![]() But in the very next paragraph things turn abruptly dark and mysterious: ‘I had written the above, destined to be the opening paragraph of my memoirs, when something happened which was so extraordinary and so horrible that I cannot bring myself to describe it. The opening sentence seductively draws you in: ‘The sea which lies before me glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine.’ It is her Great Expectations, her Mona Lisa, her Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In that novel Murdoch achieved the perfection of her craft. This is not the case with The Sea, The Sea. This does not make them less lovable or less intellectually stimulating. Actually all her novels are hypnotically readable (with the sad exception of her last, fractured book, Jackson’s Dilemma), but most contain certain faults of excess: passages of over-description, stagey scenes, unrealistic over-intellectualized dialogue, plotting whose artifice is all too obvious. ![]() It is, to my mind, her best novel, as well as being the most representative of her talents and distinctive world view. The Sea, The Sea was Iris Murdoch’s nineteenth novel and the only one to win the Booker Prize (in 1978). ![]()
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