Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919, although she spent her childhood in London and Bristol. After graduating from Oxford and publishing a study of the works of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, Murdoch started her successful career as a novelist. However, her fiction is deeply infused with ideas and concepts. Her novels typically have complex plots, whose characters represent different philosophical positions, with observations and reflections on 20th-century middle-class life, fluctuating between the realistic, the grotesque and the comic.
The Sea, the Sea tells the story of a retired playwright and director, Charles Arrowby. Arrowby comes from a fairly modest background, but has climbed socially throughout his life to become quite famous. At the start of the novel, we learn that he has decided to retire in solitude to a run-down old house near the sea.
MEMORIES OF THE SEA
The book takes the form of a diary, into which Arrowby pours his memories, thoughts and obsessions, and this literary device is highly convincing. In the beginning, Arrowby notes down his impressions of the sea, his difficulties in climbing out of the water onto the rocks and describes his new surroundings. This is punctuated with his thoughts on cookery, and brief portraits of his friends. These erratic early notes allow us to become familiar with Arrowby, even to like him, without knowing much about his past. As the novel progresses, new facts emerge that throw a much darker light onto his character.
DON’T TRUST THE NARRATOR
Arrowby is immediately established as an unreliable narrator. After beginning with a moving and beautiful description of the sea, he surprises us by writing that something horrible has happened “which I can’t bring myself to describe.” We learn nothing more, until twenty pages later. One day, while sitting on some rocks and looking over a perfectly calm sea:
“I saw an immense creature break the surface and arch itself upward. At first it looked like a black snake, then a long thickening body with a ridgy, spiny back followed the elongated neck. [….] I could also see with remarkable clarity, a kind of crested snake’s head, green-eyed, the mouth opening to show teeth and a pink interior.”
“[...] vidi un’immensa creatura frangere la supercifie ed ergersi in aria. In un primo momento sembrava un serpente nero, poi un lungo corpo sempre più voluminoso dotato di una cresta spinosa seguì il collo allungato. [...] Potevo anche vederela testa con notevole chiarezza, una sorta di testa crestatadi serpente con occhi verdi,e la bocca che si apriva a mostrare i denti e le fauci rosa”.
Hallucinations
Arrowby’s only unlikely explanation is that this might have been a hallucination caused by his use of LSD once when he was young. The reader is left with a sense of uneasiness, however, in spite of Arrowby’s attempts to downplay the event.
Although Arrowby is frequently very satisfied with the writing style and power of the descriptions of his friends, they are often unkind. One by one, several of his friends appear in the novel and we learn that they are quite different from their portraits in earlier parts of the diary. A letter from his old lover, Lizzie, reveals that she is not just a rather silly, over-feminine woman, who owes her career to Arrowby. Significantly, Lizzie describes him as a womaniser, who has treated her badly.
JEALOUSY AND ENVY
Arrowby himself cannot explain his green-eyed monster vision; however, we gradually discover that for most of his life, he has been motivated by jealousy, envy and possessiveness. His envy of his cousin James is particularly virulent:
“… part of my unease about my cousin consisted in a fear that he would succeed in life and I would fail. […] It is scarcely possible to say how far my ‘will to power’ was inspired by a deep original intent to outshine James and to impress him.”
“parte de disagio che mi ispirava mio cugino era dovuta al timore che la sua vita fosse coronata dal successo e la mia, invece, si risolvesse in un fallimento. [...] È quasi impossibile dire quanto la mia “volontà di potere” fosse suggerita all’inizio da una determinazione profonda di eclissare James e di impressionarlo”.
self pity
And yet, when we meet James, we quickly discover that he is a far better, braver man, willing to sacrifice his own life for Arrowby, something Arrowby hardly acknowledges. His narcissism is astounding. On discovering that his first love, Hartley, lives nearby, Arrowby carries out an absurd plan to kidnap her and hold her prisoner until she agrees to leave her husband and come back to him. Although Hartley is the unwilling captive, Arrowby feels most sorry for himself.
“I was totally vulnerable and helpless. I had lost control of my life and of the lives in which I was meddling. I felt dread and a terrible fatalism; and bitter grief, grief such as I had never felt since Hartley had left me so many years ago.”
“Mi sentivototalmente vulnerabile e smarrito. Avevo perduto il controllo della mia vita e delle vite in cui mi ero immischiato. Ero pervaso da un senso di terrore e di tremenda fatalità; e da una sofferenza amara, una sofferenza che non avevo mai provato in vita mia da quando Hartley mi avevaabbandonato tanti anni prima”.
AN EMINENCE
This is perhaps the point at which our liking for Arrowby is most severely challenged, and yet throughout the novel he manages to remain a sympathetic character. Murdoch skilfully maintains our fascination for him and, like his friends, we remain drawn to him in some way.
The American literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that no other contemporary British novelist was of Iris Murdoch’s ‘eminence’. The writer A. S. Byatt called her “unmatched in world literature since her death” in 1999. The Sea, the Sea has been twice adapted for radio. In the 2015 version, Arrowby was played by Jeremy Irons.