The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

It was only now clear to me how very much I had made that image, and yet I could not feel that it was anything like a fiction. It was more like a special sort of truth, almost a touchstone; as if a thought of mine could become a thing, and at the same time be truth. It was the dismissive resentment, the 'let her go then', which was a lie. My odd almost mad faithfulness had become its own reward in the end. I had smoothed Hartley's brow and unclouded her lovely eyes as the years went by, and the ambiguous tormenting image had become gentle and a source of light.

Theater director Charles Arrowby has decided to retire and move to a drafty old house in the north of England, overlooking the sea. He's trying to get away from it all, but his past keeps turning up to find him: in the shape of his former actress-lovers, like the guileless Lizzie and the fiercely jealous Rosina, as well as several friends and one ascetic cousin. These guests turn up to remind Charles of the life he's tried to leave behind, sometimes as friends and sometimes as enemies. But the most remarkable surprise visitor of all is an aging woman who turns out to be Charles' long lost love Hartley, who broke his heart as a teenager by refusing to marry him.

It seems like kismet, and Charles certainly takes it that way. He wages a long campaign to convince Hartley that her unhappy marriage to a blue collar man has been a mistake, and that she should return to him and lead the life that was lost to both of them years ago. He takes it as a given that her love for him is as eternal as his love for her, and this certainty leads him to troubling places. Soon, he's more or less kidnapped Hartley, refusing to let her leave his house and return to her husband, certain that she'll eventually come to her senses. Into this volatile atmosphere arrives Hartley's adopted son Titus, who believes he's Charles' son--it's not true, but as far as Charles can imagine, it certainly might be.

It would be accurate, though perhaps not quite apt, to say The Sea, the Sea is a 500-page book about an idealistic old man who kidnaps a woman who wants nothing to do him. Our love-fantasies, Murdoch explains, have a great power of their own. All love, she suggests, might really be rooted in our own imagined versions of the other, and who's to say that Charles is any more misbegotten than anyone else? (It certainly doesn't help Charles' case that his soulmate seems to be as provincial and dour as she keeps trying to convince him she is.)

There's something uncanny about The Sea, the Sea. There's a supernatural element that's never quite explained: a sea monster Charles witnesses on the first day of his new residence, a floating image of his lover's head in a high window, as if hanged. But the coincidence of the whole thing is uncanny, too: why is it, exactly, that all these people keep turning up in this little northern town? It only made sense when I reflected on something that James, Charles' mystic cousin, says about the Tibetan concept of the bardo, that afterlife in which you drift around encountering the spirits of those you've known in life. The moors of the north are Charles' bardo, a place where he encounters the spirits of his life whether he wants to or not, not to make things right, or better, as you might in a book that took its cues from Christianity and not Buddhism, but to contemplate the life that's formed around him. You get the impression that his mistake is thinking that he can reach out and touch the spirit of Hartley, or anyone else, to push or pull them in one way or another, but that's not what the bardo is about.

When I pick up an Iris Murdoch novel, I feel like I'm always chasing the furious comic energy of Under the Net, and it never arrives. Henry and Cato got pretty close, and other books of hers have it to some degree, but the kidnapping of a sad old woman didn't really get there for me. Perhaps it makes sense that The Sea, the Sea seems to churn and churn and not really go anywhere, like the dangerous "cauldron" at the bottom of Charles' cliff--but this is probably the least satisfying of the Murdoch novels I've read.