The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch has been a familiar name for a long time, but somehow I never felt like reading anything by her. Then recently, a few posts about her work by Garth Greenwell, whose opinion I value immensely, made me wish to do so, and I chose The Sea, the Sea, a little by chance. At first, I didn't think much of it - yes, the writing was very elegant and she knew how to build the narrator-character's voice and to subtly create some momentum of ominous things to come (like the sight of the monster, or the difficulty of getting out of the sea), but it took me a few chapters to get into the book, inside it, like a dear fellow reader used to say when talking about the magic of reading. Maybe because the narrator is not a likeable character, and the plot is sometimes somewhat far-fetched.

But then he's such a believable character, with his delusional blindness about what's happening and how selfishly he is acting, that I felt more and more drawn into the book. The writing is really extremely good, and I was often reminded of Dostoievsky, with all those dramatic and passionate characters going in and out of scene, all so extreme and strongly depicted. So I enjoyed the reading immensely, and by the end I was totally into it. So I guess it was a good introduction to Iris Murdoch's work, that makes me want to read more of her books.

I could put here several beautiful quotes from this book, but I'll leave just this one, that I particularly liked, because it expresses so perfectly something I've always felt about how a story is never finished, because one is always left with the nagging question of what would happen next:

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summing up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.