If you ask me, there is only one truly wonderful thing that can be done with food, and that is to eat it. I have never been able to fathom why people would spend so much time talking about food, cooking it, or even writing entire books dedicated to it.

So, when I read Charles's several-page-long rambling about food, it was a huge letdown for me. Honestly, the entire book appears to be a compilation of disjointed and meandering thoughts.

The plot seems overly contrived and forced. There are far too many coincidences that stretch the boundaries of believability. And aside from a few scarce and randomly scattered quotes, I truly struggle to understand what could have possibly earned this book the Man Booker prize.

It makes me wonder if there is something I am missing or if the standards for awarding such a prestigious prize have become so subjective that they are beyond my comprehension.

“The Sea, The Sea” is an extraordinary novel that combines elements of a page-turner, philosophy, comedy, and melodrama. It is truly one of the best I've read. Iris Murdoch is remarkably skilled at delving into the minds of her protagonists. Charles Arrowby, a late-middle-aged, bumbling, and morally dubious theater veteran, is a wonderful creation.

The first 100 pages of the novel, presented in Charles's journal form, might seem like they shouldn't work. He moves to Shruff's End, inhabits a lonely house by the sea, wanders around town, has visions he blames on LSD, goes on long rants about food, and reflects on his life. However, this early section, which is essentially pure exposition, actually works and oddly grips the reader. I was especially intrigued by what Murdoch leaves unsaid beneath the surface.

The novel seems to hold the record for the number of characters mentioned but never seen. You can follow the sub-narratives of at least a dozen of Charles's acquaintances. And then, at the end of these 100 pages, comes the twist, one of the greatest in literature. The journal has been hinting at a lost love from childhood, Hartley. A sequence of events unfolds, including visits from jilted lovers, and finally, Hartley is revealed.

After that, a string of completely insane coincidences begins. There are numerous characters, each with their own complex storylines. The cast is as good as any I can remember in a book, and they function like Shakespearean ghosts. Shruff's End is clearly meant to be seen as a stage. The book has its flaws, but it is so engaging that I couldn't sleep until I finished it. I highly recommend making the time to read this remarkable novel.

Sometimes, when I am still completely immersed in something, I may rate it too highly.

However, I truly don't think that's the case here. This is an instant favorite.

It presents an incredible portrait of a ridiculously self-obsessed man.

Perhaps it is the best book I have read all year.

What a huge mistake I have made by missing Iris Murdoch's novels all this time.

I will immediately start looking for the next one.

This particular one was truly brilliant.

It has captivated me from the very beginning and held my attention throughout.

The way the author has crafted the character and the story is simply masterful.

I can't wait to explore more of her works and see what other literary gems she has in store for me.

RTF

OK, now let's move on to the "Review To Follow" part. The thing is, when you wait for 10 days and then come back to review a book, the distance can have an impact on your hindsight. So be it. I'll just say this:

I initially liked the book because of the unique personality of Charles. Even though he was a narcissist and a solipsist, there was something about him that drew me in. However, as I continued reading, the weight of his obsessions started to become a burden. I found myself once again chained to a protagonist I didn't like, realizing that the story would span 500 pages. Could I endure it, despite what Ben Franklin (or was it Mark Twain) said? ("Like fish, guests start to smell after three days.") Or maybe it was two days? Counting a mother-in-law? One day.

But where was I? Oh, yes, in an almost haunted house on the sea, experiencing a fair amount of misery. Fortunately, Murdoch came to the rescue with some clever plot devices. This managed to distract me a little from the oppressive character of our ex-actor Charles.

I got back into the story despite the author's consistency in her characterization. Even better, I began to appreciate the way she was manipulating me through her writing. All this that seemed bad at first was actually good when seen from a different perspective.

By that time, I was simply eager to see what she would do with this pitiful clown. She had already paired him with all kinds of ex-lovers and ex-actors, many of whom held the same view of his mental health as I did. The stakes were high as well. There was a death, an ambush, and some gothic flourishes in the grand old house.

And, of course, the sea was always there, ready to play its part. You know what I mean. Davy Jones' locker is always open. And as for me, I became more open to Iris Murdoch's book during my reading, making the whole experience okay.

Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, the Sea" is a remarkable and complex work. It delves into the mind of one of the most despised personalities in modern times: the abusive narcissist.

The story takes the reader on a wild ride through the delusional fantasies of an ageing man, Charles Arrowby. He is a successful but vicious theatre director, obsessed with Shakespeare and now retired to a seaside house to write his life story.

Charles is not your typical fictional villain. He has no real power except for his inflated self-worth. He doesn't commit heinous crimes like killing or torturing, but his emotional abuse is far-reaching.

Like many abusers, he causes harm in the emotional realm, often overlooked in fiction as too ordinary. But in reality, people like him can cause great damage.

