The grandeur of delusions

yarb

Sep 4, 2024 12:27 AM

I think this is Irish Murdoch's best novel, and its not so much unreliable as reliably deluded narrator, retired theatre director Charles Arrowby, the most perfect of her self-sabotaging middle-aged male protagonists. Arrowby casts himself as Prospero in his seaside retreat (characters enter and exit Shruff End the way they do a stage), but unlike in the theatre, his power over other people is limited. He's a wizard whose staff has been broken; as his cousin James, the mystic who is also the only character in touch with reality, says to him of the idolised, idealised first love whom he takes captive, "she does not coincide with your dream figure. You were not able to transform her." Charles is a visionary — his hallucination of the sea monster opens our eyes, if not his, to the untrustworthiness of his vision — and his visions of himself and his friends and lovers are all that is real to him. But James again, of Charles' elaborate self-serving narrative of himself and Hartley: "you've made it into a story, and stories are false." Life isn't theatre, subject to the unifying vision of the director; it isn't a story written by an all-seeing third-person. Puppetteering has its limits, is actually rather ridiculous when practised on the stage of life. One of the many people abused and betrayed by Charles in the course of his lifelong rampage of egotism, his friend Peregrine, sums up his status as failed conjuror, ironically echoing the monster motif:

Mudoch's exquisite style is ever-present, in her iridescent, Protean descriptions of air, land, and especially sea; in her habit of evoking the passing of time (always from the perspective of her mad creation) through successive actions, like stage directions setting the pace of a play; in her facility with stacked adjectives and virtuosic variation of English adjective order: "the wet shorn moon-grey lawn" and "the gentle crafty lapping of the calm sea against the yellow rocks". She's an intensely visual writer (aptly for her name), especially in this novel of visions, so we get scalp-tingling sentences like "the sun was descending through a blue celebration of cloudless light" and motley adjective combos like "big lazy chryselephantine clouds that loafed around over the water exuding light". I'm going to quote a passage and try to explain why I think it's utterly brilliant:

There was no fog now. Twilight had been overtaken by darkness, and a bright fierce little moon was shining, dimming the stars and pouring metallic brilliance onto the sea and animating the land with the ghostly intent presences of quiet rocks and trees. The sky was a clear blackish-blue, entertaining the abundant light of the moon but unillumined by it. The earth and its objects were a thick fuzzy brown.

That peremptory first sentence. Five words, five syllables. A declaration.
The passive construction, with the twilight (Arrowby's favourite kind of light, one suspects) foregrounded, although the object rather than the subject.
Adjective order upending (size would normally come first), which combined with the use of "fierce" somehow gives the moon agency, renders it like a person or a malevolent sprite. It's like Charles is judging the moon, like he judges, in his frustrated paternalism, everyone. (As the vengeful Rosina sticks it to him, "you say you 'always wanted a son'. That's just a sentimental lie, you didn't want trouble, you didn't want to know. You never put yourself in a situation where you could have a REAL son. Your sons are fantasies, they're easier to deal with.")
Now the sparkling heart of the image, the "metallic brilliant" and the stunning verbs "animating" and "entertaining". The sky is like a theatre, an arena for the narrator's monstrous ego to cavort in.
The delicious "unillumined" — and then back to earth in that last dull, contemptuous sentence with its unappealing "thick fuzzy brown".

I adore the absurd comedy of Charles' food diaries ("for dinner I had an egg poached in hot scrambled egg, then the coley braised with onions and lightly dusted with curry powder, and served with a little tomato ketchup and mustard. Then a heavenly rice pudding") and his dicta on the same subject ("I am not a great friend of your peach, but I suspect the apricot is the king of fruit.") I love Murdoch's rich compulsive irony, her itching desire to pull the rug out from under characters and reader alike, and — the mark of many a great wrier, in my opinion — her sadism, how unflinchingly she watches these people careen around her carousel plots, bruising and breaking themselves almost beyond endurance. And I love this clever, funny, and beautiful novel from the bottom of my heart.