Iris Murdoch

VINTAGE CLASSIC MURDOCH- Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAISY JOHNSON 'I saw a monster rising from the waves.' Charles Arrowby has determined to spend the rest of his days in hermit-like contemplation. He buys a mysteriously damp house on the coast, far from the heady world of the theatre where he made his name, and there he swims in the sea, eats revolting meals and writes his memoirs. But then he meets his childhood sweetheart Hartley, and memories of her lovely, younger self crowd in - along with more recent lovers and friends - to disrupt his self-imposed exile. So instead of 'learning to be good', Charles proceeds to demonstrate how very bad he can be.

The Sea, the Sea

'I saw a monster rising from the waves.' Charles Arrowby has determined to spend the rest of his days in hermit-like contemplation. He buys a mysteriously damp house on the coast, far from the heady world of the theatre where he made his name, and there he swims in the sea, eats revolting meals and writes his memoirs. But then he meets his childhood sweetheart Hartley, and memories of her lovely, younger self crowd in - along with more recent lovers and friends - to disrupt his self-imposed exile. So instead of 'learning to be good', Charles proceeds to demonstrate how very bad he can be. **Winner of the Man Booker Prize 1978.** WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAISY JOHNSON VINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels.

Vintage Classics Murdoch Series

The Sea, The Sea

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value. The heroes at Troy fought for a phantom Helen, according to Stesichorus. Vain wars for phantom goods. I hope you will allow yourself plenty of reflections on human vanity. People lie so, even we old men do. Though in a way, if there is art enough it doesn't matter, since there is another kind of truth in the art. Proust is our authority on French aristocrats. Who cares what they were really like? What does it mean even?

To say we were ‘in love', that vague weakened phrase, cannot express it. We loved each other, we lived in each other, through each other, by each other. We were each other. Why was it such pure unadulterated pain? 

Guilt feelings so often arise from accusations rather than from crimes.

How does a child perceive such things, or rather how is it that they are so perceptible, so obvious, to a child, who perhaps, like a dog, reads signs which have become invisible amid the conventions of the grown-up world, and are thus overlooked in the adult campaign of deceit? 

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England’s theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors—some real, some spectral—that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.

bianca

Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimetre. When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one. I cannot think of any tiny good thing to do at the moment, but perhaps I shall think of one tomorrow.

Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky. And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing.

There were many ruined stone cottages, roofless and full of willow-herb and wild buddleia and butterflies, and we came on the ruin of a big house, with the box hedges of the formal garden grown into a forest and covered with rambler roses. I record these details, which I recall so clearly, because they are the very image of sorrow; things seen which might have given pleasure, but could not.

Your love for this girl, when she was a girl, was put by shock into a state of suspended animation. Now the shock of meeting her again has led you to re-enact all your old feelings for her. It’s a mental charade, a necessary one perhaps, it has its own necessity, but not like what you think. Of course you can’t get over it at once. But in a few weeks or a few months you’ll have run through it all, looked at it all again and felt it all again and got rid of it. It’s not an eternal thing, nothing human is eternal. For us, eternity is an illusion. It’s like in a fairy tale. When the clock strikes twelve it will all crumble to pieces and vanish. And you’ll find you are free of her, free of her forever, and you can let the poor ghost go. What will remain will be ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. And you’ll feel relief, you’ll feel free. At present you’re just obsessed, hypnotized.

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. 

‘All right, but in an unreal way, in a dream, in a might-have-been. Really, all this was over long ago and we’re dreaming it.’

‘Sometimes I felt I would die by wishing it when I went to sleep but I always woke up again and found I was still there. Every morning finding I’m still me, that’s hell.’

‘Well, get out of hell then! The gate’s open and I’m holding it!’

I woke to a sense of an utterly changed and perhaps dreadful world, like on the first day of a war. Joy, hope, came too, but fear first, and a black sense of confusion as if the deep logic of the universe had suddenly gone wrong. What was it that I had been so certain of, so confident about? What exactly was I up to? Had I done something mad and frightful yesterday, like a crime committed when drunk, remembered sober?

