The Sea, the Sea

Charles Arrowby, a famous theatre director, has retired to a remote house on the northern coast to renounce the world, eat simply, swim daily and write his memoirs. The renunciation lasts about as long as it takes his London acquaintances to arrive uninvited. Then, in the village shop, he sees an old woman and recognises Mary Hartley Fitch, the girl he loved at sixteen and never got over, now married for decades to a retired man in a bungalow. Charles concludes at once that she is unhappy, that her marriage is a captivity, and that his purpose is to rescue her, and Murdoch follows this conviction to its logical and appalling conclusion, by way of a locked room and a great deal of self-justifying prose. Around him circle former lovers, a rival's son, and his cousin James, a soldier with Buddhist attachments and possibly other powers. The sea is constant, beautiful and lethal. It is the funniest of Murdoch's novels and the cruellest about its narrator, exposing an obsessive who never once doubts that his desire constitutes a moral claim on somebody else's life.