Charles is a lazy and loathsome social predator, and his diary in the form of this novel offers a disturbing look into his void of a soul. His actions set off a chain reaction of social devastation, leading him back to the lives of the women he has hurt.

The novel builds up to a calamity, with the reader able to see the disaster coming from a mile away. Charles sees himself as a hero, but in reality, he is the Medusa, freezing everything in his path.

He despises intimacy and uses others as tools for his amusement. His inability to connect with others leaves him both invulnerable and hollow.

Despite being Murdoch's most celebrated work, it is also her most difficult. The narrator's limited perspective dulls some of her insights, but she still manages to make the characters engaging.

This novel is similar to Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" in its exploration of a director's attempt to stage his own life. Murdoch's satire is both specific and general, taking aim at abusive narcissism and the ways we celebrate it.

She questions the value of celebrity and the exaggerated praise of artists, as seen through Charles' adulation of Shakespeare and dismissal of others.

The theatre loves Charles for his character, but outside of it, he is a flightless and pathetic bird. Murdoch dissects the misogynist with their own words and actions, allowing us to see them wallow in their shallowness.

Overall, "The Sea, the Sea" is a thought-provoking and powerful work that earns a well-deserved 10/10.

Rarely has a character exasperated and delighted me as much as Charles Arrowby, the narrator of this fictional memoir, did.

He is a renowned theatre director, playwright, and actor. In his sixties, he decides to retire not only from the stage but from the world itself. He wants to write his recollections in much-coveted isolation. So, he leaves his apartment in London for a godforsaken village in the north and a quaint house surrounded by the sea. The sea provides the perfect backdrop for this new stage of his life, where the inescapable question of “what was it all about” is urgently demanding an answer.

However, the answer doesn't come easily. Instead, a throng of uninvited guests show up. There's a Buddhist cousin, a vitriolic ex-lover, another more doting ex, an old buddy with enough grudges to kill a friendship, an actor eager to serve his old master, and even a teenage boy who wants to play the role of the son that never was. Most surprisingly, his first love turns up, living just a few doors up the hill. His isolation is gone, but the irresistible prospect of reviving his long-lost youth rushes in, at least in his mind.

Arrowby, ever the director, keeps casting himself and those around him as if they were characters in one of his plays. But the casting often doesn't match the desires of the others. Life is both like and unlike a stage. We all want to believe we can control it and play the part of the director in our own tragicomedies. But the truth is, there are many players involved, and they all have their own scripts.

Our hero spends the entire novel trying to come to terms with this idea. In his own words, he wonders if one can change oneself. He doubts it, saying that any change is minuscule. At the end of the novel, he reflects on the ordinary obligations and interests that remain after the chaos. He wants to live quietly, do tiny good things, and harm no one.

On the cover of my edition, this is described as a “rich, crowded, magical love story.” It is rich in many ways – aphorisms, humor, theatricality, psychological exploration, and philosophical allusions. It's also crowded with characters and enough mysticism and demons to make it magical. But is it really a love story? Maybe it's more of an obsession story or a delusional one. Arrowby insists it's a love story, but that emphatic “of course” makes me think he has his doubts.

It's up to the readers to decide for themselves. Iris Murdoch is generous enough to allow us this sliver of direction in our reading experience. I know that the timing has to be right for this one. When I first read it in my twenties, I could see the brilliance of the writing but couldn't fully relate to the hero's frame of mind or the comedy of it all. Now, as I'm off to cook a Sunday meal, I'm reminded that food plays a major part in the novel, just as it does in real life. As cousin James says, “Yes, well, I must go. See you at lunch. I suppose there will be lunch.”

How else than theatrically could an actor present his story to us? How else than subjectively could an egocentric show himself to us with his past and his deeds?

In a set with few elements (a relatively simple but interesting house), the sea dominates and watches over all that happens. The sea is elevated to the power of a silent and omnipresent witness, which, despite its immensity and magic, cannot erase any past. Not at all, nowhere does the past disappear. On the contrary, whenever it can revive and bring back into the present figures from distant periods. They could seek answers, explanations or just be eager to disturb the present.

If we think about the ample and vivid descriptions of the moments when Arrowby serves the meal and savors the preparations, we understand that in fact nothing else notable exists in the present. And then, the act of eating becomes ritualistic, accentuating his egoism that seeks pleasure even in the basic human actions of subsistence.

An unpredictable book, which juggles with the plans and the characters, which brings sudden reversals of the situation, a book that conquers and not just fills pages. Murdoch is a master in creating an atmosphere similar to magic. The pearl necklace, the red room, the sea with all its faces have together a hypnotizing effect that makes the novel flow and the mind to shape.