There was never any place for our love in the world. If there had been it would have won and we wouldn’t have parted. […] and there isn’t any place for this love in the world now, it’s pointless, it’s irrelevant, it’s a dream, we’re in a dream place and tomorrow we must leave it.

Being in love, that’s another slavery, stupid when you come to think of it, mad really. You make another person into God. That can’t be right.

To me it’s yesterday. I’ve been living with it ever since, reliving it and recalling it and going over and over it and wondering what went wrong and what happened to you and where you were. I think I’ve wondered where you were every day of my life. And I’ve been alone all this time, I’ve stayed in freedom, because of you. It’s yesterday. That was the only real time I ever lived through.

I have waited for you, although I never dared to hope that I would ever see you again. And now, fleeing from worldly vanities, I have come to the sea, and to you. And I love you as I always did, my old love is there, every little fibre and tentacle and tendril of it intact and sensitive and alive. Of course I am older and it is in that sense a different man’s love, and yet it is the same love. For it has kept its identity, it has travelled with me all this way, it has almost miraculously survived. Oh my dear, how many days and nights there have been, when you knew nothing of it, when perhaps you thought of me as far away in my ‘grand world’, when I have sat alone with an aching heart, thinking of you, remembering you, and wondering where you were. How is it that people can vanish so that we know not where they are?

I felt so touched and sad, and yet so oddly proudly detached and somehow sentimental, as I seemed to see in a second, all rolled up into a ball and all vanishing, some life that I might have had with [her]…

…you may be deluding yourself in thinking that you have really loved this woman all these years. What’s the proof? And what is love anyway? Love’s all over the mountains where the beautiful go to die no doubt, but I cannot attach much meaning to your idea of such a long-lasting love for someone you lost sight of so long ago. Perhaps it’s something you’ve invented now.

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear. Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you put the boot in or whether it makes you cower. As for marriage, people simply settle into positions of domination and submission. Of course they sometimes ‘grow together’ or ‘achieve a harmony’, since you have to deal rationally with a source of terror in your life. I suspect there are awfully few happy marriages really, only people conceal their misery and their disappointment.

And then, much much farther away, stars were quietly shooting and tumbling and disappearing, silently falling and being extinguished, lost utterly silent falling stars, falling from nowhere to nowhere into an unimaginable extinction. How many of them there were, as if the heavens were crumbling at last and being dismantled.

But on seeing her again the sense of absolute belongingness had been overwhelming; in the teeth of  our fates’ most exquisite cruelty, in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other.

What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.  There are such chasms of might-have-beens in any human life. 

The sea, the sea

aisha

** spoiler alert **
           Review at 74%:

Astaga. I've had this book on my curiosity list for awhile and read some reviews. I've expected it to be great but I've never anticipated the madness after madness I'd be presented with. Ini salah satu, kalau bukan fiksi paling racun yang pernah aku baca. Hampir semua tokohnya ganjil dan tercela dengan caranya masing-masing (kecuali barangkali Titus). Frustasi parah bacanya. Sebagai pembaca normal, aku cenderung berharap bahwa protagonis memiliki kualitas-kualitas yang redeeming. Salah satu pendorong utama aku untuk terus mengikuti cerita sampai akhir adalah perasaan suportif ke tokoh-tokoh untuk mencapai tujuan-tujuan mereka. Jarang-jarang aku baca cerita dengan anti hero sebagai tokoh utama. Lagi, biasanya tokoh anti-hero masih cukup menarik simpati untuk didukung. Tapi bagaimanakah Iris Murdoch bisa menawan pembaca dengan tokoh utama Charles Arrowby yang begitu egois, narsis, kurang ajar, delusional, manipulatif, tukang bohong, jumawa, senang membendakan wanita, dan hobi memaksakan kehendak? Awalnya aku tersentuh dengan kedalaman cinta Charles untuk salah satu tokoh, tapi itupun dimanifestasikan dengan binal. Jujur, sepanjang membaca aku senantiasa mencibiri pilihan-pilihan Charles dan terheran-heran dengan kelakuan SEmua orang. Tapi aku selalu penasaran, kebejatan apa dan siapa lagi yang akan terjadi. Buku ini hampir hampir alien dan jarang relatable, sekaligus sangat realistis, karena seberapapun aku ingin menyangkal, pada kenyataannya hampir semua orang miring dengan cara yang berbeda-beda.

