The Sea, the Sea

Charles Arrowby, a celebrated theatre director, has retired from London to an isolated house on a northern cliff to eat simply, swim daily and write a memoir about his renunciation of the world. The memoir keeps failing to be about renunciation. It is mostly about him.

Then he discovers that Hartley, the girl he loved when he was eighteen and who left him without explanation, is living in the village, married for forty years to a retired man she seems frightened of. Charles decides she must be rescued, and that she has secretly loved him throughout, and proceeds to act on this with a determination that becomes, quite quickly, a kidnapping.

Murdoch is writing about self deception at full power, and the comedy is that Charles narrates his own descent in tones of complete reasonableness while a succession of visitors turn up to tell him he is deluded and are ignored.

It is long, the house and the sea are described obsessively, and there is a cousin with Buddhist views whose presence turns the book philosophical in the final act.

Expect an appalling narrator you cannot stop reading, a great deal about food, and one genuinely frightening scene in a cove. Among the funniest and most uncomfortable novels of obsession in English.

At around five hundred pages it is long, and the cooking passages, which Charles reports in loving and terrible detail, are either the best running joke in the book or the reason you stop. Best for readers who like a narrator they can watch lying to himself.