The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
I have hugely misjudged Iris Murdoch.
For some reason I had this idea in my head that her fiction would be old-fashioned and stuffy, and I honestly couldn't tell you where that idea came from. I knew she'd won the Booker for The Sea, The Sea. I knew the covers of a lot of her books slap. None of that mattered, I'd already decided she wasn't going to be for me. So I picked up The Sea, The Sea expecting to have to push through it, and instead I loved it. I now need to sit with whatever bias I was carrying around about her work, because this is great, and I'm going to have to read more of her.
The novel follows Charles Arrowby, a retired actor who's moved to a coastal town to escape the noise of his old life. He's there to write his autobiography, and he very quickly discovers that writing an autobiography is a lot harder than he thought, not least because the life he's trying to leave behind keeps turning up on his doorstep. People from his past keep appearing in the village, no matter how far he's run. That's the setup, and I'm finding it quite hard to figure out how to talk about what happens next without spoiling it, so I'd recommend going in as blind as I did.
Charles Arrowby is not a nice man, no matter how badly he wants us to believe otherwise. He's vain, arrogant, convinced he's cleverer and more worldly than he actually is. He's an alcoholic. He's violent. He's a misogynist, and he doesn't see any of it in himself, he genuinely believes he's better than everyone around him. He's a brilliant portrait of what we'd now call toxic masculinity, and he's also one of the great unreliable narrators in fiction.
It becomes clear fairly early on that he's not telling us the whole truth, or rather he's telling us his version of it, the version he's convinced himself is true. I loved the moments where the mask slips, where you catch him being less smart and less impressive than he thinks he is, and I found myself laughing at those moments because he has absolutely no idea he's just shown himself up. It's very rare that I laugh aloud when reading a book, and this certainly isn't a "funny" novel, but it absolutely pulled a few audible chuckles out of me.
The book is structured as his attempted autobiography, made up of diary entries and letters, plus the letters written back to him. What's clever is that the book you're reading at the start is not the book you're reading by the end. Murdoch shifts the whole genre of the novel underneath you, and she does it so slowly that you don't clock it happening until it already has. Looking back you can trace exactly how you got from one to the other, but I couldn't tell you the moment it changed. There's a small part of me that still wants to read the book the opening chapters promised, but I'm more than happy with the book I actually got.
Underneath all the stuff about masculinity, fame, and loneliness, and underneath the fact that Charles Arrowby is just not a very nice person, there's a real undercurrent of queerness running through the book. Most of the men here are strongly hinted to be gay. This was published in 1978, a decade after homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK but a long way from equal rights, when there was still a serious social taboo attached to being gay. It's an odd thing to read now, having lived through what looks in hindsight like a bit of a golden age for queer acceptance, only to be watching those rights come under attack again, with the rhetoric in the UK getting worse by the year. There's something unsettling in seeing a glimpse of how things used to be, when people had to be secretive about who they were. None of this is to say Charles Arrowby's behaviour has anything to do with his queerness, to be clear, he's just a monster who happens to be a very funny and entertaining narrator.
I loved every second of reading this. It's a big book, but Murdoch's writing is so fresh that it never once felt like a slog. Her voice is incredibly strong and the pace ebbs and flows in a way that keeps you on your toes, long languid stretches where you just sit in the language and the world she's built, then sudden bursts where it moves with the urgency of a thriller. The worst thing a long book can do is get boring, and that never happened here. Even in the stretches where I had no idea where it was going, I trusted that Murdoch knew exactly what she was doing, and I was happy to go along for the ride.
Really recommend this one. I'm definitely going to be reading more Iris Murdoch.