Editors Reads Verdict
Murdoch's Booker Prize winner — the novel that best demonstrates her central argument: that we are almost entirely unable to see other people as they actually are, and that this inability is what we call love.
What We Loved
- The unreliable narrator is one of fiction's finest — Charles believes himself self-aware while demonstrating his blindness on every page
- The philosophical content is woven into the narrative rather than stated — Murdoch trusts her story to carry her ideas
- The coastal setting is rendered with unusual precision and menace
Minor Drawbacks
- The length and the degree of Charles's self-deception can be testing — readers need patience with a narrator who is also their vehicle
- The supernatural elements divide readers
Key Takeaways
- → Love is predominantly a projection — we do not love people as they are but as we need them to be
- → Retreat from the world is not possible — the world follows us, usually in the form of our own desires
- → Theatre people carry the theatricality into real life and cannot distinguish performance from sincerity
| Author | Iris Murdoch |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Penguin |
| Pages | 502 |
| Published | January 1, 1978 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Classic |
| Difficulty | Advanced |
| Best For | Readers of serious British literary fiction who can appreciate a narrator who is brilliant, self-deceived, and completely unaware of the gap between those two qualities. |
The Retirement
Charles Arrowby has been famous. He ran a celebrated theatre company, directed major productions, was loved and feared in equal measure. Now he is retiring — to a house on the English coast he found in a property magazine. He will write his memoirs and eat simple food and look at the sea and not think about Clement, or Rosina, or Lizzie, or any of the women who have been so important to him.
Then he sees Hartley. His childhood sweetheart — the only woman he ever truly loved, the one he lost at seventeen — is living in the village nearby, married to a man called Fitch, apparently unhappy. Charles immediately knows what must be done.
The Self-Deception
Murdoch’s genius in The Sea, The Sea is to give us Charles’s account in full and then let us see, through the responses of every other character, how different his account is from reality. The Hartley he sees is the Hartley of fifty years ago. The rescue he plans is a form of abduction. His self-awareness, so frequently invoked, is the most thoroughgoing blindness in the novel.
The novel won the Booker Prize in 1978. It is among the best demonstrations in English fiction of the gap between how people narrate their own behaviour and what that behaviour actually is.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Sea, The Sea" about?
Charles Arrowby, retired theatre director, retreats to a house on the English coast to write his memoirs and renounce the world. He then discovers that his childhood sweetheart, Hartley, lives nearby — and becomes obsessed with rescuing her from her marriage. Murdoch's Booker Prize winner is a novel about the self-deceptions of obsessive love.
Who should read "The Sea, The Sea"?
Readers of serious British literary fiction who can appreciate a narrator who is brilliant, self-deceived, and completely unaware of the gap between those two qualities.
What are the key takeaways from "The Sea, The Sea"?
Love is predominantly a projection — we do not love people as they are but as we need them to be Retreat from the world is not possible — the world follows us, usually in the form of our own desires Theatre people carry the theatricality into real life and cannot distinguish performance from sincerity
Is "The Sea, The Sea" worth reading?
Murdoch's Booker Prize winner — the novel that best demonstrates her central argument: that we are almost entirely unable to see other people as they actually are, and that this inability is what we call love.
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