The Sea, The Sea

The Retirement

Charles Arrowby has been famous. He ran a celebrated theatre company, directed major productions, was loved and feared in equal measure. Now he is retiring — to a house on the English coast he found in a property magazine. He will write his memoirs and eat simple food and look at the sea and not think about Clement, or Rosina, or Lizzie, or any of the women who have been so important to him.

Then he sees Hartley. His childhood sweetheart — the only woman he ever truly loved, the one he lost at seventeen — is living in the village nearby, married to a man called Fitch, apparently unhappy. Charles immediately knows what must be done.

The Self-Deception

Murdoch’s genius in The Sea, The Sea is to give us Charles’s account in full and then let us see, through the responses of every other character, how different his account is from reality. The Hartley he sees is the Hartley of fifty years ago. The rescue he plans is a form of abduction. His self-awareness, so frequently invoked, is the most thoroughgoing blindness in the novel.

The novel won the Booker Prize in 1978. It is among the best demonstrations in English fiction of the gap between how people narrate their own behaviour and what that behaviour actually is.

The Theatre of the Self

Charles Arrowby is, not incidentally, a man of the theatre, and Murdoch makes his profession the key to his pathology. A lifetime of directing has taught him to arrange other people into the roles his imagination assigns them, and he cannot stop doing it once he leaves the stage. His “retirement” to the coast is itself a piece of theatre — the renunciation of a worldly man performing humility — and his pursuit of Hartley is a production he is mounting in his own head, complete with villains, a captive princess, and a heroic rescue. The cast of his former life keeps arriving uninvited at his door, refusing to stay offstage, dragging the world he meant to renounce right back into his hermitage. Murdoch’s point is merciless: the theatrical temperament cannot distinguish sincerity from performance, and Charles’s tragedy is that he sincerely believes in the parts he has written for everyone, Hartley most of all. The Hartley he loves is a character he has been rehearsing for fifty years; the actual elderly, frightened woman who lives down the lane bears almost no relation to her.

The Sea, the Supernatural, and the Limits of Will

The novel’s title points to the one presence Charles cannot stage-manage: the sea itself, indifferent, ancient, and utterly unresponsive to his desires. Murdoch returns again and again to his swimming, his near-drownings, the strange rock pools, and a notorious sea-monster vision that erupts early in the book and divides readers to this day. Some find these intrusions of the uncanny a flaw; others recognize them as the point — the eruption of a reality that will not conform to Charles’s projections, a force as resistant to his fantasy of possession as Hartley ought to be but is not allowed to be. Around this central concern Murdoch braids her abiding philosophical obsessions: the difficulty of truly attending to another person, the moral work of un-selfing, the gap between the goodness we imagine in ourselves and the harm we actually do. Her years teaching philosophy at Oxford taught her to take ideas seriously without letting them stiffen into lecture, and here the thinking is wholly dissolved into character and incident.

Limitations

The length and the degree of Charles’s self-deception can be testing — readers need patience with a narrator who is also their vehicle. The supernatural elements divide readers. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of serious British literary fiction who can appreciate a narrator who is brilliant, self-deceived, and completely unaware of the gap between those two qualities.

The Booker Prize and Iris Murdoch’s Career

The Sea, The Sea won the Man Booker Prize in 1978. It was Murdoch’s seventeenth novel and the work that brought her formal recognition to match the critical reputation she had established since Under the Net (1954). The prize committee cited the novel’s psychological complexity and the richness of its portrait of Charles Arrowby — a retired theatre director who withdraws to a remote seaside house and finds that solitude does not produce the clarity he expected.

The Novel’s Central Argument

Murdoch’s philosophical background — she taught philosophy at Oxford and published academic work on Sartre and Plato alongside her fiction — is visible throughout her novels in the seriousness with which she takes her characters’ ideas about themselves and others. The Sea, The Sea is constructed around the philosophical concept of the fantasy of possession: Charles’s belief that his first love Hartley, who married someone else forty years ago, is still somehow available to him, still essentially the girl he remembers. This delusion — maintained with great ingenuity and considerable force — is the novel’s central subject. Murdoch uses the sea, and Charles’s relationship to it, as the one thing in the novel that resists human projection: it does not respond to desires or reflect back the observer’s preferred self-image.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Murdoch’s Booker Prize winner — the novel that best demonstrates her central argument: that we are almost entirely unable to see other people as they actually are, and that this inability is what we call love.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Iris Murdoch