The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch (1978)

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999) was the prolific British author’s nineteenth novel. The book’s evocative prose and rich symbolism explore the illusion of love, the struggle for self-understanding, and the powerful pull of memory and desire. Following is a review and analysis from 1978, the year in which it was published:

"The story of Charles Arrowby, a self-involved and egotistical retired theater director begins as he is setting about to write his memoir. To focus on this task, he secludes himself in a house, not surprisingly, near the sea. He muses,

'Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

As he looks back over his life, Arrowby encounters his first, adolescent love, now much older and hardly recognizable. This upends his quiet plans as he grows obsessed with her and sets off some farcical situations."

Iris Murdoch’s gift for elevating even the most seemingly banal of events into the focus of enduring philosophical and ethical questions is rarely more convincingly wrought than in The Sea, The Sea. The story, told by a transparently unreliable narrator, is a convincing meditation on self-delusion. The Sea, The Sea was critically acclaimed and won the 1978 Booker Prize.