The Sea, the Sea in The Obscure Reading Group

Mar 29, 2018 Laysee rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: five-star-books

The Sea, the Sea is the 1978 winner of the Booker Prize for good reasons. It is a brilliantly perspicacious exploration of human weakness in all its gory fullness. All the feelings that torment the soul are thrust into consciousness and displayed so well that the reading experience is so bad at times. Very few books that serve up a detestable self-serving cad as the main protagonist have succeeded in becoming for me a five-star read. This is an exception.

Charles Arrowby, an eminent theatre arti The Sea, the Sea is the 1978 winner of the Booker Prize for good reasons. It is a brilliantly perspicacious exploration of human weakness in all its gory fullness. All the feelings that torment the soul are thrust into consciousness and displayed so well that the reading experience is so bad at times. Very few books that serve up a detestable self-serving cad as the main protagonist have succeeded in becoming for me a five-star read. This is an exception.

Charles Arrowby, an eminent theatre artiste in his sixties, has retired to Shruff End, a ‘seaside paradise’ he owned, to write a memoir and supposedly to ‘repent of a life of egotism.’ His intended subject is his love affair with Clement Makin, a deceased, older actress and mistress who has shaped his life both professionally and personally. Hailed in the popular press as a ‘tyrant ‘, a ‘tartar’, and a ‘power-crazed monster', Charles is worshipped by the actors and actresses whose career he makes or breaks but who both curiously love and fear him. Right from the beginning, Charles’ writing plans are haplessly and irrevocably derailed. He let on that ‘something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it even now after an interval of time...’ The memoir that Charles ends up writing is this book we are reading. It is an account of his life, in particular, his obsessive pursuit of a childhood love that encapsulates for him an ideal so pure that nothing must stand in the way of its resurrection.

After forty long years, Mary Hartley Smith remains in Charles’ heart as his one true and only love, or so he claims. Other women, by comparison, are mere shadows. Or so he claims, too. Charles despises women, uses them for his pleasure and discards them at will. His relationships are characterized by irrational jealousy, vampirish possessiveness, and guiltless glee in smashing other people’s marriages. His old flames – Lizzie and Rosina – show up at his seaside cottage to lay claims on his love despite having suffered humiliation and grand heartaches. The husbands of these actresses rock up as well. Their interactions are tense but marvelously hilarious. Charles has no qualms about exploiting each of his adoring colleagues until he bumps into Hartley in the village. This encounter with his lost love precipitated a devastating detour into unexpected experiences, which spin out of control. The crux of the story is Charles’ descent into increasing horror and tragedy, so bent is he on snatching at happiness at the expense of others’ misery.

Murdoch described the pain of yearning, confusion, jealousy, possessiveness, deception, manipulation and servitude with insightful candor. The internal chaos found a literal sounding board in the tempestuous sea, whose wildness and beauty were captured in myriad flashes of color and delight. It took Murdoch 500 odd pages to sift the main protagonist until he is finally able to separate the wheat from the chaff and allow the reader to perceive truth in all the falsehood that has thickened over time.

Characters loom larger than life and understandably so because they are actors by profession. They leave a deep impression as friends who matter, imperfect though they are. They become for Charles a source of light in the murky muddle he created for himself. Lizzie, Gilbert, Peregrine, Rosina and James are stars in their own right and far more likeable than Charles. Lizzie, whom I felt most tenderly toward, writes to Charles: “My love for you has always had a sad face. Oh the weakness of the power of love.” And yet, she makes one of the most touching supplications to Charles for his kindness: “Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth: these things matter more and more as one grows older.”

Read The Sea, the Sea. Like the fathomless sea, this novel has depth and profundity that promise to call forth a richer understanding of the natural impulses that underlie the best and worst in human behavior. ...more

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Oct 13, 2023 Ken added it · review of another edition

Shelves: finished-in-2023

RTF

OK, now the "Review To Follow" part. Only, when you wait 10 days and come back to review a book, distance hurts hindsight. So mote it be. I'll just say this:

I started out liking the book because of the unique personality of Charles, even though he was a narcissist and a solipsist. Then the weight of his obsessions began to weigh on me. Here I was again, manacled to a protagonist I did not like and realizing that the sea crossing would take 500 pages. Could I stand it, Ben Franklin (or was it ...more

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Oct 17, 2023 Kathleen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophical, setting-england, women-writers

“Who is one’s first love?”

