The Sea, the Sea, Iris Murdoch
The Sea, the Sea, Iris Murdoch
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The Sea, the Sea
Booker Prize Winner

Author: Iris Murdoch

Narrator: Simon Vance, Kimberly Farr

Unabridged: 21 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 04/18/2017

Synopsis

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.

About The Author

Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut novel, Everything Under. Her 2020 novel Sisters was adapted into the 2024 feature film September Says. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her debut play, Viola’s Room, was produced in 2024 by the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. After working in the Treasury and in the UN, she discovered philosophy, eventually becoming Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. Her philosophical concerns are at the heart of the 25 novels for which she became famous, gaining the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea. Until her death in 1999, she lived in Oxford with her husband, the academic and critic, John Bayley. She wrote poetry all her life.Rachel Hirschler is the lead transcriber with the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives. Miles Leeson, Anne Rowe and Frances White are leading academics and editors who have published widely on Iris Murdoch’s life, philosophy and novels. Together they administer and contribute to the work of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre, the Iris Murdoch Society and the Iris Murdoch Review.John Burnside was among the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial, Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and, in 2023, he received the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. He died in 2024.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim on September 18, 2023

This book earned the author the Booker Prize in 1978. It’s a powerful book. I had seen it forever at library sales and for years I thought I should read it. Finally, I did, and I wish I had read it earlier. I’m giving it a rating of 5 and adding it to my favorites. The main character is a recently re......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on February 06, 2023

"Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure." —Charles Arrowby, The Sea, the Sea Charles Arrowby, a self-absorbed theatre director,......more

Goodreads review by Adam on December 13, 2017

An extraordinary novel, at once page-turner and philosophic, comic and melodramatic, one of the best that I've read. Murdoch is remarkably skilled at inhabiting the minds of her protagonists, and Charles Arrowby, a late-middle-aged, bumbling, morally dubious, veteran of theater, is a wondrous creati......more

Quotes

Winner of the Booker Prize 

"Profound and delicious for many reasons . . . A multilayered working out of her feelings about the intensity of romantic experience . . . [It] also happens to be intelligently and sympathetically concerned with four of my favorite things: swimming, eating, drinking and talking. . . . It is an ideal beach book—especially if you enjoy the cooler and pebblier and spookier northern sort of beach." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"A powerful novel about the dismantling of ego, the truth of love—I’m in awe of Murdoch’s genius." —Kate Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

"A joy to read: a rollicking story that seems endlessly to be building towards some awful, hilarious, frightening conclusion." —Harper’s Bazaar

"Sublime [and] profound . . . She takes great care to imbue the house, the sea, the surroundings—everything—with depth and significance. . . . Exhilarating." —Sam Jordison, The Guardian

"This comedy is lit with the aplomb of true comedy’s calm understanding of moral obliquity. . . . There is the genuine weight of obsession in Arrowby’s narrative, but also the mere weight of iteration and ingenuity." —Martin Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review

"Murdoch's subtly, blackly humorous digs at human vanity and self-delusion periodically build into waves of hilarity, and Arrowby is a brilliant creation: a deeply textured, intriguing yet unreliable narrator, and one of the finest character studies of the 20th century." —Sophia Martelli, The Guardian

"The author renders her immorality play with painstaking attention to atmosphere: the changing hues of the waves, the slippery amber rocks, the strangely damp house are all made palpable. The old scandals are shrewdly reexamined, and Murdoch's style is as saline as the sea below." —Time

"One of the best and most influential writers of the 20th century . . . She connected goodness, against the temper of the times, not with the quest for an authentic identity so much as with the happiness that can come about when that quest can be relaxed." —Peter Conradi, The Guardian

Awards

  • Man Booker Prize for Fiction
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