The Sea, the Sea; A Severed Head: Introduction by Sarah Churchwell

by Iris Murdoch, Sarah Churchwell (Introduction)

These two major novels—by one of the most influential British writers of the twentieth century—are ferociously dark comedies that combine playfulness with profundity.

A Severed Head  (1961) is one of Iris Murdoch’s most entertaining works, tracing the turbulent emotional journey of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a smug, prosperous London wine merchant and unfaithful husband, whose life is turned inside out when his wife leaves him for her psychoanalyst. The story takes bedroom farce to a new level of sophistication, with scenes that are both wickedly funny and emblematic of the way momentous moral issues play out in everyday life.  

The Booker Prize–winning The Sea, the Sea  (1978) is set on the edge of England’s North Sea, where egotistical Charles Arrowby, a big name in London’s glittering theatrical world, has retreated into seclusion to write his memoirs. Arrowby’s plans begin to unravel when he encounters his long-lost first love and finds himself increasingly besieged by his own fantasies, delusions, and obsessions.
           
Both novels are tragicomic masterpieces that brilliantly dramatize how much our lives are governed by the lies we tell ourselves and by the all-consuming need for love, meaning, and redemption.

Introduction by Sarah Churchwell

Genres: Fiction, Classics

696 pages, Hardcover

First published April 5, 2016

About the author

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch

Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.

"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...

Reviews

[Bookforum Magazine]

"Somehow Murdoch's novels, chockablock with hyperliterate and supremely articulate writers, academics, civil servants, theater folk, and other brain-workers of the upper-middle class energetically making messes of each other's lives and their own, demand to be encountered in print form–and that is no easy thing these days.

The tensions between the archetypally vast and the novelistically local and precise is perhaps the essential and most striking aspect of her work. Things are as they seem and yet often freighted with allegorical meanings–rewarding the reader's close attention on both planes. Murdoch World is a strange and liminal place, inhabited by magi and monsters in modern garb, full of terrors and delights.

Iris Murdoch would scoff at the comparison, but she shares with Shakespeare the rare ability to create characters who are vividly themselves in all their idiosyncratic individuality and who also suggest archetypal figures in the human pageant."

-Gerald Howard on Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea and A Severed Head in the Fall 2016 issue of Bookforum

To read the rest of this review, go to Bookforum:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This nicely bound volume contains two of Murdoch’s works; ‘A Severed Head’ written in 1961, and ‘The Sea, The Sea’, penned in 1978. While both have male narrators and deal with love affairs, they are very different in tone.

‘A Severed Head’ is a bedroom farce, a short work (less than 200 pages) that details a short time in the life of comfortably well off wine dealer Martin. Martin has both a wife (Antonia) and a mistress (Georgie). All is well in his world. Then Antonia tells him that she wants a divorce; she is in love their friend and therapist, Palmer. She wishes to leave immediately. Palmer and Georgia wish to stay good friends with Martin, though, which Martin accedes to. It’s all very, very civilized. As the tale goes it, it turns out that nothing is as it seemed to Martin; people are coupling up all over the place and with everyone else. Despite his being cuckolded before he ever strayed, and being jerked around by everyone, I found it impossible to feel any sympathy for Martin; it’s not far into the story before he begins hitting people, something he continues to do. No one seems to have a whole lot of brains, just lust and manners. It’s funny in ways, a satire of morals and manners.

In ‘The Sea, The Sea’, the narrator is older and single, a retired actor and director who has bought a remote house on the coast that is falling into decay. He begins to write a combined memoir and diary, which is the story we read. Charles Arrowby is over sixty, and is wifeless, childless, brotherless, sisterless, and well known- although not as well-known as he likes to think. At his new home, he enjoys swimming in the sea, looking for pretty rocks, making horrible sounding meals, and fixating on women from his past. First he lights on Lizzie, who, having given up on Charles, is happily cohabiting with a gay friend. After he sends her a letter indicating he wants her back, she is ready to drop her partner. Then he accidently runs into a woman from even further back in his past: Hartley, the girl he grew up with and who was his first live, the girl who vanished and never made contact again, whose mother told Charles she was married and never wanted to see him again. One contact and he becomes obsessed with her. She admits she’s afraid of her husband Ben, and that their son ran away to escape him. This convinces him she’s trapped in an abusive marriage, and he is going to save her. He begins to stalk her, and eventually kidnaps and imprisons her in his house.

