The Sea, the Sea

Set in England, British author Iris Murdoch’s psychological novel, The Sea, the Sea (1978), follows self-obsessed playwright and stage director Charles Arrowby who retires to a remote coastal area to write his memoirs. Exploring the differences between public and private life, the novel shows how people craft public personas that seem more virtuous than their inner motivations really are. Moreover, it illuminates how little insight the modern subject actually has of himself and how he is perceived. Ultimately, Arrowby’s endeavor to make sure the world knows him proves circular and defeating, landing him back in his original self-obsessed position. The novel won the 1978 Booker Prize, one of the highest awards in British literature.

The Sea, the Sea alternates between diary form and first-person narrative. The entire plot takes place during a single summer in the mid-twentieth century. Charles Arrowby is retiring from the British theatre. Through a long career, he has made himself known as one of the country’s preeminent playwrights. Yet, he has found that the world of theatre lacks spirit and depth, forgoing them for the sensational illusions of transcendence and significance. Arrowby buys a house called Shruff End right at the edge of the sea, fantasizing that he will soon relinquish his personal attachments and peacefully drift out of his busy and superficial role.

Before long, Charles’s solitude at Shruff End is interrupted by various friends from London, who all seem to have tracked him down. He receives visitors and countless letters, all of which distract him from his business of figuring out how to let go. After a spat with Charles, a former acquaintance speeds away in his car, almost running over a woman walking near Charles’s house. The woman looks strikingly familiar; Charles speaks to her, realizing that she is his crush from childhood, Mary Hartley Fitch. During their teenage years, recognizing that they loved each other, they promised they would one day get married. When Charles told her he was moving to London to start theatre school, Hartley suddenly ended things with him. The two haven’t seen each other since, until now. Moreover, the feeling of a lost opportunity lingered in the background of every relationship Charles went on to have.



Without really gauging how Hartley feels about him, Charles becomes obsessed with reviving their past relationship—or, at least, his idealized version of it. His endeavor is sidelined by several of his past lovers, who incessantly visit him. At the same time, Hartley is threatened by her emotionally abusive husband, and her son, Titus. Titus runs away when family tensions become too difficult. Though part of Hartley wants to end her marriage, she has mixed feelings about trying to return to an inaccessible, innocent, and naive past. When she rebuffs Charles, he reacts desperately, shutting her in his house to forcibly isolate her from her other life. Hartley nearly suffers a psychotic break and begs Charles to let her go. After her repeated requests, he complies.

After Hartley leaves, Charles suppresses his continuing turmoil by brute force. For a while, Shruff End feels like the refuge he had hoped it would be. Titus moves in with him, and the two grow as close as family. Charles’s sense of order does not hold up for long: after a drunken night out with his friends, a man shoves Charles off a ledge into the sea. Someone dives in to rescue him; he imagines that his savior is his cousin James. However, when he returns to consciousness, he learns that Titus drowned after he was pushed in. Charles is distraught with guilt over Titus’s death, partly because he still clings to the fantasy of being Hartley’s family. His obsession deepens to the point where he even starts believing that Hartley’s husband is responsible for the attempted murder and Titus’s death.

Charles later learns that the man who pushed him into the sea is not relevant to Hartley’s life at all: the ex-husband of one of Charles’s former lovers, he came to take revenge. Charles reaches out to Hartley and finds that she is content with her husband again. In fact, they are moving to Australia to escape England and the burden of their memories there. Charles’s sense of control over his friends’ lives dissolves like the illusion that it has always been. He realizes that most of his friends are forgetting, or have already forgotten him. At the end of the novel, Charles learns that his cousin James has died. The events surrounding his death are suspicious, suggesting foul play, but it goes unresolved. Realizing that he is not meant to retire in isolation, he sells Shruff End and returns to London. He returns with improved insight into his egocentrism, even stating: “I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality.” Once in London, he intends to connect more deeply with his old colleagues and friends.