There’s no way to get around it, this book is odd. I think that’s part of the reason why it's taken me so long to write this review, because The Sea, The Sea is just so strange. Even its strangeness is strange, because for the most part it's fleeting. In the main, the book is a relatively straightforward story about ego and obsession. But every once in a while it takes a turn for the supernatural, and the disjuncture between the mundane details of Charles Arrowby’s life of self-imposed exile in his ramshackle seaside house and the bizarre incidents that beset him, involving ghosts, monsters and Buddhist esoterica, is sharp and, well, strange.Arrowby is a renowned playwright recently retired to the coast, and the book is, ostensibly, the result of his attempts to write his memoirs. The first-person narrative begins with teasing hints about the salacious details he might reveal about the private lives of various stars of stage and screen, before increasingly becoming a record of the events happening to him in the present: his swimming habits in the treacherous sea, the spurned women who show up at his door unannounced, the visits of his old theatre friends and of James, his mysterious half-brother, and, crucially, the unexpected presence of one particular woman, from his youth, with whom he becomes dangerously and tragically obsessed. It is the aftermath of Arrowby’s attempt to rescue this woman (shades of Orpheus?) from her life of normality that finally forces him to reflect upon his own monstrous, self-regarding ego and the illusions upon which it is built.
There are non-human characters, too. The sea is a looming presence against which the actions, and the lives, of the human characters seem petty and insignificant. The house is a haunted repository of someone else’s memories, where every creaking step and groaning timber speaks of previous lives. There is also magic, and death. It’s a dense, complex, impressive piece of art, this book.
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