Review at 100%:
MEMBAGONGKAN. Satu hal, aku merasa sangat terpikat sekaligus ga nyaman sama ceritanya karena hubungan antara tiap-tiap tokoh adalah mimpi buruk aku tentang kehidupan sosial. Sering banget di tengah aku baca aku membatin 'takut banget 😱'. This book elaborated the crazy things about human nature as a biased social animal exceedingly well. Sampai sekitar 88% buku, aku pikir buku ini macam majalah hidayah yang akan memberikan Charles ganjaran atas kebangsatannya. Tapi akhirnya, buku ini hanya tentang manusia. Retribusi bukan akhir. Kejadian buruk pun tidak mesti adalah sebuah ganjaran. Seakan sebuah keniscayaan, sekali-sekali ada kecelakaan, kehidupan berlanjut, manusia belajar, hubungan terjalin kembali, dan orang-orang pergi, kadang tidak untuk kembali. Walaupun bikin setres dan terguncang, jujur, The Sea, The Sea seru. Aku butuh 3 bulan untuk sampai ke 46%, tapi mungkin hanya seminggu untuk menghabiskan sisanya. Sampai postscriptpun aku sangat menikmati. 4.8/5

Jim Hagan

Length probably not justified but it was probably worth the payoff.

M. Marques

** spoiler alert **
           I didn’t expect this book to turn into one of my favorites.

One of my favorite parts:
“What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? I can do nothing for you any more, my darling. I wondered if I would be fated to live with this love, making of it a shrine which could not now be desecrated.”

What a gem.

'Time, like the sea, unties all knots' WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN BURNSIDE When Charles Arrowby retires from his glittering career in the London theatre, he buys a remote house on the rocks by the sea. He hopes to escape from his tumultuous love affairs but unexpectedly bumps into his childhood sweetheart and sets his heart on destroying her marriage. His equilibrium is further disturbed when his friends all decide to come and keep him company and Charles finds his seaside idyll severely threatened by his obsessions.

Emmett

'Oh stop, can't you just think of something better and want it?'
'One can't do that to one's mind. You don't understand people like me, like us, the other ones. ... You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don't look -'"

The sea is the governing rhythm of this novel, an impermeable mystery, a slate-coloured restlessness vacillating from tempting calm to roiling distress. Its turmoil-and-tranquility mimicking the repetitive motions of heaving and pulling back, giving, declaring and withholding, yielding and protesting possession, that the characters go through. Their personal illusions are gossamer, shimmering, definitely resolute, so full-mouthed and youth-ripe one moment and then the next, faltering, unsure. The protagonist is the histrionic Charles Arrowby - not in expression but certainly in temperament, regardless of what he may claim. He may have retired from the glittering business of theatre but finds himself unable to escape the business of cutting loose from his old friends, with whom it is clear he has tales (relationships) that are far from finished. It is a glimpse of his lost childhood sweetheart, married and weathered by time, that sets him off to recover a curtailed love, clutching at the dangled promise of recovering the sweetness of youth and the purity of that love...but at the cost of snatching her from her seemingly unhappy marriage? But, is she truly unhappy?

In true Iris Murdoch fashion, emotion is the pulse of the novel but the true core of it is a moral quandary. Her characters find themselves in situations that they respond strongly to with their hearts but also feel the weight of obligation, of behaving adequately or properly in their circumstances. Her people have been described as 'hysterical', having emotions far too intense for plausible daily life, but this reader imagines that the space of The Sea, The Sea demonstrates how affection and nostalgia can transmute into darker forms of delusional possession, or lead irresponsible lives and draw everyone into their mess. Murdoch does it all with unflinching precision.

