Book Review: The Sea, The Sea

 “We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may in the end lead to heaven and to hell.”

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 1978. The novel is centered around Charles Arrowby, a recently retired and somewhat well-known theater director/actor. He leaves London for a remote area by the sea, living in a dilapidated house where he can live in solitude and write his memoirs. However, his acquaintances still track him down and he unexpectedly is reunited with his first love. 

The initial plot of The Sea, The Sea sounds a bit like a soap opera, but Murdoch expertly weaves in greater themes such as love, guilt, idealized memory and romance, and a bit if existentialism/phenomenology into a very dramatic plot. 

The witty, sarcastic style was the first thing that caught my attention. Even as the narrative gets darker and at times, rather absurd, Murdoch maintains a bit of humor throughout the story. There are these little sentence here and there that made me chuckle and this helps to keep the mood of the novel a little bit lighter, even though there are some really twisted elements. 

“I ate and drank slowly as one could (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heaven) conversation or reading. Eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.”

Charles would loathe that I consider meal time the most optimal time for reading… There are so many descriptions of the ridiculous things that Charles eats throughout the novel that one could make an entire list of his meals. I found this rather entertaining. 

One of the major themes of The Sea, The Sea is this concept of “life” being the grand theater that art imitates. 

“This is why all the world is a stage, and why the theater is always popular and indeed why it exists: why it is like life, even though it is also the most vulgar and outrageously factitious of all the arts.”

Charles sees the theater/the arts as a way  manipulate the people in his life. He is constantly maneuvering the people around him for his own purposes and goals. This actually makes him a rather deplorable person, and yet this greater philosophical question arises: Don’t we all do this to some extent? Are we all playing roles and moving things and people around us to fit into the roles we want them to play, in the story of our choosing?

“…is one of those who have a strong concept of the life they want to lead and the role they want to play and lead it and play it at the expense of everyone, especially their nearest and dearest. And the off thing is that such people can in a sense be wrong, can as it were miscast themselves, and yet battle on successfully to the end, partly because their victims prefer a definite simple impression to the pains of critical thought.”

The Sea, The Sea also hones in on the idealization and memorialization of people, especially people from one’s past. Charles writes a lot about the people in his life, but he is an unreliable narrator; often Charles will discuss a person in his life, whether it’s his cousin James, his previous romantic partners, or his theater colleagues, but when these characters are introduced in the novel, their behaviors don’t line up with Charles’ descriptions. 

“How can one describe real people? … Perhaps that is what this book will turn out to be, simply my life told in a series of portraits of the people I have know.”

However, like an an artist painting a portrait of a person, the person is at the mercy of the painter. Charles has made up his mind about how he views the people in his life. The character with the biggest discrepancy is Charles’ first love, Hartley. Charles refuses to acknowledge that Hartley is not the young woman from his youth. He has “painted” her a certain way and cannot distinguish this from reality. This idealization of Hartley, and the insanity that ensues, drives the plot of the novel. Charles is hanging on to an unrealistic and romanticized concept of “young love.” 

“Ask yourself, what really happened between whom all those years ago? You’ve made it into a story, and stories are false.”

As I mentioned, Charles is not a likable character, however he’s quite self aware and he does have a bit of a character arc, which I can always appreciate. Charles is not supposed to be likable and I believe that Murdoch tends to have main male characters that are just the worst. I find it interesting that most of Murdoch’s novels consist of her writing from the perspective of men. I would like to explore this concept more after I’ve read more of her work. 

Murdoch’s writing is also fantastic. The dialogue is quick and snappy, but there are also these gorgeous passages describing the sea and landscape. There are countless descriptions of the sea and references to The Odyssey (something else I’d like to go back and dive a bit deeper into), images of eels, sea monsters and reference to seals. All of these things mean something. This book is worth reading for the scenic descriptions alone. 

The Sea, The Sea is an enjoyable and dramatic novel. Murdoch’s writing is descriptive, relatable, and evocative. This is a chunkier book, but it’s not too heavy or dense, even though she is weaving in some more philosophical concepts (which makes sense, as she was a philosopher…). There were times I felt the plot was a bit repetitive, but it didn’t ruin the book for me and I look forward to reading some of her other novels. I also look forward to revisiting The Sea, The Sea and really diving into the imagery, because it’s all deliberate. 

Rating: 4/5 

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