The Sea, the Sea; A Severed Head
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First published in 1978, The Sea, the Sea is Iris Murdoch’s Booker Prize-winning novel of obsession, vanity and the elusive nature of love. Charles Arrowby, a celebrated theatre director recently retired from London, settles into an isolated house on the English coast, intending to withdraw from society and write his memoirs. His solitude is disrupted when he discovers that his childhood sweetheart, Mary Hartley, now married and living nearby, is still within reach. Convinced that their youthful love can be recovered, Charles becomes consumed by the idea of bringing her back into his life.
Narrated in Charles’s self-assured, frequently unreliable voice, the novel gradually exposes the distance between his romantic fantasies and the reality of other people. The sea, at once beautiful, threatening and indifferent, provides a striking counterpoint to his attempts to impose order on the world around him. With characteristic philosophical depth and dark comedy, Murdoch explores the possessiveness that can disguise itself as love, the limits of self-knowledge and the difficulty of seeing others clearly. One of her most accomplished novels, it brings together the psychological complexity, moral inquiry and theatrical imagination that define her work.
From the book
“How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.”
— Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
On The Sea, the Sea
“Dazzlingly entertaining and inventive.”
— The Times
Published in 1961, A Severed Head is one of Iris Murdoch’s most audacious and darkly comic novels, a sophisticated exploration of adultery, desire and the hidden forces beneath respectable appearances. Set within London's comfortable intellectual society, the story is narrated by Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a prosperous wine merchant whose carefully ordered existence begins to unravel when his wife, Antonia, announces that she intends to leave him for their mutual friend and psychoanalyst, Palmer Anderson. Martin, who has himself been conducting an affair with a younger woman, Georgie, finds his assumptions about love and marriage increasingly unsettled as a succession of unexpected revelations draws his brother Alexander and Palmer’s enigmatic half-sister, Honor Klein, into an increasingly intricate web of relationships.
What begins as a comedy of manners gradually becomes something stranger and more unsettling, as Murdoch exposes the vanity, self-deception and unconscious desires concealed beneath the language of reason and civility. Through the figure of Honor Klein, whose unsettling presence evokes the ancient myth of Medusa, the novel explores the tension between intellectual control and the irrational dimensions of human experience. Brilliantly constructed, sharply observed and rich in psychological complexity, A Severed Head stands among Murdoch’s most accomplished comic novels, revealing her fascination with mythology, morality and the difficulty of seeing other people as they truly are.
From the book
“As real people we do not exist for each other.”
— Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
On A Severed Head
“Witty and sophisticated, this novel is set among London fogs, and drawing rooms filled with too many objects d'art.”
— Kirkus Reviews