To repent of egoism: is autobiography the best method? Well, being no philosopher I can only reflect about the world through reflecting about my own adventures in it. And I feel that it is time to think about myself at last.The Sea, the Sea is broken up into three parts: In the first (“Prehistory”, 90 pages), we meet Charles Arrowby; a just retired theatre actor/director/playwright who has retreated to a mouldering home on the edge of the sea in order to reflect on his life and compile his memoirs. There's a naivete of voice in this section as Arrowby attempts to give a brief sketch of his early years while struggling with the format of autobiography. In the second section (“History”, nearly 400 pages), events speed up as people from Arrowby's past begin to drop in on him and there is much coincidence, tragedy, comedy, and farce. Arrowby is so busy during these weeks that this section is no longer in a journal form and stories are told in large, cohesive chunks whenever Arrowby has a chance to write them down. In the final section (“Postscript”, 25 pages), Arrowby is alone once more and attempts to put the preceding events into some perspective; the voice becomes deliberate and thoughtful. Overall, I found this format to be more interesting than the actual plot, but even at that, not too terribly interesting.
I like that in the first section, while Arrowby is alone at Shruff End, the reader is suckered into taking him at his word: he sketches his successful professional career, his family (dead and saintly parents; one living cousin, with whom he doesn't really get on), and his history of light and easy love affairs (having never married, he blames his lack of commitment on an adolescent lost love). At this point, he muses that this book will probably be about his wealth of theatre stories, or perhaps a revealing look at his longtime relationship with a grand dame of the London stage. When other characters begin to show up, however, Arrowby is revealed to be the most unreliable of narrators; particularly in the way his ego has scorched and burned a path through the hearts of every woman he's ever known. Even the cousin James, at first dismissed as unimportant, is slowly revealed to be rich, to be a General in the British Army, to be someone who is always checking in on Arrowby; a figure of mystery and mysticism. This evolution of the reader's estimation of Arrowby is very well done.
In this beginning section, too, Arrowby has much to write about his philosophy of eating simple foods and is always recording the meals that he makes for himself:
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.)And again, at first this seems like simple writing efforts by a man who doesn't yet know what to include in a memoir, but it is eventually quite revealing when others arrive and we learn that Arrowby has long been attempting to impose his eating philosophy on his friends; people who would much rather dine out at the Ritz. In these parenthetical asides about basil and meat, we can see Arrowby's true voice and he's a bit of a know-it-all tyrant. I want to include here that when I read The Year of Reading Dangerously I was amused by Andy Miller's efforts to recreate menus from The Sea, the Sea and it seems like further irony that these simple sounding meals are apparently pretty nasty in real life.
So, yes, the format is revealing about the process of memoir and self-discovery and there is much interesting philosophising about the driving forces behind a life (generally reduced to negative ones like jealousy and spite and self-deception). I enjoyed the nature writing about the ever-changing sea and the tenacious plants and people that presume to live in its proximity. And yet...this book felt overlong, and while there were some surprises in the middle section that made it nearly a real page-turner, I'm left with the overall impression of having been bored. I didn't like the main coincidence or the metaphysical malarkey, I found the characters to be mostly unlikeable (which I suppose is part of the point), and I was never unaware that Charles Arrowby had been written by a woman; he really didn't sound like any man I've ever met. I'm surprised Iris Murdoch won the Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea in 1978, so maybe it went over my head, or maybe it just hasn't weathered well, but for a book that I had been meaning to read for a long time, I nearly regret picking this one up.
Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.