And thus, we come to ask ourselves how far one can become a victim of egoism... do we manipulate others or not? Do we always see the past in our favor? Have we been and are we so good? So right to have done all that we have done? Do we really think and care about the feelings of those around us? Do we live only for and after our desires? Do we offer understanding and kindness?... or do we always see ourselves as the most innocent in any situation?

Can we trust our own perceptions about the past, or do we actually reconstruct it according to our own way?

A reading that, besides the rich and fascinating descriptions of nature, makes us think, perhaps reactivates an order closer to what matters and subtly points out aspects of the human character, perhaps more and more dehumanized by consumerism, pride, superficiality, indifference.

An invitation to reflection and to the recovery of one's own being. That noble one.

I first learned about Iris Murdoch from the movie about her life (with the wonderful Judi Dench, watch it if you have a taste for tragedy until the end of time) and I had said then that someday I would read something of hers. Over the years I neglected it, but as part of the ambitious project to read all the Booker Prize winners, this book that won in 1978 finally fell into my hands.

With the title directly referring to Xenophon and the Anabasis of Cyrus, the story of a famous middle-aged theater director who decides to retire to a seaside house and whose (of course) past visits him like the tide with tragic consequences has some of the most beautiful descriptions of the sea that I have ever read (and usually I'm allergic to exhaustive descriptions). In direct contrast and analogy to the psychological makeup of the author, it creates a chaotic and troubled universe, but at the same time mysterious with an underlying thriller dimension that however never reaches its peak, weaves a melancholy, contradictory and rather unlovable hero and explores loneliness in the "demon-haunted worship that is human life".

Following the course of the sea, the narrative sometimes clashes and sometimes retreats, sometimes explodes and sometimes subsides, while the inevitable philosophical aura that pervades the book (after all, Murdoch was a philosophy professor) turns this Sea into a heavy and demanding read, which makes you want to swim in its deep waters, but never lets you be carried away by its wave.

I found this both repelling and compulsive. The more repulsed I became, the less capable I seemed of putting it down. I was hooked just several pages in, enamored with the elegant, elegiac tone of Charles Arrowby's attempts at composing a memoir/diary after exiling himself to a remote seaside home to live in monastic isolation.

Via Arrowby, Murdoch's prose takes on a sea-like quality. The ebb-and-flow of memories and musings churning together present and past to the point where the edges of reality and unreality begin to blur imperceptibly. I settled in for what I fully expected to be more or less an intelligent and eerie psychological thriller.

But just as it was not meant for Arrowby to enjoy his solitude, so I was quickly jumbled out of any conceptions that I was in for a graceful memory piece. Suddenly figures from Arrowby's past begin showing up uninvited at his doorstep. This culminates with the unexpected reappearance of a lost first love, setting off a string of increasingly erratic behavior that quickly threaten to become dangerous.

It took a while for me to adjust to such a drastic change of narrative trajectory. But as it went along, I began to appreciate the grand guignol absurdity of it all. And it wasn't, I admit, until just about the very end that I realized how the incongruent-seeming opening does indeed set up nicely the rest of the novel. Reported to be the premiere interpreter of Shakespeare of his day, isn't it natural, maybe even inevitable that Arrowby's life takes on an expansive Shakespearian theatricality?

\\"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.\\" -Shakespeare, As You Like It

And that kind of sums up my final response to The Sea, The Sea. Creaky, isolated Shruff End is not the place of escape and seclusion Arrowby intends it to be. But is merely an empty stage upon which the figures of his past, present and possibly his future appear with a theatrical punctuality. Reciting their lines, performing their small roles and disappearing again into the wings again until called upon again to reappear on cue around Arrowby as he plays his \\"many parts,\\" from a wizened Prospero to a tragic Lear to a pathetically misguided attempt at Romeo and Juliet that quickly deteriorates into a truly horrific parody of Taming of the Shrew.

Did I enjoy The Sea, The Sea? I can't honestly say that I did. I'm not even sure that I liked it per se. But it did compel me to descend into a unique type of claustrophobic madness, creating a literary experience of a type that I've never quite experienced before, which is saying something indeed. My true reaction is suspended somewhere between three and four stars. But considering that the only other Murdoch novel I've read has continued to grow in stature in my memory, I gladly give the novel the benefit of the doubt and round my rating up.

\\"The past and the present are so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.\\"

I purchased this book from Booksale Baguio in April 2009 for a mere P30. After delving into its pages and devouring the story, I found myself thinking that I would willingly part with P800.00 to experience such a remarkable novel. This book is not only included in the prestigious 501 Must Read Books but was also a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

I am truly enamored with the way Dame Iris Murdoch crafted her characters and seamlessly introduced them into the plot. I managed to read this in just 5 working days, from Monday to Friday, doing most of the reading at home, and even squeezing in some pages at the gym during breaks. In the morning, as I placed the book beside me and endured the morning traffic while driving, I would reflect on what I had read the previous night. It was as if I was replaying the images in my mind and speculating on what would unfold next. It felt like I was engrossed in a telenovela, and this was made possible by Dame Iris Murdoch's vivid and suspenseful storytelling approach. The way she described the sceneries and even the food was simply captivating.

