The Sea, The Sea

By Iris Murdoch

528 pages

Published in 1978 by Penguin Classics

After a successful but sometimes scandalous career as a playwright and director, Charles Arrowby retires from the hubbub of London to what he expects will be some years of tranquil solitude. His plan is to write a memoir about a love affair he had with his mentor, and to enjoy an occasional tryst with an actress he has been having sex with, off and on, for many years.

His plans are altered by the appearance of a middle-aged woman whom he has not seen since his adolescence. She was his first lover, and he remembers her as beautiful and slender. She’s now stout and very ordinary looking, but the spark is still there and he sets about trying to seduce her.

The first hundred pages of the book give the reader hope that the rest of the book will be a pleasant story of rekindled love. I’m just now getting further along than that and can tell that it’s going to be a very different kind of story. Other characters – mostly former lovers – are coming and going, and most of them don’t have good feelings towards Arrowby.

A great deal of the action is interior (his impressions in the memoir) and show him to be a somewhat selfish and superficial individual, despite whatever accomplishments he has had in theater.

This is a very modern novel in the sense that the protagonist is a somewhat ordinary man with many ordinary vanities and vices that leave him, like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, unable to carve out any real meaning from his life.

Murdoch’s language is rich, and her dialog and descriptions are filled with allusions to myth and magic. Arrowby’s confrontation with love and forgiveness makes this one of Murdoch’s most moving and powerful novels.

From Dwight Garner, The New York Times: “Profound and delicious for many reasons… a multilayered working out of [Murdoch’s] feelings about the intensity of romantic experience.” 

From Sophia Martelli, The Guardian: “Murdoch’s subtly, blackly humorous digs at human vanity and self-delusion periodically build into waves of hilarity, and Arrowby is a brilliant creation: a deeply textured, intriguing yet unreliable narrator, and one of the finest character studies of the 20th century.”

From Time: “The author renders her immorality play with painstaking attention to atmosphere: the changing hues of the waves, the slippery amber rocks, the strangely damp house are all made palpable. The old scandals are shrewdly reexamined, and Murdoch’s style is as saline as the sea below.”