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sunshowerdandelion) wrote2025-01-26 08:18 pm
sunshowerdandelion) wrote2025-01-26 08:18 pm
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26.01.2025 (1): The Seas!
Another novel I have probably only scratched the surface of. Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea is committed, committed to Charles Arrowby, who's mostly a monster in that personal 'neighbor who has a vendetta' kind of way. In that 'jealous ex' sort of way. He has really the most grandiose delusions, and I really found him cartoonishly evil at times (again the wormy, personal sort of evil), but then he believes himself to be in love. Honestly as someone who has been like that, I would have perhaps done some of what he did to Hartley, and I definitely understand the wormy, self-immolating, fantastical evil someone is capable of when given that kind of license. I only sort of understood Hartley, which is a bit weird seeing how I was the Hartley in my relationship.
About the style: It is really great, but just not my style. Amazing descriptions of the sea, of course, and I'm sure the poetry of the I is muted a bit by my preferring more flamboyant descriptions, but I cannot deny the power of the style. Arrowby's narration loops onto itself and you have to be a bit careful, but luckily if you observe him closely you can sometimes catch him out. He is monstrous but humanly so, in that weird selective way. And as I've said, the novel is wholly committed to Arrowby.
The plot: I did not expect there to be so much plot! It has everything really, all the dramatic high notes and low notes. I was very much put off by Arrowby at the start and at the middle, because he is such a wormy little man (and I took to Lizzie), but after a while his monstrous characters squares off against itself, and it gets really funny and engaging. Some bits were really funny, and there's a line towards the end mentioning Russel's Chicken which made me laugh a lot. It's all a bit of a literary thriller and ends about how you'd expect. My personal explanation for the sheer amount of plot is that this is Charles's bardo.
And speaking of bardos, I really loved the parts where the novel gets uncanny. This is a novel full of ghosts, sometimes ghosts from the future. There's two scenes, one at the beginning involving an animal, one towards the middle involving a light fixture, which creeped me out very badly. I think it's fair to say this is a magical realist novel.
I think Iris Murdoch set off to prove that other people exist and she does this very forcefully and very well in this novel. Not until the very end (and not even then!) does Arrowby consider others, especially women. It takes the whole novel and a whole lot of tragedies to even crack his self-regard (he is not a believer in character change) and I don't think it will take.
The novel made me think a lot about love, and I do think the answer to the question, "Who is one's first love?" is in this case "Your own self." But I'm sure Iris Murdoch herself would have deplored that answer, since I think she very much espoused the view that others exist. I wholly agree with her.
About the style: It is really great, but just not my style. Amazing descriptions of the sea, of course, and I'm sure the poetry of the I is muted a bit by my preferring more flamboyant descriptions, but I cannot deny the power of the style. Arrowby's narration loops onto itself and you have to be a bit careful, but luckily if you observe him closely you can sometimes catch him out. He is monstrous but humanly so, in that weird selective way. And as I've said, the novel is wholly committed to Arrowby.
The plot: I did not expect there to be so much plot! It has everything really, all the dramatic high notes and low notes. I was very much put off by Arrowby at the start and at the middle, because he is such a wormy little man (and I took to Lizzie), but after a while his monstrous characters squares off against itself, and it gets really funny and engaging. Some bits were really funny, and there's a line towards the end mentioning Russel's Chicken which made me laugh a lot. It's all a bit of a literary thriller and ends about how you'd expect. My personal explanation for the sheer amount of plot is that this is Charles's bardo.
And speaking of bardos, I really loved the parts where the novel gets uncanny. This is a novel full of ghosts, sometimes ghosts from the future. There's two scenes, one at the beginning involving an animal, one towards the middle involving a light fixture, which creeped me out very badly. I think it's fair to say this is a magical realist novel.
I think Iris Murdoch set off to prove that other people exist and she does this very forcefully and very well in this novel. Not until the very end (and not even then!) does Arrowby consider others, especially women. It takes the whole novel and a whole lot of tragedies to even crack his self-regard (he is not a believer in character change) and I don't think it will take.
The novel made me think a lot about love, and I do think the answer to the question, "Who is one's first love?" is in this case "Your own self." But I'm sure Iris Murdoch herself would have deplored that answer, since I think she very much espoused the view that others exist. I wholly agree with her.