Meanwhile, he is dealing with the plague that everyone who moves to a holiday-ish locale has to live with: everyone he knows comes to visit. An old girlfriend, Lizzie and her partner, more old friends, Hartley’s estranged son, and his cousin James that he hasn’t seen for decades, all come calling without warning- of course, he doesn’t have a phone. Also, the house may be haunted. These people allow us to see things through eyes other than Charles’s; Hartley’s son fills in some of the background of Hartley’s marriage and Ben’s brutishness, while others see Ben in a very different light.

I had a hard time keeping track of the passage of time in this novel; Charles seems to exist in an alcohol fueled cloud of obsession. While the book was interesting, and I couldn’t stop reading it, I really disliked Charles. He is very much the center of the universe and no one else’s needs or wants intrude upon his thinking. His friends I have to wonder about, as they continue to party while being aware of his prisoner. I have to say the ending surprised me; it seemed tacked on in a way, but though short, it grabbed my interest in a way parts of the main story didn’t. We are left with the mystery of who and what Cousin James really was; I would have liked to know more about him than Charles!

While both stories contain people who act like fools, the writing is top notch and I enjoyed reading them- ‘The Sea, the Sea’ is some 450 pages long but I read it in a couple of days.

[Christine Bonheure · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derde leesbeurt van The Sea, The Sea en weer ben ik onder de indruk. Ik zat onbewust te knikken bij de passages over het huwelijk. “Waag het niet om als buitenstaander een huwelijk te beoordelen, want tussen de echtparen heerst er een band die niemand begrijpt, alleen zij.” Beroemd theaterregisseur Charles Arrowby is met pensioen, koopt een afgelegen huis aan zee en botst in het dorp op zijn enige en ware jeugdliefde, even oud als hij en uiteraard getrouwd. Hij wil haar opnieuw voor zich winnen en haar uit de handen van haar brute echtgenoot redden. Maar wil zij dat wel? Wat hij allemaal doet zouden we nu stalking noemen én gerechtelijk bestraffen. Veel personages en even veel liefdesintriges, maar vooral het inzicht aan het eind van het boek wie Arrowby’s echte liefde is hakt erop in. Vijf sterren omwille van het sublieme Engels. De taal van Murdoch zingt echt.

A Severed Head vind ik dan weer maar drie sterren waard. Had de naam Iris Murdoch niet op de cover gestaan, ik had nooit kunnen raden dat zij dit heeft geschreven. Het deed me denken aan zo’n draaideurkomedie in het theater. Een personage start een intrige op en verlaat de ruimte door de rechtse deur. Meteen erna komt via de linkse deur een ander personage tevoorschijn met een nieuwe intrige. Iedereen in deze roman heeft wel iets op amoureus vlak te maken met iemand anders. Er wordt gekoppeld, uit elkaar gegaan en opnieuw gekoppeld, uiteraard met een ander. De verhaallijnen zijn soms heel bizar en er komt precies geen eind aan alle verwikkelingen. Het happy end vind ik een beetje ongepast. Toch ook weer een compliment voor de prachtige taal en stijl.

[Marcia Aldrich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, what I mainly was struck by reading these two Murdoch novels so late after their popularity was the incredible gusto of the prose style. What confidence and bravado, what speed of sentence pace even though frankly not that much "happens" in the novels. There's a lot of talking and reversing course and biting satire, puncturing vanity right and left. I'd say these novels are a hoot. I don't know if I want to read another though, at least not for a while, because these two while different in characters and situation, struck me as remarkably the same. Perhaps it's just a matter of her very identifiable style, a style I like.

[Brian Kerr]

to-read

[Jean Lobrot]

Absolutely phenomenal. What a masterwork of vain, pathetic tragicomedy. The sea the sea is easily 5 stars and a severed head is very close to that