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:
