The most significant person, however, is one who had disappeared from Arrowby's life long ago: his lost first love, the woman he wanted to marry but who fled. The hero, Charles Arrowby, is a retired and celebrated theatre director and, it goes almost without saying, a sentimental cynic and a monster of egotism. So there it is, a book that has left me thoroughly divided. It's as flawed as it is wonderful and it took a brave jury to give it the prize. Or, at least, a very forgiving one. The main character is an egotist. The press has called him a tyrant and power-crazed monster. He’s a misogynist who has used and abused women all his life. A good friend, a male, tells him “the trouble with you, Charles, is that basically you despise women.”

Perhaps I should make myself known as I make myself a ploughman's lunch, ploughman's lunch. My name is Charles Arrowby. You probably recognise the name. In my time I have been a famous actor, playwright and theatre director, but now I am in my 60s I tire of the egotism of the stage and have left London to live alone in Shruff End, a remote dwelling perched on the edge of land, o'erlooking the sea, the sea, that sometime had the still calm of mill-ponds past and at others crashed tumultuously in frothy whirlpools of anguished darkness. The book is his memoir-cum-diary-cum-novel of a few eventful months at Shruff End. He bumps into his childhood sweetheart, Mary Hartley, who had disappeared in their teens. Cue quests, plots, reminiscences, and theatrical friends and ex lovers, plus mysterious cousin James, dropping in at crucial moments. There’s also incarceration, attempted murder, near death experiences, actual death, missing - and found - persons, possible supernatural events, a sea monster, and some strange meals.

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. She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)

The life he’d foreseen — the windy, wave-beaten promontory, the sketchy “nature study,” the small gourmet treats (Iris Murdoch does wonders of sneaky characterization by having him gloat over his solitary, greedy, unappetizing menus), the lighthearted pleasure of torturing infatuated ex-mistresses — all begins to disintegrate, as people and nameless things from the past crowd into his field of vision. That was the prehistory. Now then we reach the history. The time when letters and characters began to serendipitously arrive as if by magic – that word again. First came Lizzie, pleading with me to love her, to let her be my object. It was tempting, but no. Next a letter from James that I read while lying naked after swimming once more in the turbulent sea, the sea. He too will come to visit. And now a car appears. It is Perry – he does so hate being called Perry – and Rosina. I am so very grateful to Perry for having been so adult about my elopement with Rosina, a level of maturity not since reciprocated by his wife. This comedy is lit with the aplomb of true comedy’s calm understanding of moral obliquity . . .There is the genuine weight of obsession in Arrowby’s narrative, but also the mere weight of iteration and ingenuity.”—Martin Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review With nothing to do but "learning to be good", it is inevitable that Arrowby will create some drama even in this isolated spot; and this he does by attempting to draw his former lover Lizzie into his new life while trying to destroy the marriage of his childhood sweetheart, Hartley. Other visitors congregate at his new abode, shedding light on Arrowby's past and present: his Buddhist cousin, James (of whom he has always been profoundly jealous), and various theatrical ex-lovers and ex-friends. Their relationships reveal the shallows of Arrowby's self-knowledge – as well as his ability to manipulate. These events serve two purposes, because they also show another side to Charles. At one point, an ex-girlfriend remarks acidly, "you know you can't keep your hands off women", yet throughout so far Charles has claimed he has a scrupulously fair and respectful attitude to females, even using the word "unsexed" to describe his fastidious, ascetic attitude. Yet now we learn that he has broken up the marriage of Rosina, seemingly just because he can. He will jettison the ever-faithful Lizzie without a thought, at the drop of a hat, as he has done several times before. The reader now begins to wonder about the idolised Hartley. Could the relationship have possibly been as innocent, pure and altogether romantic as Charles has claimed?

Arrowby's passion for Mary -- now plain, and settled in a different lifestyle, decades removed from the girl he loved -- comes very close to being beyond believable.

