The Sea, The Sea (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) [Paperback]

 

 

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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.

The Sea, The Sea has become one of my top five favorite books and Iris Murdoch one of my favorite authors.

In The Sea, The Sea, we meet arrogant, snobbish Charles Arrowby, a retired London theatre director. Charles has recently bought a house by the sea where he hopes to finish his pretentious autobiography. Many things happen, however, to disrupt this enterprise.

First, Charles discovers that one of the small town's inhabitants is his very first love, a love who disappeared from his life in his teens. Believing her to symbolize his lost youth and innocence, Charles becomes obsessed with her almost to the point of madness.

Iris Murdoch's books are all excellent studies of relationships and The Sea, The Sea is certainly one of her best. In it, the character of Charles lies at the center of a vast network of complex relationships and interpersonal interactions. Much of the novel is an exploration of how we, ourselves, influence what others eventually come to see about people and how they relate to them.

Although relationships take center stage in this novel, there is much symbolism and even a little of the supernatural. The sea is so ever-present in this book that it almost seems to be a character in and of itself. Charles reacts to the sea in many ways, some benign, some not so benign. The sea, itself, is portrayed as something that is untimately not able to be understood or controlled, much as is life.

Although this book is passionately moral, it is definitely not a treatise on how to behave in a moral fashion. In fact, many of Murdoch's characters could be said to be anything but "moral." The values and consequences portrayed in this book are done with such a skillful hand, that The Sea, The Sea sits head and shoulders above Murdoch's other books, good as they are.

Just like the theatrical world it explores, The Sea, The Sea, is a showy, dramatic and powerfully effective book. It is Iris Murdoch's masterpiece and a huge reward for any reader.

In 'The sea, the sea' the human spirit in all its frailty is softly laid out before the reader, encapsulated in a language of times past that is sometimes more poetry than prose. If you love pure literature, read this spectacular book. It will show you a view down into humanity as though through the eyes of a god.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Unpleasant, and not the place to start with Murdoch
So many people who want to start reading Iris Murdoch start here, because it's her only novel to win a Booker Prize. Read more

Published on April 27 2002

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascination
A tangled tale acting like an undertow, irresistably drawing people on shore and readers to participate. Read more

Published on July 9 2001 by Ruth Westkaemper

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