The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
"The Sea, the Sea" by Iris Murdoch is a complex novel structured as a diary/memoir narrated by Charles, who reflects on his life after relocating to a coastal home called Shruff End. The narrative delves into Charles's past, particularly his numerous romantic entanglements and his relationship with his cousin James, a soldier and Buddhist. Central to the story is Charles's unfulfilled schoolboy crush on Mary Hartley Smith, which he idealizes as his only true love, influencing his subsequent relationships and choices.
As Charles confronts his isolation and the arrival of former friends, rivals, and lovers, he becomes fixated on Mary, now married and living nearby. Driven by a misguided sense of "holy love," he resorts to drastic measures, including kidnapping her, which reveals his profound self-delusion and egotism. His struggles culminate in a series of dramatic and surreal events, ultimately leading to a confrontation with the reality of his delusions and the happiness of others. Through rich prose and intricate character studies, Murdoch explores themes of obsession, identity, and self-awareness, illustrating the irony that while Charles believes he seeks enlightenment, he remains blind to his own shortcomings. The novel invites readers to reflect on the nature of love and the complexities of human relationships.
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The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1978
Type of work: Novel
The Work
Told in the form of a diary/memoir, Charles first records his impressions of his new home and then reviews his past life largely through memories of a series of love affairs with various actresses. He also delineates his relationship with his one living relative, his cousin James, a soldier and a Buddhist, by whom Charles always felt overshadowed. Charles receives a friendly letter from James when he is ensconced in his new home, Shruff End, indicating James’s desire to get together. Yet more important than all of these affairs is a schoolboy romance he had with a girl named Mary Hartley Smith, which was unconsummated yet lives in his mind as the most important relationship he ever had. Before Charles was twenty, Hartley (as he calls her) disappeared from Charles’s life and married another man. Charles believes he has never married because Hartley was the only pure, true love he ever encountered.
Although Charles does not get along with the townspeople and in fact becomes a figure of fun to them, he is isolated for only a short time before he is deluged with a series of visits from former friends, rivals, and lovers, which lead to several dramatic scenes and mysterious phenomena. These tangled relationships, however, leave Charles indifferent once he discovers that Hartley, now called by her married name Mary Fitch, lives with her husband, Ben, in the nearby village. His initial encounter with Mary rekindles his desire for her, although Mary is now about sixty years old, wrinkled, and faded. Overwhelmed by what he considers his consecrated, holy love for Mary, he engages in a series of ploys and ambushes to win back her heart. He convinces himself she is unhappily married and, with the help of her adopted son, Titus, he kidnaps her and keeps her locked in an upstairs room in his house, thereby reducing her to a frightened, whimpering, helpless woman.
Charles’s assembled cousin, friends, and old lovers understand the absurdity of the situation while Charles cannot, and they convince Charles to let Mary return to her home and her husband. Yet this is not a return to reality for Charles, for he develops an intense hatred for Ben Fitch. Charles believes that Ben is trying to kill him by pushing him into a blowhole below his property, where the waves are lethal. To complicate the mystery, Charles is pulled from the blowhole in what seems to him a strange miracle. Although these plotlines are tied up by the end of the novel, Charles does not give up his fantasy of reuniting with Mary until, snooping around her house one day, he is surprised by a neighbor who shows him a happy postcard that Mary sent from Australia, where she and Ben have suddenly immigrated.
Told in the first person by Charles, the novel depends upon the quality of the narrative voice, and Charles writes grandly most of the time. Murdoch is a stylist who never disappoints, and she cleverly has Charles reveal himself as a supreme egotist, blinded by self-delusion, in his own voice. One of the central ironies of the novel is that although the reader and the characters surrounding Charles see through him, he is lacking in self-knowledge despite his endless self-examination. Another of the ironies is that of all the characters, only Mary and Charles’s cousin James are really “good” people, a goal Charles set for himself on the way to becoming a monster.
Bibliography
Baldanza, Frank. Iris Murdoch. New York: Twayne, 1974.
Bayley, John. Elegy for Iris. New York: Picador, 1999.
Byatt, A. S. Iris Murdoch. London: Longman, 1976.
Conradi, Peter. Iris Murdoch: A Life. New York: Norton, 2001.
Dipple, Elizabeth. Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Johnson, Deborah. Iris Murdoch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Todd, Richard. Iris Murdoch. New York: Methuen, 1984.