The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch

I have hugely misjudged Iris Murdoch. For some reason I had this idea in my head that her fiction would be old-fashioned and stuffy, and I honestly couldn't tell you where that idea came from. I knew she'd won the Booker for The Sea, The Sea. I knew the covers of a lot of her books slap. None of that mattered, I'd already decided she wasn't going to be for me. So I picked up The Sea, The Sea expecting to have to push through it, and instead I loved it. I now need to sit with whatever bias I was carrying around about her work, because this is great, and I'm going to have to read more of her. The novel follows Charles Arrowby, a retired actor who's moved to a coastal town to escape the noise of his old life. He's there to write his autobiography, and he very quickly discovers that writing an autobiography is a lot harder than he thought, not least because the life he's trying to leave behind keeps turning up on his doorstep. People from his past keep appearing in the village, no matter…