I struggled with this for a while, mainly because I was so irritated by Charles Arrowby, the main character and unreliable narrator. Arrowby is a retired actor, director and playwright who has moved to a remote cottage by the sea and is tentatively writing his memoirs. Whole successions of characters, many of them former lovers, arrive and depart and Charles encounters his first love Hartley who has also retired to the area with her husband. That emphatic ‘of course’ makes me think he has his doubts. He’s too intelligent not to. Up to the readers to decide for themselves. Iris Murdoch is generous enough to allow us at least this sliver of direction in our reading experience. His personal sorcery suddenly fails to work, the forces of necessity (chaos, the amorphous surrounding sea) take over, in one of those manic, violent, coincidental climaxes that leave the characters (and the reader) breathless. Death, along with marriage, is an inevitable touchstone of reality for Murdoch.A four-part adaptation of The Sea, The Sea by Richard Crane, directed by Faynia Williams appeared as the Classic Serial on BBC Radio 3 in 1993. The actors included John Wood as Charles Arrowby, Joyce Redman as Hartley Fitch, with Siân Phillips, Sam Crane& Peter Kelly. Episode 3 included an interview with Iris Murdoch. On bad press: “Even if readers claim they ‘take it with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’.” Felt a little depressed but was cheered up by supper: spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil. (Basil is of course the king of herbs.) Then spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill. Boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soya oil and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in. With these, a slice or two of cold tinned corned beef. (Meat is really just an excuse for eating vegetables.)” But her art teaches us to continue to recognise her selfhood, the mystery and irreducibility of it, and to see morality in such an effort. All of her novels explore the contest between love and art as conduits to truth, and the ways in which contingency contends against form. Does art redeem? Does love? Or do we keep confusing our misunderstandings with metaphysics? Contingency is frightening, as all Murdoch’s characters know, capricious, unpredictable; but it is in the hazards of the fortuitous that life reveals itself. Love is also contingent, unpredictable, hazardous. Good art, Murdoch also said, is “the highest wisest voice of morality, it’s something spiritual – without good art a society dies. It’s like religion really – it’s our best speech and our best understanding – it’s a proof of the greatness and goodness which is in us.” Although Murdoch parses the grammar and traces the limits of love, she never stops believing in its moral force, or the spiritual potential of art. Art is impossible, so is love. And the only possible moral choice is to continue trying to achieve both, knowing that they are impossible.

This book earned the author the Booker Prize in 1978. It’s a powerful book. I had seen it forever at library sales and for years I thought I should read it. Finally, I did, and I wish I had read it earlier. I’m giving it a rating of 5 and adding it to my favorites. Charles claims that as a result of their idyllic childhood passion, all his future chances at happiness in love were destroyed. All his subsequent relationships with women had been paltry and sham, compared with the perfection of the love shared between him and Hartley. And the distorted rather overbearing relationship he had had with the much older Clement, could presumably have had a negative influence on him. The story of Charles Arrowby, a self-involved and egotistical retired theater director begins as he is setting about to write his memoir. To focus on this task, he secludes himself in a house, not surprisingly, near the sea. He muses:

Success!

He does have quite a few friends, however, and ex-lovers, who aren't quite willing to let him fade from view. Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize—a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs Perhaps the earlier part of the novel was necessary solely to establish the mundane side of Charles's life, so that these events could be more believable. Certainly the fact that we have been told Charles "lost" Hartley at 18, when she ran away from him, makes us wonder about how honest he is being about himself, and how clear about his memories. Why did she leave him so irrevocably, so that there was no possibility she might be found? And indeed, is this really what happened? Hartley herself seems to be an enigma in the novel, sometimes professing love for Charles and actively seeking him out, yet constantly refusing to leave her husband. At times she seems weak and ineffectual, at others she is reported by other characters to be unstable, and there do seem to be indications that this is true. And how does the reader interpret her final action? Clement made him feel so good that he did not attempt to find Hartley. She kept him from his one true love by...being...so...terrific. The Poor Bastard. I could have told you the country is the least peaceful and private place to live. The most peaceful and secluded place in the world is a flat in Kensington.”