Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978) is a novel of obsession, memory, and self-deception, narrated in diary form by Charles Arrowby, a retired theatre director who has retired and left London for an isolated house on the English coast. Set chiefly along an unnamed northern shoreline, the book takes the form of a memoir-turned-novel that its narrator drafts as events overtake him. The novel explores themes including The Nostalgic Power of First Love, Jealousy as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and The Futility of Renouncing One’s Nature.

This guide is based on the 2001 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature depictions of death, child death, death by suicide, sexual violence, sexual harassment, physical abuse, emotional abuse, child abuse, pregnancy termination, mental illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, anti-gay bias, gender discrimination, racism, substance use, and cursing.

Plot Summary

Charles Arrowby, a famous London theatre director in his sixties, retires from London and buys Shruff End, an isolated house on a stretch of rocky English coast. He intends to write a memoir, swim daily, cook simple meals, and reflect on his long career and his many lovers, especially the older actress Clement Makin, who launched his career. Almost at once, the solitude unsettles him: He sees a sea monster rising from the water, attributes it to an old LSD trip, and notices that a vase and a mirror in the house have inexplicably broken.

His memoir keeps circling back to Hartley, his first love from Warwickshire, who left him when they were young and married someone else without explanation. One day, Charles realizes that an old woman he has seen several times in the village near his new home is Hartley herself. He intercepts her and learns that she is married to Benjamin Fitch, a retired fire-extinguisher salesman, and has an adopted son, Titus, who has run away from home.

Charles fixates on the idea that Hartley’s marriage is unhappy and Ben is tyrannical. He calls at their bungalow and finds Ben unwelcoming. Lizzie Scherer, an actress he had recently written to and asked to live with him, writes that she is happy in her new life with Gilbert Opian, the gay actor with whom she shares a home. Gilbert soon comes to Shruff End to ask Charles to leave Lizzie alone; he stays on and becomes a kind of household servant. Charles sees Rosina Vamburgh, a former lover and the ex-wife of Charles’s friend Peregrine Arbelow, and she confesses that she has broken into the house and smashed the vase and mirror. She believes that Charles is in a relationship with Lizzie and vows to wreck it to get revenge for him leaving her years ago.

Charles continues to pursue Hartley. He eavesdrops outside Nibletts and overhears Ben accusing her of long-standing infidelity. Charles takes this as proof of cruelty and decides to rescue Hartley. Meanwhile, Lizzie reverses herself and arrives ready to be with him, but he tells her that he has met someone from his past and sends her away. He writes Hartley a long letter declaring his love and offering to take her out of her marriage, and delivers it by knocking on her door using a code from their childhood. Then he goes to London with Rosina to retrieve old photographs and to think.

In London, Charles visits Peregrine, Rosina’s ex-husband, who is miserable about his second marriage, and runs into his cousin James. James, a former soldier and serious Buddhist, has left the army and lives among his Tibetan artifacts in a cluttered Pimlico flat. Charles tells him about Hartley; James tells him not to interfere.

When he returns to Shruff End, Hartley comes to him one night while Ben is at woodwork class. She explains that Ben became convinced Titus was her child by Charles, despite the boy being adopted, and tormented Titus through his childhood until Titus left. She insists her marriage cannot be undone and flees in panic when she sees how late it has grown. Charles intercepts her near Nibletts and covers for her with Ben.

Soon afterward, Titus himself comes to the house and asks Charles whether Charles is his real father. Charles denies it but persuades the boy to stay and offers to help him begin an acting career. Charles draws Hartley to Shruff End by telling her that Titus is there. He then locks her in an upstairs room as a virtual prisoner, intending to free her from Ben despite her continued desire to go home. Hartley remains shut in for several days, weeping and pleading to go home.

The house fills up around her captivity. James arrives unexpectedly for Whitsun, then Peregrine, then Lizzie. James organizes a delegation to drive Hartley back to Nibletts. On the way, Rosina appears near the road; she pelts Peregrine’s car with stones and shatters the windscreen. When they arrive at Nibletts, James recognizes Ben from the military. Hartley is returned to Ben.

Lizzie returns to Shruff End, and one evening the household drinks and sings together. Later, Charles goes out to the rock bridge over Minn’s cauldron, and someone shoves him from behind into the deep, churning pool. He nearly drowns, but James resuscitates him. Convinced Ben pushed him, Charles raves about revenge. One day, Titus, swimming alone in the bay, drowns. Tourists pull his body from the water, and James cannot revive him.

Charles, devastated, becomes convinced that Ben killed the boy after attempting to murder Charles. He starts plotting retaliation. Pressed by James, Peregrine confesses that he did it as revenge for Charles having taken Rosina from him years before. In the same stretch of days, Lizzie and James admit that they have known each other slightly for years and have occasionally met to talk about Charles. Charles, furious at the secrecy, orders them both away.

One day, he receives a letter from Hartley and Ben, a polite invitation to tea. At Nibletts, they tell him that they are emigrating to Australia in a few weeks. Charles slips Hartley a letter asking her to run away with him and tells her a taxi will wait at the church. She does not come. Days pass. He sees Peregrine and Rosina at the local hotel; they have reconciled and plan to start a theatre in Londonderry, Ireland.

James visits for a long evening and talks about Tibetan magic and his sherpa Milarepa, who died on a mountain because James’s powers of bodily heat-generation failed. After he leaves, Charles falls ill. When he recovers, Lizzie and Gilbert come briefly to receive his blessing on their renewed cohabitation.

Charles goes to Nibletts and finds it empty, and a neighbor tells him that Hartley and Ben have already left for Australia. A buried memory of his near-death experience surfaces: James descending a sheer rock face and lifting him out of the water by what seemed supernatural means. Soon after, a letter arrives from Dr. Tsang in London; he says that James has died peacefully, choosing his moment in the way enlightened practitioners are said to. At dawn, Charles sees four seals in the water.

In a postscript, Charles continues the diary, writing now from James’s London flat, which he has inherited along with James’s money. He sells Shruff End and leaves James’s possessions, including a wooden casket reputed to contain a demon, largely untouched, living amongst them. He discovers volumes of poetry James wrote, but he refuses to read them.

Charles lunches regularly with Lizzie and visits her and Gilbert, who has become a television star, at their flat. They hear that Peregrine has been murdered by terrorists in Londonderry; he had started a peace foundation. Rosina is later rumored to be living with a woman in Los Angeles. Charles entertains and dismisses theories that James faked his death for British Intelligence and that the Fitches faked their emigration. He sends James’s books to the British Museum, donates James’s money to various causes, and develops chest pains his doctor cannot diagnose. He receives offers to direct again. One day, the casket falls from its bracket and opens, releasing whatever was inside.