How to account for an emotion that one seems so sure of but eventually repents of? How to act? How to be responsible for peoples lives and one's own? Especially when one has acted heartlessly? Can we ever see people clearly, as they are? Imagine others vastly different from ourselves? Arrowby's attempts to diagnose his lady love's distress and create a solution of bliss for them both comes up repeatedly against an idea he writes in his diary but I think never fully accepts - that she does not want this, does not want more. Moving on, accounting for that rather ridiculous moment of effusive, chaotic rashness, is a process of shifting of blame, like one shifts a weight from one foot to the other: in order to absolve or explain, the other has to be a 'liar'. How to try to explain ourselves, to explain away in hindsight an embarrassment. The presumptuous things one has to do to achieve a state of comfort living in the world.

The perceptive point is the end of knowledge of the other, the suggestion that despite what everyone has to say, and what the protagonist himself has to say, no one is fully trustworthy, official biographer. Hartley is rock, promise, a 'dead thing' to be resurrected, a damsel in distress, a liar, an image lost forever. Lizzy is ageing, beautiful like a schoolgirl, trusting, fearful, lively, stricken, full of love and waiting for that moment - as Arrowby imagines it with no less self-indulgence - where the object of her affections will give up and fall into her loving arms, or maternal and self-confident. Gilbert is generous, weak, amusing, someone Arrowby sees as beneath him and his actions seem to affirm that. Arrowby sees everyone and is quite sure of his opinions of them, but they still surprise him, but he still thinks he knows them. The reader knows not to trust these pompous readings of character.

Where the black mark of death could have caused an awakening, here it makes a stain, not quite a black hole, and the event passes and life moves along with it darkening the water. Here, to quote Seamus Heaney, there are no 'diamond absolutes' ("Exposure"). There is in time only the ever-changing waves of the sea, the sea.

Kwan Ann Tan

Oh Charles. Oh Charles, Charles, Charles. 

I'm so glad I started this book right after Brideshead Revisited. It was completely accidental, of course, but without this beautiful juxtaposition of characters that share the same name, would I have seen this book in the same light? As a consequence, this review will probably be about both books, since they have now become almost inextricably linked in my mind. 

Throughout my reading of the book, I could not help but feel that Charles Arrowby and Charles Ryder were indeed, distantly related, through that brilliant branch of protagonists that wistfully pine for an ideal, the legions of Gatsbys and Richard Papens that litter the literary world. 

But where Ryder is content to pine from afar, never daring to cross that barrier to grasp his prize, Arrowby takes his destiny into his own hands and captures that flighty bird, only to become so utterly disillusioned by it. 

I loved this book because I was able to feel it so poignantly. Every word touched a chord in varying shades and tones- Even at his most finicky, I could understand Arrowby's paranoia, I enjoyed reading about his queer mixtures of food, about the general tone of loneliness and wanting to be longed for. The thrill of the chase, the hard crash that comes with the breaking of a dream. 

The Sea, The Sea is such a beautifully eclectic mix of characters that flit in and out of Arrowby's life, and Murdoch manages them with such delicacy that I felt intimately connected to each and every one of their personal struggles, sympathized with their actions. 

Sigh. This is definately one of those books that will stay with me for a long time.

Trevor Berrett

Here we have the memoirs of Charles Arrowby. The story he tells is brutal and haunting, not always on the surface but mostly in the characters' psyches. These poor people should not be dealing with each other, but somehow out of their interaction comes a sense not just of redemption but also of transcendence. Arrowby is a despicable man--here he is telling a story that puts him and his life in such a high position that readers do not get to read the guilt, the pain, and the emptiness of his life, though it's there. Also, readers do not get a clear glimpse at the other characters because Charles himself does not fully comprehend those around him. While this may sound like a typical case of an unreliable narrator, Murdoch expertly uses this to explore the themes of egoism and jealousy. 

Murdoch is also a master of atmosphere: the bead curtain, the red room, the sea itself are all presences throughout the book. She uses them to great effect to create moods and to reflect the flow of the novel.

You can read my complete review on my blog, The Mookse and the Gripes.

The Sea, the Sea

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