The Sea, the Sea

The test of what could be removed bites here more than on most books at this level. The central line is iron: Charles finds Hartley, decides she must still love him, besieges and finally imprisons her, and loses Titus to the sea. Around it runs a long carousel of arrivals, Lizzie, Gilbert, Rosina at the window, Peregrine, each with a scene of recrimination and reconciliation that often rhymes with the last. The defence is real: every visitor is a former possession of Charles’s, and the parade shows a man who has always treated people as cast; the pages on food and on the theatre are the self-portrait, not ornament. Even so, much of the London visitors’ talk could go with little loss, and the “Postscript” restates in reflection what the “History” showed. Required at the core, assembled at the margins.

Score: 7.8 / 10

What the book brings into the open can be stated and holds: that romantic love in an egoist is a fiction he writes about another person, and that the person written over goes unseen. Hartley is the proof. Charles builds her into the lost girl of his boyhood and a captive wife awaiting rescue; what the reader sees through his own pages is a frightened, ageing, plainly married woman who wants to be left alone, and whose marriage, however unhappy, is hers. The disclosure is made through the narrator’s blindness rather than over it, and that is the book’s chief achievement: Murdoch’s moral philosophy, attention to the reality of another as the root of goodness, becomes a lived condition. James adds a second disclosure, that power, even spiritual power, is a temptation. The axis stands a tenth below the gate because the truth, once seen, is one truth, worked thoroughly rather than widened to the society around it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The book rises often, in a register of its own, half comic and half terrible. The sea is a constant presence: in Charles’s swimming, in his fear of the rocks and the tides, and in the first sentence of the book. The heights are four. The sea monster Charles sees rising from the water early on, a moment of real dread left unexplained. His fall into Minn’s Cauldron, the churning rock basin, after Peregrine pushes him, and his rescue by James, which Charles experiences as something beyond human strength. Titus’s drowning, told with a flatness that makes it worse. And James’s death in the “Postscript”, which has a quiet strangeness. Between these the comic machinery of the theatre visitors keeps the book low for long stretches: the heights come often, not constantly.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The archetypal structure is partly built and partly evoked. Built is The Tempest: Charles is a Prospero who has ruled a world of players by enchantment and comes to a house by the sea to abjure his magic, and the book tests whether he can. James, with his mastery of the body and his willed death, is the true magus beside the false one, and their pairing carries the book. The sea is the element that takes and gives back. The lost first love, a garden from which one was expelled, is structural too. Evoked rather than built are the demons and dragons of the sea and the Buddhist apparatus, which sit in the book as colour more than frame. The myth is load-bearing in the Prospero line and atmosphere elsewhere, and the axis weighs the whole book.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The turn is to hand a comic novel of manners, a philosophical novel and a gothic tale to one self-deceiving memoirist and let his journal lose control of its genre: it begins as a retirement diary of meals and swimming and becomes a narrative of obsession, kidnap and death without the narrator noticing the change. That is a real move, and Murdoch staked her most serious ideas on a narrator who mocks them. But the tradition is near and well proven: the egoist narrating his own love, Humbert Humbert most obviously and Ford’s Dowell before him; the English country house comedy of arrivals; the magus novel of the 1960s. Within Murdoch’s own work the book refines methods she had used for twenty years rather than breaking with them. The wager was placed largely on paths already walked.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Put a third person in place of Charles’s journal and the book loses most of what it knows. The Hartley of the novel exists only as a figure the reader reconstructs against the narrator’s account; the book’s truth lives in the gap between what Charles writes and what his own reported scenes show. The form also carries time: the “Prehistory” is written in calm, before the summer’s events, and the “History” is told after them, so that the narrator’s prose itself shows the damage. The “Postscript”, titled “Life Goes On”, turns the form on itself: Charles, back in London, keeps writing, resolves to change, and is visibly the same man, and the book’s last judgment on him is made by form rather than by statement. The cost is length: the form permits the sprawl as well as compelling the knowledge.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The book has sustained nearly fifty years of reading without being used up, and it repays return chiefly through the double reading its narration invites: on a first reading one follows Charles; on a second one reads Hartley, Ben and Titus past him, and the book changes. James’s nature stays open, whether he is a saint, a magician or a damaged man, what he saw in Tibet, how he died; and the sea monster and the rescue at the Cauldron are never settled between the marvellous and the psychological. Criticism has returned to it as Murdoch’s central novel and as the key text for reading her philosophy into her fiction. What holds the axis at 8.1 is that its ideas, once grasped, are articulated within the book itself, in James’s talk and in Charles’s late reflections: the well is deep, and its floor can be seen.

Score: 8.1 / 10

One of the two lowest of the twelve. The field is the English novel of the later twentieth century. The intrinsic force is moderate: the book perfects a way of joining moral philosophy to comic and gothic fiction that Murdoch had built over a career, and does not reorganise what the English novel could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Booker Prize of 1978 made it Murdoch’s best known novel, and it became a fixture of the late twentieth century English canon in teaching and in the anthologies of its period. What holds the axis there is that particular later works that changed course because of it are hard to name with confidence, and Murdoch’s larger influence on the philosophical novel in English belongs to her body of work, which is not what is scored here. A strong book in its field, not a turn in it.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The highest of the twelve. Forty-eight years since publication are weighed as forty-eight years. The text is whole and stable, and kept in a classics list; the book is taught and translated. Its presence is real but has narrowed: Murdoch’s standing fell in the decades after her death, and the novel is read more in the academy and among her readers than generally. The charge of a surface fixed to its moment applies in part: the London theatre world of the postwar decades and an idiom of upper middle class English talk that now dates. Fame is presence, not proof, and the Booker and the reputation are counted here at the figure usual for the span, with no step above it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The command is considerable and uneven, and the unevenness is partly designed. Charles’s voice is a feat of ventriloquism: vain, pedantic, funny, observant of food and weather and blind to people, and his meals, set down with a gourmand’s solemnity, are some of the best comic writing in the book. The plotting of the “History” is expert, the kidnap built by small escalations so that the reader is complicit before he sees it. Against this, the London visitors talk in a stagey, exclamatory register that is sometimes Charles’s mockery and sometimes simply Murdoch’s habitual dialogue; and the prose is fast and loose in places, with repetitions of gesture and phrase across scenes that the narrator’s manner does not wholly account for. Good making, at times load-bearing; not the sentence by sentence command of the books at the top of the axis.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the farce of Gilbert in an apron serving Charles at Shruff End, and Titus dead in the sea. They obey one law, the law of a man who arranges people as a director arranges a cast, and whose arrangements, harmless in the comedy, kill in the tragedy. The supernatural strand, the monster, the face at the window, James’s rescue, his death, is governed by one law of ambiguity throughout, never confirmed and never explained away. The “Postscript” holds the comic and the solemn in one key. The coherence is wide, from domestic comedy to near-mysticism. What holds the axis at 8.2 is that the Buddhist and magical material is pitched in a different register from the social comedy, and the joins, James’s long speeches above all, can be seen.

Score: 8.2 / 10

One of the two lowest of the twelve. The book holds consciousness, at length and in depth; love and marriage; the life of art, the theatre as a world and as a metaphor; religion, in Buddhism, the spiritual life and the uses of power; and the natural order, the sea as a force and not a backdrop. It integrates them through the one narrator. What holds the axis there is what it leaves out, which is large: labour, the state, history and class appear only as a tint of Charles’s snobbery and Ben’s soldiering. Its world is a house, a village and a set of former lovers. That is a choice, and the integration of what it holds is good, but the orders of reality held in one structure are fewer than in the social novels at the top of the axis.

Score: 7.6 / 10