The Sea Book (Conservation for Kids)

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Lentil soup, followed by chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea, then dried apricots and shortcake biscuits… Fresh apricots are best of course, but the dried kind, soaked for twenty-four hours and then well drained, make a heavenly accompaniment for any sort of mildly sweet biscuit or cake. They are especially good with anything made of almonds, and thus consort happily with red wine.” But smell and taste? Much harder. Think of a favourite food ( siu mai). You can see it, you can feel its texture, and hear the sound as you bite into it. But can you describe, let alone experience its taste and smell? I struggled with this for a while, mainly because I was so irritated by Charles Arrowby, the main character and unreliable narrator. Arrowby is a retired actor, director and playwright who has moved to a remote cottage by the sea and is tentatively writing his memoirs. Whole successions of characters, many of them former lovers, arrive and depart and Charles encounters his first love Hartley who has also retired to the area with her husband. p>The Sea Book places the planet's oceanic zoological wonders in a wider ecology of food
webs, ecosystems and planetary processes. Environmental concerns are raised, but without scaring the living daylights out of any children, or their parents. It is a masterful execution of Albert Einstein's dictum that everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure."Like many of Murdoch’s characters Arrowby is not very likeable and seems completely oblivious to the mayhem he creates among his nearest and dearest. I also found myself increasingly irritated by what he did with food (nothing kinky here!); if Murdoch meant him to be annoying, she wrote him very well. There is moral complexity and ambiguity as Arrowby tries to recapture his first love (literally). The cast of secondary characters are strong and are not there for mere ornament. Cousin James is an interesting counterpoint to Arrowby. Still that day of license and illicit invitation was not done. As Mrs. Grace, stretched there on the grassy bank, continued softly snoring, a torpor descended on the rest of us in that little dell, the invisible net of lassitude that falls over a company when one of its number detaches and drops away into sleep. ... Suddenly she was the centre of the scene, the vanishing-point upon which everything converged, suddenly it was she for whom these patterns and these shades had been arranged with such meticulous artlessness: that white cloth on the polished glass, the leaning, blue-green tree, the frilled ferns, even those little clouds, trying to seem not to move, high up in the limitless marine sky. This memorable summer, painted with golden sun and inky shadow, creates the first plan of the novel. Just then Max had gained this sad knowledge that there is always a lover and a loved and which role he would be playing in that act. A series of more or less enraptured humiliations. She accepted me as a supplicant at her shrine with disconcerting complacency… Her willful vagueness tormented and infuriated me.”

The journal is a useful device, telling us much of the history we need to know, and developing our ideas about Charles's character, as well as giving us an indication of his attitudes towards some of the other people who will enter the novel. It is also presented in a totally believable and authentic way. An amateur, unpractised writer, starting with a vague idea in retirement, may well start off with one idea, and go off at various tangents, being diverted by other ideas. However this early part of the novel does seem to be a little tedious and self-indulgent. It is rather too full of lengthy speeches and conversation; there are great long swathes of emoting from the characters, and it's all very angst-ridden. Nothing much seems to be happening, and a modern reader cannot help wishing this first part of the novel had been edited. The smell in the hall was like the smell of my breath when I breathed and rebreathed it into my cupped hands.” The awful crying of souls in guilt and pain, loathing each other, tied to each other! The inferno of marriage.” Then, with a suddenness that was surprising, all the bits began to fall together, Charles became someone intricate and complicated and the plot started to develop into a gripping story of love, obsession, misdirection, mystery and human foibles. Minor characters took on hidden meaning and became central to the story and Charles became someone you could laugh at and cry for simultaneously. I succumbed to emotions that bubbled up like the surf of Murdoch’s raging sea. I felt the tension of the situation, I struggled to think how it could be resolved and leave anyone intact, I worried for the sanity of everyone involved, and I mourned for the things that might have been if any of these characters had lived life with their eyes open. If there is one thing I could say is unique in Murdoch’s writing, it is that you feel her story as much as read it.Yet, he discovers that silence has been his companion his whole life. He knows and understands it like he has never known and understood anybody, including himself.

