The sea, the sea
Lionel Jouffe rated ★ 9/10
Iris Murdoch. 1978 The Sea, the Sea is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1978, it was her nineteenth novel. It won the 1978 Booker Prize. Plot The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs. Murdoch's novel exposes the motivations that drive his character – the vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Charles Arrowby, its central figure, decides to withdraw from the world and live in seclusion in a house by the sea. While there, he encounters his first love, Mary Hartley Fitch, whom he has not seen since his love affair with her as an adolescent. Although she is almost unrecognisable in old age, and outside his theatrical world, he becomes obsessed with her, idealising his former relationship with her and attempting to persuade her to elope with him. His inability to recognise the egotism and selfishness of his own romantic ideals is at the heart of the novel. Arrowby terrorizes Mary (whom he calls Hartley as if she is male) by kidnapping her, stalking her, and allows her adopted son to die swimming. The title refers to people “watching” terrible acts (the guests aware of Charles’ kidnap and the son swimming in a dangerous area and not intervening or helping or preventing tragedy). In fact, everyone present, including Charles, is indifferent to the drowning. Mary is so traumatized by his stalking, she and her husband must leave their home and flee to Australia. (The book may allude to the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder, which was not seen but overheard with no “witnesses” seeking to stop the murder as it occurred.) The terror Mary experiences is downplayed by humor around Charles’s master-slave homosexual games. After the kidnapping of Mrs. Fitch by Arrowby, he is left to mull over her rejection in a self-obsessional and self-aggrandising manner over the space of several chapters. "How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality... Yes of course I was in love with my own youth... Who is one's first love?"[1]