Charles Arrowby, a moderately famous playwright, has retired to an old house on the edge of the sea and intends to write of Clement, the much older actress and former love who made him famous. She is one of many former loves he discusses, one of many theater people involved in the web of his life. Here in isolation, he considers them all, considers himself.

In the first section he is only musing to himself, but in the second, these people emerge onto the scene and in a “Who is one’s first love?”

Charles Arrowby, a moderately famous playwright, has retired to an old house on the edge of the sea and intends to write of Clement, the much older actress and former love who made him famous. She is one of many former loves he discusses, one of many theater people involved in the web of his life. Here in isolation, he considers them all, considers himself.

In the first section he is only musing to himself, but in the second, these people emerge onto the scene and in a series of strange coincidences we begin to see how the truth of his life is something more complex. Charles unexpectedly meets his long-lost first love, and his quest for her is central to the story.

“She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.”

We may not all be famous and have dramatic friends, but like Charles, we are the stars of our own lives. And we often act as such, as if we were the center of everything.

“How important it seems to continue one’s life by explaining oneself to people, by justifying oneself, by memorializing one’s loves.”

Charles is flagrantly selfish, and we see his faults clearly as we read. He is so easy to mock, yet there is something there, something relatable, something so human in that selfish human way we all have.

Or perhaps it isn’t Charles at all, but Murdoch and her writing skill. You wouldn’t think these self-obsessed ramblings and unlikely events would be interesting, but I found it gripping--all 500 or so pages. I found in each character a fully-formed, uniquely interesting (if often baffling) individual. His cousin James provides a whole philosophical subplot, and the photograph of James’ parents dancing, described with such subtle and tender detail, is something I see perfectly, and won’t soon forget. So writing, writing, writing is the key to why this novel succeeds.

Still, throughout the book, I kept wanting to know what was real, who to believe. I wanted illusions corrected somehow. But I don’t think the author is concerning herself with realism here. She’s laying out a landscape of our fickle minds.

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher novelist, and in this book she took that combo to an amazing height. I’ve enjoyed the three of her books I read previously but this … This one is special. It’s a wonderful convergence of character and subject matter and setting. The sea! It is tumult and danger, calming and healing, mysterious and unknowable. As complex as we are, as we think we are anyway. It reflects what’s going on in the sky, and like the never-ending conversation inside our heads, it unceasingly clamors on and on. ...more

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Oct 19, 2023 Sue rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle, britain, my-own-books, fiction, read-2023

This pseudo memoir is unlike any other book I’ve ever read. In The Sea The Sea, Charles Arrowby leaves behind his life of theater and apparent renown to move to a house high above the sea where he will write about his life. Early on, we learn that Charles is very much an unreliable narrator. So much so that this novel becomes a story that will either capture your attention or cause you to shake your head so hard that you have to close the book. If you choose the first option, as I did, you likel ...more

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Oct 26, 2017 Jeremy rated it really liked it

At times the book is so luminous it sparkles with that essence as to why we write in the first place, and the insights of a life in the theatre, especially the British Shakespearean variety, are better than any other fiction I’ve read on the subject, but I dare say it gets stuck in a melodramatic loop in its second half. You almost want to shout out to the narrator, “Get over it man!” Other characters lose their brains too, but the novel eventually rebounds quite gracefully thanks to, in part, s ...more

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Oct 18, 2023 Dawn Tessman rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The story of Charles Arrowby who retires to the sea from a career in the theatre and is unexpectedly reacquainted with a long lost love whom he immediately attempts to woo and “save.” This book is a challenging read, as it follows Charles’ scheming thoughts and actions in diary-form, which are insufferable and infuriating at times, while his introspections specifically with regard to Hartley, his love interest, begin to become ploddingly tiresome and overdone by the end of the novel. At the same ...more

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