The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

This is the Booker Prize winner for 1978 and I can see why it was selected. There are many beautifully written passages and the story itself takes some bizarre turns which lend an unknowable and mysterious component to the book. The basic story is as follows, a famous and jaded theatre personage retires to the (you guessed it) sea, ostensibly to devote himself more fully to personal development. He purchases a very strange and almost unpleasant house near an unfriendly village. He has what I would describe as mystical experiences and here is a passage from the book that describes one of those experiences. "Later I knew that I had been asleep and I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden,gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been removed behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. Stars behind stars and stars behind stars behind stars until there was nothing between them, nothing beyond them, but dusty dim gold of stars and no space and no light but stars." I am not a great reader for sound but even I found this to be poetry. The great movement in the book is that Charles (the theatre guy) is reunited with his lost love of his youth. From there the story descends into madness you might say but eventually there is redemption for Charles and tragedy for some other characters. It (the book) starts a little dry but then rewards the reader with great imagination.