"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 to 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.
In exposing the jumble of motivations that drive Arrowby and the other characters, Iris Murdoch lays bare "the truth of untruth"--the human vanity, jealousy, and lack of compassion behind the disguises they present to the world. Played out against a vividly rendered landscape and filled with allusions to myth and magic, Charles's confrontation with the tidal rips of love and forgiveness is one of Murdoch's most moving and powerful tales."

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
Genres: Fiction

 

This is the first novel I have read so far written by Iris Murdoch, which won the Man Booker Prize in 1978 and it is also one of the 1001 Must Read Books. The main character, James Arrowby, is a retired theater director who moved to a house by the sea – one of my dreams 🙂 – to write his memoir/diary. I liked and disliked him as well throughout the book. I liked some of his habits, some of his thoughts, but I disliked his delusional love for Hartley.

I found this book (written by a woman from a man’s perspective) very thought-provoking and definitely well-written.

You can read more about it here.

“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.”

“We enjoyed and craved for each other’s company. What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.”

“Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted.”

“Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth: these things matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare.”

“Marriage is a sort of brainwashing which breaks the mind into acceptance of so many horrors. How untidy and ugly and charmless married people often let themselves become without even noticing it.”

“Yes, the final question is, how much does one crave for someone’s company; that is more radical, it matters more than passion or admiration or ‘love’.”

“Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.”

“Love is a miracle, real love is. It’s far above the sort of boundaries, and limits we were always tripping over. Why define, why worry, why not just be simple and free and loving with other people? We aren’t young anymore.”

“Every persisting marriage is based on fear.”

“When you feel full to the brim with your own life, committed, given, complete, it makes you feel so free too.”

“To find one’s true mate is to find the one person with whom happiness is purely innocent.”

“‘To establish relationships, you can’t just elect people, it can’t be done by thinking and willing’. […] ‘Most real relationships are involuntary. As in a family…’ ‘Yes. Or sometimes they just seem destined. A Buddhist would say you had met in a previous life.'”

“Some kinds of obsessions, of which being in love is one, paralyze the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality.”

“We never give up a pleasure absolutely, we only barter it for another.”

“One often feels guilt not because one has sinned, but because one has been accused!”

“Can one change oneself? I doubt it. Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a millimeter. 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.”