What is the book about?
"The Sea, the Sea" (1978) is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs. Played out against a vividly rendered landscape and filled with allusions to myth and magic, Murdoch's novel exposes the jumble of motivations that drive her characters - the human 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 dwell in seclusion in a house by the sea. Whilst there, by an extraordinary coincidence 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 totally outside his theatrical world, he becomes obsessed by her, idealizing 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. After the farcical and abortive kidnapping of Mrs. Fitch by Arrowby, he is left to mull over her rejection in an enjoyably 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?" (From Wikipedia).
Why this book?
The Wikipedia summary of the book, while pithy, makes it look like a throwaway comedy of manners. This novel of a whopping 500 pages has more to offer than farcical love affairs. Despite the seemingly light premise, this counts as one of Murdoch’s darker works, serving up weighty issues such as goodness, morality, imagination, fantasy, and myth. The central character Charles is an old dandy with delusions of grandeur who thinks he can innocently retire from the hustle and bustle of the world after a lifetime of tempests. He finds out during his self-imposed exile that the past is a difficult thing to shake off, and that being good is not just a matter of wanting to be. As he slowly and humiliatingly drowns in the sea of past escapades, he comes to the realisation that he has been living a life of egotism – in spite of all his good intentions. Murdoch does not judge her character, nor does she tell us what the alternative is to living a life of egotism. The impression the reader walks away with after 500 pages is that there is NO alternative. We are “doomed” to live our lives out in fantasy rather than reality. One of the final passages reads: “But of course pain remains and will remain. We are conditioned beings who salivate when the bell rings. This sheer conditioning is another of our most characteristic dooms.” In other words, there is very little we can do to escape our egotistical nature. The novel also casts doubt on the ascetic and mystical way of life: Can one truly evade the temptations of earthly life by turning one’s back on them? It is our nature to be self-centred and incline towards vanity, and any attempt to deny this is just a form of self-delusion.
The novel’s title, interestingly, echoes Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” in which the magician Prospero attempts to transform magic into spirit (a higher phenomenon), just as Charles attempts to transform the profane into the spiritual.
The novel’s scope is broad and may strike readers who are not used to Murdoch’s style as meandering and wordy. My advice is: Be patient with the novel and you will be dazzled when you reach the end.
What would be a good book to read after this?
If you fall under the spell of Murdoch after reading this, which is very well possible, I must refer you to two other great (shorter) novels of hers: “The Bell” (1958) and “A Severed Head” (1961).
0 comments:
Post a Comment