The Sea, the Sea

The Sea, the Sea is a novel by the Irish writer Iris Murdoch, published in 1978. It won the Booker Prize that year, and it is written as the diary and memoir of a man who has decided to leave his old life behind.

Charles Arrowby has spent his working life in the London theatre as a director, and he retreats to a tower-like house on the coast to write about himself. He arrives believing that he has finished with the world, and he is hardly settled before he sees something in the water that he takes for a sea monster and meets a woman he loved as an adolescent.

The woman is Mary Hartley Fitch, and Charles becomes obsessed with her. He idealises the relationship they had, sets out to persuade her to leave her husband for him, follows her about and eventually takes her away against her will in the belief that he is rescuing her. Friends and former lovers from the theatre come to visit him, among them his cousin James, a retired intelligence officer, and they tell him what they think of what he is doing.