Will I love The Sea, the Sea?

The book is genius and totally bonkers in the best way.

When a would-be hermit, a 60something playwright named Charles Arrowby, retreats to a house by the sea to write his memoirs in solitude, he’s besieged by uninvited visitors and interpersonal trouble, much of it of his own making.

The titular sea is ever-present throughout, almost alive in all its changing moods, and there is a lot of food and drink amid the constant conversations. What follows is a masterpiece of self-delusion and nostalgia, obsession and regret, a very British kind of comic madness that resolves into philosophical calm. 

The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978 and I can see why. It is a compelling, uncomfortable book about a narcistic playwright (Charles Arrowby) who is both obsessive and self-destructive. It’s an uncomfortable read, as well. One of those very rare books that I wanted to put down, not because it was bad, but because the protagonist kept making horrible deluded decisions and I couldn’t stand it anymore.

An absorbing novel.

I will always find an excuse to read a classic literary tome about an unreliable narrator by the British seashore, partly because I know I’m in for a gut-punch of a landscape description. Even better when it’s garnished with a few—not too many, just enough—of those ultra-evocative lines that stop you in your tracks and make you go, “That’s exactly what that’s like!” But that’s not even the best part of this five-course meal of a book.

The story becomes increasingly surreal and disturbing. At each stage, Murdoch’s descriptions of the ocean landscape shift and change with the narrative, so… show more.

This 1978 Booker-winner is said to be the British philosopher and novelist’s finest work. A celebrated London theater director retires from his dissolute show-business life to the seaside, only to encounter his lost boyhood love, for whom he renews a frightening passion made of equal parts nostalgia and fantasy. In addition to its Nabokovian study in obsession and its poetic air of Shakespearean romance, The Sea, the Sea is also a seminar in the ethics of art: the characters debate their obligations to other people, the viability of art when divorced from ordinary human concerns, and even—this is not strictly… show more.