The story revolves around Charles Arrowby and is presented in a journal form. Charles is a retired stage actor and director who has retreated to the seaside after retirement. In the beginning, I was a bit confused as I initially thought the narrator was female, given that Dame Iris Murdoch is a woman. It was quite surprising to read a woman writing from a male's perspective without the typical melodramatic touch that most female writers tend to have. Of course, with the exception of Nicholas Sparks, a male author who is a bit of a drama queen!

However, I did have one minor disappointment with the novel. The reason given by Charles Arrowby for how he accepted his passion to win back Hartley or Mary was a bit lacking.

"One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story. She was not able to be my Beatrice nor was I able to be saved by her, but the idea was not senseless or unworthy.... The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed. Perhaps this is the final forgiveness that James spoke of."

These lines, which appear on page 502, just three pages from the end of the book, attempt to explain the obsession that Charles Arrowby displayed throughout most of the book since he reunited with Hartley after so many years since high school graduation. At one point, I thought it was just crazy, as if Charles Arrowby was trying to recapture his youth and virility, and Hartley seemed like a lunatic. But in reality, these were not the main messages at all. The novel was about undying love and forgiveness.

In 2002, I watched the movie IRIS, starring Kate Winslet as the young version and Judy Dench as the old version. When I saw the book, I immediately picked it up because I loved the movie. Dame Iris Murdoch unfortunately suffered from Alzheimer's Disease. In the movie, she lost her mind, couldn't recognize her partner-lover, and neglected to clean her house and herself. It was a beautifully acted movie that paid tribute to a highly respected literary master.

Bravo, Dame Iris Murdoch!

Iris Murdoch, an Irish and British novelist and philosopher, is renowned for her novels exploring themes such as good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. In 1987, she was honored as a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for her services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her twelfth on the list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Sadly, in 1997, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and passed away in 1999 in Oxford.

My interest in Iris Murdoch was first piqued after watching the 2001 film Iris, starring Kate Winslet and Judi Dench. The movie delved into her relationship with her husband John Bayley, from her early years to their later life when she was afflicted with Alzheimer's. I highly recommend this film.

The Sea, The Sea, published in 1978, won the Booker Prize. It tells the story of Charles Arrowby, a retired director and actor, who relocates to an old seaside house called Shruff End to pen his memoirs. The house, on a rocky peninsula with an old tower but lacking electricity and indoor plumbing, offers Arrowby solitude and the opportunity to swim nude in the sea, a perilous act considering the need to climb the rocks afterwards. Initially, he believes he spots a sea monster in the waves, but is it real or a remnant of a bad LSD trip from years ago? Additionally, the house may be haunted as Arrowby sees faces and hears strange noises at night. Former friends and lovers visit, but he is fixated on his childhood sweetheart, Hartley, who makes an unexpected appearance. Her presence compels Charles to attempt to rekindle a romance that died long ago, despite her aging and rejection of his advances. The novel centers on Arrowby's egotism and selfishness, which he fails to recognize in himself.

This was a rather lengthy novel that I almost abandoned several times. However, the story continuously drew me back in, and I was eager to read more as it unfolded. The character of Charles Arrowby was unlikable; he was a misogynist who treated his past lovers poorly and an egotist who thought only of himself. Nevertheless, Murdoch's writing was superb, particularly her descriptions of the sea and the landscape. The story also raises numerous ethical questions and what-ifs. Can one revive a long-lost love? Something many older people have surely contemplated. Overall, I did enjoy this novel and look forward to reading more of Murdoch's works in the future.

Definitely not my cup of tea.

The ramblings of a completely self-absorbed, delusional and unbearably verbose person left me absolutely indifferent. It was as if I was trapped in a never-ending loop of the same mundane thoughts.

I forced myself to finish it, because I'm a sucker for self-punishment, and also because I hoped for an unimaginable twist at the finish line that would make it all worth it. However, I was left none the wiser.

If you don't count the bizarre self-inflicted death (not suicide though) that came out of the blue, there was really nothing remarkable about this piece.

I suppose the author should be considered very talented, after being able to fill pages upon pages with what was essentially the same ideas, over and over again.

It's quite a feat to be able to make something so monotonous seem almost interesting at times.

Nonetheless, I do hope that my next readings this year will turn out to be more satisfying and engaging, rather than leaving me feeling so disengaged and unfulfilled.