I’ve just spent a week in the company of a monster, and I didn’t enjoy it.

I really hated The Sea, The Sea. Or rather I really hated the novel’s protagonist, which on this occasion amounted to the same thing. For a novelist with a reputation for labyrinthine plots, this narrative is fairly straightforward. Theatre director Charles Arrowby the novel’s narrator, retires to the seaside to write his memoirs. Arrowby is utterly self-absorbed. His life has seen a succession of women throwing themselves at him and this pattern continues as he is visited by a series of former lovers, actresses of different degrees of fame, all wanting to resume their relationships. He is not interested, principally because he prefers to steal married women away from their husbands. As soon as each conquest has been mastered he loses interest. His latest obsession is Hartley, a childhood friend who he happens to meet in the village, who he sets about trying to persuade to leave her mild-mannered husband. He even goes to the extreme of kidnapping her, and only releases her once it is obvious she is not going to relent. To justify his obnoxious and criminal behaviour he persuades himself that Hartley is the long lost love of his life, although she clearly sees their friendship in a different light.

Charles’s magnetic attractiveness to women is not however just in his imagination – even at the end of the novel he received letters from a 17 year-old young woman offering him her virginity and to bear his child. But it is mysterious, because he is a bully and a bore. He is always having epiphanies, supposedly profound insights into what is really going on in people’s heads, insights which are invariably wrong. Undeterred he pushes on to the next revelation. When he finds out that his cousin James and his former lover Lizzie have been meeting for coffee occasionally, he throws a tantrum, reacting as if they have been betraying him. Instead of telling him to grow up they indulge his hurt feelings, apologise and withdraw. When he is pushed into the sea and nearly drowns the list of possible suspects is long – I think I would have been tempted!

So we’ve established that Charles is a deluded ego-maniac who is a danger to all around him. Just in case this point needs reinforcing, Murdoch has him see a monster in the choppy waters around his house. This monster is quickly dismissed as a LSD flashback, but later Charles reflects that “I let loose my own demons, not least the sea-monster of jealousy” (528) just in case anyone had missed the heavy-handed symbolism in the preceding 527 pages,

We are supposed to find Charles’s pretentious approach to food amusing. He prepares various mildly eccentric meals for himself and others. At first they are very slightly comic – I stress slightly:
“Anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil… Then bananas and cream with white sugar. (Bananas should be cut, never mashed, and the cream should be thin.) Then hard water-biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese. Of course I never touch foreign cheeses.”

But there’s a relentlessness to this, and we get descriptions of meal after meal:

“Lentil soup, followed by chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea, then dried apricots and shortcake biscuits… Fresh apricots are best of course, but the dried kind, soaked for twenty-four hours and then well drained, make a heavenly accompaniment for any sort of mildly sweet biscuit or cake. They are especially good with anything made of almonds, and thus consort happily with red wine.”

OK, we get the point.

Murdoch is a hugely respected writer, but even her greatest fans seem prepared to acknowledge her flaws. Here the greatest sin is simply repetition – if something is worth saying it is repeated time after time. The scenes where Arrowby tries to persuade Hartley to leave her husband, and she asks to be allowed to leave, go on for page after page with little variation. The conceit that the novel is Arrowby’s memoir is inconsistently maintained – the struggle of having to construct time for him to draft his recollection of the previous events gets tiresome and is quietly dropped. Murdoch’s (alright, Arrowby’s) technique for building suspense is limited:

“Something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it” (1)

“Something rather odd and distressing has just occurred”

“I was sitting writing the above late last night in my drawing room when something very disconcerting happened” (74)

“Shortly after this something very disconcerting happened”. (107)

Obviously this is equally a reflection on Charles’s limited ability to express himself, but the end result is wearying.

It should be possible to enjoy and appreciate a novel where the central character is obnoxious or deluded (Pale Fire?) but I didn’t find it so here. Arrowby is a pompous bore who desperately needs to wake up to his own short-comings, but never. Even someone trying to kill him doesn’t make him pause for reflection! There’s no development in Charles’s character – he remains as deluded and ignorant at the end of the story as he was in its beginning. Is it my shortcoming in not being able to enjoy this widely revered novel(ist)?