Iris Murdoch is beloved of bookish adolescents, which is not surprising because her novels are fantasies about bookish adolescence going on forever. Groups of old university friends in their sixties are just as tight as ever, still falling in and out of love with each other, and still agonising about their feelings with earnest reference to whichever post-Kantian philosopher, you sense, last came up in a lecture.
Her characters never grow up — elderly civil servants are ruled by strong, contradictory emotions; smashing things, going off in sulks, finally winning over a lover only to discover, on that instant, they don’t want them at all. In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History a precocious group of student friends concoct a plan to live together for ever, pursuing ideas and writing books. In Murdoch’s oeuvre, that plan worked out.
I hope I don’t sound scornful. My point is: I love this. There are far too many novels in which characters learn the same tedious lesson: to grow up, get a hold on their emotions, and adapt themselves to life as it is, in all its complexity. (It is, of course, the theme of every coming-of-age novel). Murdoch is making an alternative case, which is much less conservative and far more fun.
Her critics have tended to patronise her for this unconformity — it is taken, too often, as immaturity (“What a shame she never realised it might be possible… to just messily get on with loving one person,” the literary critic Colin Burrow wrote of The Sea, The Sea). But they’re missing the point.
The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker prize in 1978, is the tale of Charles Arrowby, a theatre director trying to renounce his glittering city life. He has flounced off to a house on the coast to swim, potter about and “learn to be good”. Rereading it is rather like going on holiday yourself. Murdoch’s descriptive passages — of eating, swimming, tramping about in nature — which could so easily be dull, are viscerally refreshing. Her trick, I think, is to infuse them with mysticism — landscapes breathe, animals think, the sea boils with possible monsters, exquisite little snacks are prepared with fetishistic ritual. You read with rapt attention.
Advertisement
It is also of course a wonderfully indulgent journey back to adolescence (even first-time adult readers will find it thick with nostalgia). The theme is immature love, the delusions and self-delusions needed to maintain it, and the destructive possessive forces it can unleash. Arrowby used to specialise in theatrical effects; he would “stun” audiences into submission. We learn he had a similar effect on women. Two former lovers turn up at his seaside haunt to claim him, while another is discovered (rather clunkingly, I’m afraid) to be already living in the village.
While Arrowby attempts to work through his feelings about all this, genres proliferate wildly. The novel is at once gothic ghost story, French farce, melodrama, philosophical treatise, and detective story. At one point it tinkers with a sort of Buddhist magical realism. It’s all great fun, and funny, too. In his self-deception and self-regard Arrowby at times veers close to Alan Partridge (he is also cast as our spectacularly unreliable narrator). “How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life,” he writes early in his adventure. “Still no letters.”
Towards the end of the novel, it almost looks as if Arrowby is learning something. Someone dies, and in his grief he starts to see others more clearly. He has idealised a former lover, he realises — now he sees her as she is, and begins to understand why she might not want to return to him. And in his pursuit of “goodness” he has hurt everyone around him. He is growing up.
However, this is a Murdoch novel, so he doesn’t. In the final chapter any neat conclusions are deliberately unpicked. Arrowby ruminates over his scraps of self-knowledge until they are churned into nonsense. “One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face.” A new mistress writes to him. He buys a lot of cheese. He knocks over a mysterious casket. Another demon is out.
