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A review by batbones
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
5.0
'Oh stop, can't you just think of something better and want it?'
'One can't do that to one's mind. You don't understand people like me, like us, the other ones. ... You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don't look -'"
The sea is the governing rhythm of this novel, an impermeable mystery, a slate-coloured restlessness vacillating from tempting calm to roiling distress. Its turmoil-and-tranquility mimicking the repetitive motions of heaving and pulling back, giving, declaring and withholding, yielding and protesting possession, that the characters go through. Their personal illusions are gossamer, shimmering, definitely resolute, so full-mouthed and youth-ripe one moment and then the next, faltering, unsure. The protagonist is the histrionic Charles Arrowby - not in expression but certainly in temperament, regardless of what he may claim. He may have retired from the glittering business of theatre but finds himself unable to escape the business of cutting loose from his old friends, with whom it is clear he has tales (relationships) that are far from finished. It is a glimpse of his lost childhood sweetheart, married and weathered by time, that sets him off to recover a curtailed love, clutching at the dangled promise of recovering the sweetness of youth and the purity of that love...but at the cost of snatching her from her seemingly unhappy marriage? But, is she truly unhappy?
In true Iris Murdoch fashion, emotion is the pulse of the novel but the true core of it is a moral quandary. Her characters find themselves in situations that they respond strongly to with their hearts but also feel the weight of obligation, of behaving adequately or properly in their circumstances. Her people have been described as 'hysterical', having emotions far too intense for plausible daily life, but this reader imagines that the space of The Sea, The Sea demonstrates how affection and nostalgia can transmute into darker forms of delusional possession, or lead irresponsible lives and draw everyone into their mess. Murdoch does it all with unflinching precision.
How to account for an emotion that one seems so sure of but eventually repents of? How to act? How to be responsible for peoples lives and one's own? Especially when one has acted heartlessly? Can we ever see people clearly, as they are? Imagine others vastly different from ourselves? Arrowby's attempts to diagnose his lady love's distress and create a solution of bliss for them both comes up repeatedly against an idea he writes in his diary but I think never fully accepts - that she does not want this, does not want more. Moving on, accounting for that rather ridiculous moment of effusive, chaotic rashness, is a process of shifting of blame, like one shifts a weight from one foot to the other: in order to absolve or explain, the other has to be a 'liar'. How to try to explain ourselves, to explain away in hindsight an embarrassment. The presumptuous things one has to do to achieve a state of comfort living in the world.
The perceptive point is the end of knowledge of the other, the suggestion that despite what everyone has to say, and what the protagonist himself has to say, no one is fully trustworthy, official biographer. Hartley is rock, promise, a 'dead thing' to be resurrected, a damsel in distress, a liar, an image lost forever. Lizzy is ageing, beautiful like a schoolgirl, trusting, fearful, lively, stricken, full of love and waiting for that moment - as Arrowby imagines it with no less self-indulgence - where the object of her affections will give up and fall into her loving arms, or maternal and self-confident. Gilbert is generous, weak, amusing, someone Arrowby sees as beneath him and his actions seem to affirm that. Arrowby sees everyone and is quite sure of his opinions of them, but they still surprise him, but he still thinks he knows them. The reader knows not to trust these pompous readings of character.
Where the black mark of death could have caused an awakening, here it makes a stain, not quite a black hole, and the event passes and life moves along with it darkening the water. Here, to quote Seamus Heaney, there are no 'diamond absolutes' ("Exposure"). There is in time only the ever-changing waves of the sea, the sea.
'One can't do that to one's mind. You don't understand people like me, like us, the other ones. ... You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don't look -'"
The sea is the governing rhythm of this novel, an impermeable mystery, a slate-coloured restlessness vacillating from tempting calm to roiling distress. Its turmoil-and-tranquility mimicking the repetitive motions of heaving and pulling back, giving, declaring and withholding, yielding and protesting possession, that the characters go through. Their personal illusions are gossamer, shimmering, definitely resolute, so full-mouthed and youth-ripe one moment and then the next, faltering, unsure. The protagonist is the histrionic Charles Arrowby - not in expression but certainly in temperament, regardless of what he may claim. He may have retired from the glittering business of theatre but finds himself unable to escape the business of cutting loose from his old friends, with whom it is clear he has tales (relationships) that are far from finished. It is a glimpse of his lost childhood sweetheart, married and weathered by time, that sets him off to recover a curtailed love, clutching at the dangled promise of recovering the sweetness of youth and the purity of that love...but at the cost of snatching her from her seemingly unhappy marriage? But, is she truly unhappy?
In true Iris Murdoch fashion, emotion is the pulse of the novel but the true core of it is a moral quandary. Her characters find themselves in situations that they respond strongly to with their hearts but also feel the weight of obligation, of behaving adequately or properly in their circumstances. Her people have been described as 'hysterical', having emotions far too intense for plausible daily life, but this reader imagines that the space of The Sea, The Sea demonstrates how affection and nostalgia can transmute into darker forms of delusional possession, or lead irresponsible lives and draw everyone into their mess. Murdoch does it all with unflinching precision.
How to account for an emotion that one seems so sure of but eventually repents of? How to act? How to be responsible for peoples lives and one's own? Especially when one has acted heartlessly? Can we ever see people clearly, as they are? Imagine others vastly different from ourselves? Arrowby's attempts to diagnose his lady love's distress and create a solution of bliss for them both comes up repeatedly against an idea he writes in his diary but I think never fully accepts - that she does not want this, does not want more. Moving on, accounting for that rather ridiculous moment of effusive, chaotic rashness, is a process of shifting of blame, like one shifts a weight from one foot to the other: in order to absolve or explain, the other has to be a 'liar'. How to try to explain ourselves, to explain away in hindsight an embarrassment. The presumptuous things one has to do to achieve a state of comfort living in the world.
The perceptive point is the end of knowledge of the other, the suggestion that despite what everyone has to say, and what the protagonist himself has to say, no one is fully trustworthy, official biographer. Hartley is rock, promise, a 'dead thing' to be resurrected, a damsel in distress, a liar, an image lost forever. Lizzy is ageing, beautiful like a schoolgirl, trusting, fearful, lively, stricken, full of love and waiting for that moment - as Arrowby imagines it with no less self-indulgence - where the object of her affections will give up and fall into her loving arms, or maternal and self-confident. Gilbert is generous, weak, amusing, someone Arrowby sees as beneath him and his actions seem to affirm that. Arrowby sees everyone and is quite sure of his opinions of them, but they still surprise him, but he still thinks he knows them. The reader knows not to trust these pompous readings of character.
Where the black mark of death could have caused an awakening, here it makes a stain, not quite a black hole, and the event passes and life moves along with it darkening the water. Here, to quote Seamus Heaney, there are no 'diamond absolutes' ("Exposure"). There is in time only the ever-changing waves of the sea, the sea.