Jan 07, 2016 08:06 PM
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Rarely has a novel investigated jealousy so profoundly as Iris Murdoch does in this Booker-winning opus. Murdoch has been known to question the assumptions about love, to scrutinize its doctrine, and she does that with aplomb in The Sea, The Sea. Through the protagonist Charles Arrowby, the author mourns the expiry of youth and the death of innocence in an almost obsessive fashion. The subject of his obsession is, outwardly, his first lover Mary Hartley Fitch, but it is abundantly clear to the reader(and to the protagonist in a trademark Murdoch self-aware way) that it is his own youth he compulsively lusts after. He says as much in his extensive interior monologue at the end.
Murdoch also explores the violence inherently contained in love: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. She brings to the fore love's little cruelties. What she does even more admirably is that she lays bare the male psyche so effortlessly- a difficult enough job for a man, almost impossible for someone of the opposite gender.
Arrowby, a miserable man that he is, does not shy away from asking uncomfortable and hurtful questions of himself, knowing full well that even if he does get answers he shall not like them. Indeed, he takes an almost masochistic pleasure in subjecting himself to this intellectual ordeal. We are made witnesses to his mad, rambling, heart-wrenching questioning. The anxieties and the insecurities are made palpable. Crisis ticks away like a time-bomb through the narrative. The reality, if there is any to be grasped, shows itself in the form of disastrous consequences that hadn't originally featured in the realm of the possible, or at least, the probable.
The Sea, The Sea is a profound contemplation on love, obsession, youth and ageing, art and literature(theater in particular, since Arrowby is an acclaimed retired theater director).
