Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Most Gorgeous Prose...and a Wonderful Story, Too, February 23, 2002
By A Customer
The Sea, The Sea has become one of my top five favorite books and Iris Murdoch one of my favorite authors.In The Sea, The Sea, we meet arrogant, snobbish Charles Arrowby, a retired London theatre director. Charles has recently bought a house by the sea where he hopes to finish his pretentious autobiography. Many things happen, however, to disrupt this enterprise. First, Charles discovers that one of the small town's inhabitants is his very first love, a love who disappeared from his life in his teens. Believing her to symbolize his lost youth and innocence, Charles becomes obsessed with her almost to the point of madness. Iris Murdoch's books are all excellent studies of relationships and The Sea, The Sea is certainly one of her best. In it, the character of Charles lies at the center of a vast network of complex relationships and interpersonal interactions. Much of the novel is an exploration of how we, ourselves, influence what others eventually come to see about people and how they relate to them. Although relationships take center stage in this novel, there is much symbolism and even a little of the supernatural. The sea is so ever-present in this book that it almost seems to be a character in and of itself. Charles reacts to the sea in many ways, some benign, some not so benign. The sea, itself, is portrayed as something that is untimately not able to be understood or controlled, much as is life. Although this book is passionately moral, it is definitely not a treatise on how to behave in a moral fashion. In fact, many of Murdoch's characters could be said to be anything but "moral." The values and consequences portrayed in this book are done with such a skillful hand, that The Sea, The Sea sits head and shoulders above Murdoch's other books, good as they are. Just like the theatrical world it explores, The Sea, The Sea, is a showy, dramatic and powerfully effective book. It is Iris Murdoch's masterpiece and a huge reward for any reader.
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61 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I see, I see, February 24, 2002
Having recently seen the film Iris, and being disappointed inasmuch as it focused mostly on her personal life as a young woman and on her Alzheimer's as an older woman without featuring information about her many novels, I decided that I'd been remiss in never having read her works. I then proceeded to read The Sea, The Sea. This book is deep as the sea, inasmuch as it is about the mental processes of a not-so-good playwright who manages to become famous. The novel turns out to be quite interesting; in fact, fascinating; though at one point, somewhere around page 100, I felt that I didn't give a whit about it all. That was temporary. I returned to the book, read the remaining 4/5ths, and found it rewarding. It starts out on an intimate basis, as if you are reading a letter from a friend, and I utterly loved that ploy. Then, it changes; suddenly, all kinds of twists and turns occur, and though the reader has at first seen Charles, the protagonist, as a humorous man who withdraws from society to a home by the sea (I chuckle, for this house on a cliff in rugged terrain is definitely not the haven which a home should be), circumstances plunge him into temporary madness. The word "sea" conjures so many images of all that the sea can be: wild, calm, loving, cruel. Charles gets to see every aspect of the sea's personality, and we get to see every aspect of his. At one point in the book, Charles' madness is hard to take, as we are drawn in to experience it. In other words, since Charles has chosen a craggy environment in his quest for peace, peace is hard to come by. Charles undergoes an epiphany -- in fact, more than one. He turns out to be a lucky man, inasmuch as he is given the unique opportunity of learning that he was wrong in many ways, and in many of the impressions which he formed, thoughout his earlier years, and thus he is able to look at life in a new light. Murdoch adds charm to the sometimes grim account in the way she brings in ordinary details of day-to-day life. This serves to bring in an element of humor which sometimes caused me to laugh out loud. The character of James, Charles' cousin with whom he had a kind of sibling rivalry all his life, is the soul of the book. We laugh at Charles' description of James early on, but we are quite sober at the picture of the true James at the end. Symbolism abounds in this book. Though one doesn't have to know the myth on which it is based in order to appreciate it, it doesn't hurt to have as much knowledge as possible to heighten one's understanding. I found myself wondering if this book was autobiographical, because I saw some similarities between the Iris of the film and the Charles of the book. Though the protagonist in The Sea, The Sea is a male, we know from the film, Iris, that Iris was bisexual. I also wondered if there was any reason why several of the women in Charles' life had male names, if there was any meaning behind those names. Why Charles' voice sounded more feminine, at times, than masculine. But that is secondary to the more important issues of this book, and the fact that this is a novel very much worth reading, certainly raising many more issues than I have summed up briefly in this review.
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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Confronting the monster of one's ego, November 10, 2002
The first section of this novel, "Prehistory," seems interminable at times. The British director Charles Arrowby has retired to a drafty old house by the sea to write his memoirs. He begins in diary form, relating his daily regime, detailing his fastidiously prepared meals, recalling with fondness (and condescension) people in his life, dismissing others who have crossed him, and reminiscing about the one "true love" of his life, who inexplicably left him when he was a youth. With the exception of one or two mysterious incidents (at one point, he thinks he sees a dragon in the sea), so little happens in the first 87 pages that anyone will wonder, why am I reading this?It's a set-up. After this lengthy prologue, people from Arrowby's past begin arriving at his doorstep or in the nearby village, shattering the tranquil atmosphere of his retirement and belying the gist of his memories. As the one character who Arrowby had earlier described as "very attached to me" says in anger: "You're an exploded myth.... You never did anything for mankind, you never did a damn thing for anybody but yourself." The reader quickly realizes that Arrowby is an egotistical boor who, under the guise of "love," wielded power and fear over the people in his life. Then, as the horde of Londoners from his past continue to invade his new home and complicate his life, he unexpectedly runs into his adolescent flame--and he convinces himself that, trapped in a marriage he regards as repulsive, she still has feelings for him. What follows is both hilarious and heart-rending--and often excruciating to read. Charles Arrowby is not a likeable character; he is, in fact, detestable. And the life he remembers is not how his "friends" recall it. As his cousin asks him, "What is the truth anyway...? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions." In the scene previous to this conversation, Arrowby is in a museum, examining Titian's "Perseus and Andromeda," which depicts Perseus rescuing Andromeda from a dragon. Murdoch's novel asks (and here I oversimplify): who's really the monster? who's the rescuer? who indeed needs to be rescued? and at what expense? Be warned: For this Penguin edition Mary Kinzie has provided one of those annoying introductions that would make an excellent afterword. Much of her essay is incomprehensible unless you've read the novel, and it gives away many important plot elements, including the pivotal climax. Happy is the reader who waits until finishing the novel to read this incisive summary.
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