We are very aware that Charles may be an unreliable narrator. His conquests of women seems very fanciful. Is every woman he has ever met really in love with him? At this point he also waxes lyrical about an old childhood romance with a girl called Hartley, his only "true love", and the readers gets the impression that Charles is impossibly unrealistic, viewing the world almost entirely through his imagination. An elderly grieving man, Max Morden, recalls his childhood memories, after the passing of his wife. He is lonely, depressed (considers an 'honorable suicide'), introspective, honest with himself, and has ample time to reflect on events that ultimately made him the man he was. But it was the events at their holiday bungalow one fateful year, that inspired him many years later to revisit the place where he was forced to become a man long before nature required him to be one. What has this luminous painting of a female bather to do with a book called "The Sea", you might ask? More than you might think. Pierre Bonnard, a French Post-Impressionist painter, often painted his wife Marthe. He painted this particular piece when she was in her 70s, and she had died by the time he completed it. We can see by virtue of the recognisable images of female form and bathtub, the general gist of the painting. But the image goes beyond the bounds of reality with the misshapen bathtub that accommodates impossibly long and bent limbs, the colours shimmering and waving on the organically undulating walls as though they might just disappear at any moment, a dog on what might be a mat or a square of light on the slanted floor, brushstroke after gorgeous brushstroke coming together to simulate Marthe's moment of private repose. The moment is almost certainly of a younger Marthe, though. It is the artist's memories of an earlier, more youthful moment. I hate the falsity of ‘grand’ dinner parties where, amid much kissing, there is the appearance of intimacy where there is really none.” Maybe it’s precisely because smells don’t readily convert to similes and metaphors that they are such powerful triggers?But as Max invades his frozen memories he awakens ghosts long gone though never forgotten and the unsettling and seductive Grace twins, his childhood friends, will become sharply delineated on the wall of his memory, prompting unintended recollections about the strangeness and dislocation of one’s own existence and the immortal burden of being the survivor. Felt a little depressed but was cheered up by supper: spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil. (Basil is of course the king of herbs.) Then spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill. Boiled onions served with bran, herbs, soya oil and tomatoes, with one egg beaten in. With these, a slice or two of cold tinned corned beef. (Meat is really just an excuse for eating vegetables.)”

Which is the more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her?” The world is not real until it is pushed through the mesh of language. It is a way of validating reality for myself. ~ John Banville in Drexel University interview. We meet the Grace family: Carlo, Connie, their children Chloe and Myles, and their minder or perhaps governess, Rose. This family is perceived by Max as his social superiors but he is drawn to them for many reasons – partly curiosity, partly out of loneliness, and somewhat out of boredom. The Graces fascinate him, especially noticeable while he relates his experiences with them as a boy. However, with all the time that has passed between then and now, their once large summer home has become a boarding house, and he seeks it out to stay in and perhaps looks to his past to help him heal. The journal he writes, and which we are reading, is an attempt to form some structure to his life, and to be a memoir of sorts. But even though he professes to be writing details of the house and village, he seems to find it impossible to concentrate on the job he has set himself, which he says is the reason for being there in the first place. He becomes distracted inordinately easily; even the food he prepares is an excuse. He rambles on about his culinary activities - both past and present,The Godhead for me was a menace, and I responded with fear and its inevitable concomitant, guilt.” But that’s as a child. Still drowning in his grief, from his hard and recent loss, we read and feel for its inevitability, like the tide that stops for nothing, and Max unavoidable memories hurt and haunt him. His memories only escalate his sentiment of gloom and remorse. I have to confess that this was one of the scattered moments where I read more than the beauty of Banville well-chosen words; his suffering with the loss of his wife touched me deeply. The Sea the Sea by Iris Murdoch, is her 20th novel, which won the Booker prize in 1978. The author famously was an academic; a professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, who also wrote novels with a philosophical focus. The prose is lyrical, often poetical. With brutal honesty, he recalls the events with a dollop of wry, dark humor in between. Since most reviewers approach the novel with an intellectual savoir fair, or academic onslaught, to keep the experience as sterile as possible, a vital component of the tale is missed - the emotional investment of both the characters and the readers. For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil. (really good olive oil is essential..." (this goes on for another 15 lines)