocking event is seeing his first love, Mary Hartley, now, like him, in her 60s, living in the same village. Arrowby and Hartley were in love as teens, and Arrowby convinces himself that their love was meant to be, that she is as obssessed with him as he is with her, and that she is trapped in her current marriage. At one point, he imprisons her until it finally gets through to him that she does not want to stay with him. Alternately pathetic and absurd, Arrowby’s self-absorption is ridiculed in a number of comic set pieces.

The sea referred to in the novel’s title is not only the source of the dominant strain of imagery; it is itself a major character. As a force of indeterminacy and flux, it is a counterpoint in the narrative to the deluded and narcissistic efforts of Arrowby to freeze the past into an image of his own myth-making. Arrowby imagines himself as an elderly Prospero, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, giving up his pretensions to orchestrate the lives of others, but his egotistical tyranny prevents him from truly seeing, and not just manipulating, others. Arrowby believes that he has achieved some insight into himself in time for the denouement, but it is not clear to the reader that he has achieved redemption.

Iris Murdoch’s gift for elevating even the most seemingly banal of events into the focus of enduring philosophical and ethical questions is rarely more convincingly wrought than in The Sea, The Sea. The story, told by a transparently unreliable narrator, is a convincing meditation on self-delusion.