With his own 'clever face' for one trying to repudiate cunning and guile too pleased with his 'entirely satisfactory' hairpiece for one who had turned against the lies of art and vanity.

Instead of the affable seals that are supposed to visit his coast, Arrowby sees a horrible sea monster. dramatists are disgraceful liars unless they are very good.')īut the omens aren't good for this effort to switch from spellbinding and pleasing oneself to being good and true. This Prospero wishes to drown his book, give up power for quiet days, 'change magic into spirit.' (Miss Murdoch, defending her own craft, has her theatrical protagonist say about the novelist that 'his humble medium is on His business has been magic and illusion and working his will on others now Arrowby is a famous English director-playwright, stage tyrant and lover of stars, now in his 60's he has droppedĮverything and retired to a lonely seaside house, there to be washed clean by the cold tides of the 'blessed northern sea' in which he swims daily. The first page of 'The Sea, the Sea' announces an unusual project: learning to be good, after a life of egoism, art and power. (The demons are man-made: 'We are all potentially demons to each other,' writes Charles Arrowby, the narrator of 'The Sea, the Sea,' after 495 Into bizarrerie, epiphanies of the spiritual and invasions of the demonic. Her stories, including this one,Īre marked by an uncommon variety and complication of incident the reader is continually surprised and shocked by the abrupt appearances, disappearances and reappearances of characters, unexpected couplings and uncouplings, sudden shifts Yet her novels have a lot of flash - thanks to her quite remarkable powers of invention. Intelligence, a philosophically educated, uninfatuated English moral intelligence with nothing flashy about it. Her work keeps its interest, I think, because of its His is Iris Murdoch's 19th novel, unusual I'm sure for a serious writer today.

Iris murdoch the sea the sea review