The Sea, the Sea; A Severed Head - (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics) by Iris Murdoch (Hardcover)

About the Book

'The sea, the sea' - Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors -- some real, some spectral -- that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core. 'A severed head' - A dark and ferocious comic masterpiece, the story traces the turbulent emotional journey of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a smug, well-to-do London wine merchant and unfaithful husband, whose life is turned inside out when his wife leaves him for her psychoanalyst.

Book Synopsis

These two major novels--by one of the most influential British writers of the twentieth century--are ferociously dark comedies that combine playfulness with profundity.

A Severed Head (1961) is one of Iris Murdoch's most entertaining works, tracing the turbulent emotional journey of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a smug, prosperous London wine merchant and unfaithful husband, whose life is turned inside out when his wife leaves him for her psychoanalyst. The story takes bedroom farce to a new level of sophistication, with scenes that are both wickedly funny and emblematic of the way momentous moral issues play out in everyday life.

The Booker Prize-winning The Sea, the Sea (1978) is set on the edge of England's North Sea, where egotistical Charles Arrowby, a big name in London's glittering theatrical world, has retreated into seclusion to write his memoirs. Arrowby's plans begin to unravel when he encounters his long-lost first love and finds himself increasingly besieged by his own fantasies, delusions, and obsessions.

Both novels are tragicomic masterpieces that brilliantly dramatize how much our lives are governed by the lies we tell ourselves and by the all-consuming need for love, meaning, and redemption.

Introduction by Sarah Churchwell

Review Quotes

Praise for The Sea, the Sea

"Dazzlingly entertaining and inventive."
--THE TIMES (London)

"One of Miss Murdoch's best novels . . . Murdoch was always balancing the demands of storytelling with the more urgent need to examine how the truth of a fleeting life reflected the larger, permanent truths of existence."
--THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Murdoch's subtly, blackly humorous digs at human vanity and self-delusion periodically build into waves of hilarity, and Arrowby is a brilliant creation: a deeply textured, intriguing yet unreliable narrator, and one of the finest character studies of the twentieth century."
--THE GUARDIAN

Praise for A Severed Head

"Beautifully and wittily written."
--THE NEW YORK TIMES

"This is a comedy with that touch of ferocity about it which makes for excitement."
--Elizabeth Jane Howard

"Remarkable . . . One feels a power of intellect quite exceptional in a novelist."
--THE SUNDAY TIMES (London)

"Murdoch's novels are not merely cerebral exercises in ideas about moral philosophy, ethics and aesthetics, although those ideas shape her fiction. They are also shot through with the dark energies of occult forces, variously figured as Eros, the id, the unconscious, the repressed, the monstrous, the supernatural, the libidinous . . . Murdoch's fictional experiments . . . fuse realism with the mystical."
--from the Introduction by Sarah Churchwell

About the Author

IRIS MURDOCH (1919-1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy Fellow at St Anne's College for twenty years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than twenty-six novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry.

SARAH CHURCHWELL is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe and Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby. She writes regularly for New Statesman, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications.