The Sea, The Sea

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Once more I find I have been economical with the truth, but this time I shall tell all. I promise. Hartley was my childhood love. We were inseparable. A working class Romeo and Juliet. And then she left me when I went to drama school. No reason, no explanation. She left me heart-broken. Perhaps it was because of her I became the thespian I am, but that's another story. Here she was again. Mysteriously turning up again after 50 years, living in the very same village as me. Arrowby falsely believes that Mary's husband was involved, and his obsession soon resurfaces. He finds out that it was the ex-husband of another one of his former lovers who pushed him. Arrowby begins to feel increasingly isolated and feels his power over his loved ones is waning. When Mary informs him of her plans to move to Australia, Arrowby decides to return to London, humbled slightly by the blow to his ego. She did not have to join my grand intimidating alien world. To wed his beggar maid the king would, and how gladly, become a beggar too. The vision of that healing humility would henceforth be my guide. This was indeed the very condition of her freedom, why had I not seen this before? I would at last see her face changing. It was, I found, a part of my thought of the future that when she was with me Hartley would actually regain much of her old beauty: like a prisoner released from a labour camp who at first looks old, but then with freedom and rest and good food soon becomes young again.” Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one. I cannot think of any tiny good thing to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow."

The journal he writes, and which we are reading, is an attempt to form some structure to his life, and to be a memoir of sorts. But even though he professes to be writing details of the house and village, he seems to find it impossible to concentrate on the job he has set himself, which he says is the reason for being there in the first place. He becomes distracted inordinately easily; even the food he prepares is an excuse. He rambles on about his culinary activities - both past and present,Echoing the prominent place that romantic love and sexual obsession often play in Murdoch's novels, the greatest obstacle to the self-understanding and maturity that Charles so falteringly strives for proves to be his accidental meeting with his first love, Hartley, who, after her abrupt cessation of their chaste yet intoxicating relationship, became a rather ordinary housewife. Contrasting the thoughts and motivations of Hartley and her all-too-banally brutal husband Ben with those of Charles and his many neurotic visitors, the novel descends into a whirlpool of opposing wills and thwarted stratagems. With a morbid fascination brought about by Murdoch's nimble control of this cast of idiosyncratic characters, we watch as serene reflection eludes Charles and he desperately grasps at the unrealistic phantoms spawned by the long lost object of his unconsummated childhood infatuation—leaving many victims in his wake. Throughout the novel, theatrical illusion, Tibetan magic, unconscious projections, supernatural interventions, and overripe fantasies all skew clear perception, distorting the characters' awareness of events and entangling them in a confused web of self-centered power relations, even as they try to be virtuous. Murdoch’s novels always have at least one Svengali figure. Charles is the obvious candidate: his career is highly relevant, he controls the narrative we read, and towards the end, he says “ I was the dreamer, I the magician”. But there are several other contenders, and that was the most interesting puzzle for me: Rosina, James, even Titus or Hartley? Do Iris Murdoch’s novels still matter to people? Or, after the high-water mark of her Booker-winning 1978 novel, The Sea , The Sea, and a late period of longer, more philosophically abstruse books, did her work collapse into her biography – the jumble of love affairs, absurdly messy kitchens and Alzheimer’s disease that were dramatised by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in the 2001 film of her life? And, once the attention paid to her life had abated, had contemporary fiction simply moved on? Rather than, as lesser mortals may have done, seeing such action as delusional idiocy requiring the attention of a doctor if not the police, the others recognised it for what it was; an important expression of the futility of egotism. So they helped me enact my plan.

An ethical question: can we say that a child’s death can ‘strengthen’ a troubled marriage, if the child, now an adult, was the cause of most of the trouble?Increasingly Charles has little grumbles about the privations of his self-imposed exile, reporting spooky goings on. He half imagines there is a poltergeist, as things keep mysteriously getting smashed. In the event this turns out to be a red herring. An old girlfriend had been indulging in a spot of mischief-making. He reassures both himself and the reader that this could be due to a solitary experiment with mind-altering drugs in his youth, thus rationalising the weird "supernatural" experiences that he has. There is an ambiguous attitude to the supernatural here. Sometimes it seems as though there can be no logical explanation for the events; yet at other times a delayed reaction to LSD seems more than likely. Several of the horrific and malevolent impressions Charles reports, are bound up with his feelings about the sea. He is terrified of a monster of a creature - a thirty-foot eel-like serpent which coils up out of the sea. But is this after all merely what used to be called a "bad trip"? The Sea the Sea by Iris Murdoch, is her 20th novel, which won the Booker prize in 1978. The author famously was an academic; a professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, who also wrote novels with a philosophical focus. What is love? How is the idea or thought of it, especially young love, affected by the passage of time, what with our tendency to romanticize our youth? The best parts in the first half of the book have to be the wonderful descriptions of the sea, which increasingly seems to have an organic, perhaps omniscient presence,