Out of Place No.03: 'Missing Person' by Patrick Modiano

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘To make a few faded words visible again.’ Memory and oblivion in Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person

The last rays of the sun linger on the façade and the glass-fronted doors of the garage, over there, on the other side of Rue de Rome, by the railway track.

From the window of an apartment, a man looks out across the city at night contemplating the rooftops, the façades of the buildings with windows lit up, a maze of staircases and elevators. In the distance, the city stretches out to streets, gardens, squares, and métro stations. To the bridges crossing the river, and lines of cars. The city is imagined as a dreamlike labyrinth, a network of chance meetings and encounters, of paths that cross, and lives that leave few traces. 

Published in 1978 and steeped in the shadows of Paris during the occupation, Missing Person evokes a city of mystery and ambiguity. Patrick Modiano creates a haunting and melancholy atmosphere of dreamlike uncertainty, from the first line of the book: ‘I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop.’ 

Guy Roland is a detective on a quest into his own past, hoping to uncover the identity he lost during the occupation of Paris. In the years following 1945 he found himself ‘struck by amnesia and was groping about in a fog’. Following a thread of fragments of evidence, of names, addresses, and photographs, the book maps a trail of clues and a series of encounters. He begins to submerge himself in the past, hoping to be recognized, for his own memory to surface. Amidst a tangle of revelations, of possible directions and stories, of unreliable evidence, are the memories even real or are they imagined: ‘Is it really my life I’m tracking down? Or someone else’s into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?’

Modiano’s work is preoccupied by the ways in which the past lives on and shapes the city of the present. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, which cited ‘the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation’. Since the publication of his first novel in 1968, Modiano has felt compelled to keep returning to this period of history, to begin to unravel its secrets, and to piece together in fragments what it felt like to live in those years, the gaps in memory and silences about wartime France and the occupation.

Modiano borrows the framework of a detective thriller, but this is a detective story in which no resolution is possible, because the evidence is fragmentary and dependent on chance and memory. Perhaps there are no answers, only dead ends. The search for a lost past creates a sense of dislocation and doubt that it’s enigmatic narrator can be anything other than a missing person with no verifiable name or history: I am nothing. 

Missing Person describes a series of phantomlike encounters with people whose lives briefly intersected. There are meetings with people who fail to recognize him, and muffled conversations. His identity is obscured, obliterated by the distance of time, by the fading of memory. ‘There, under the embankment trees, I had the unpleasant sensation that I was dreaming. I had already lived my life and was just a ghost hovering in the tepid air of a Saturday evening. Why try to renew ties which had been broken and look for paths that had been blocked off long ago?’

It feels as if uncertainty is what defines Modiano’s writing, and his themes of loss and abandonment arise from the precarious circumstances of his upbringing which he has written about in his memoir Pedigree. Missing Person echoes some of these fragments, and there is a crossover of places and names. Modiano has written about his memories of walking the city from a young age, in areas of Paris such as Pigalle and Montmartre, and the influence of these first impressions on his subsequent writing: ‘It was there, on rue Fontaine, place Blanche, rue Frochot, that I first brushed against the mysteries of Paris and, without realizing it, began dreaming of a life for myself.’

Modiano’s cities are memoryscapes. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he spoke about the links between walking and exploring the city and imagination: ‘through the topography of a city, your whole life comes back in the form of successive layers, as if you could decipher the superimposed writings of a palimpsest.’ Modiano’s places tend to be spaces of transit, hotel rooms, cafes, rented apartments. He is drawn to explore the run down and haunting atmosphere of certain quarters of the city. They are ephemeral and intriguing locations that fill his books with an atmosphere of mystery and melancholy. In Missing Person, the narrative circles around the Rue de Rome in Batignolles and the train tracks, the site of a lost memory.

What is striking on reading Missing Person is the detailed geography of the city, and the number of references to street names and specific places. The city becomes a site of clues or signs to be followed like a trail. They provide something tangible. Signs that might point the way through the darkness of memory. ‘I use them to try to obtain reference points. Buildings bring back memories and the more precise the setting the better it suits my imagination.’

I couldn’t resist the urge to map this book, the specific locations contrast with the uncertainty and lack of solidity which are the overall effect of the book. For Modiano’s narrators, the city is a place of anonymity in which it is possible to merge with your surroundings. Mark Polizzotti describes how this effect of disorientation is created precisely by a ‘sense of tension arising from this almost hyperreal precision and the knowledge that, despite this, the places themselves keep eluding our grasp.’ 

In Missing Person, the reader is led along a trail of papers, lists and fragments - postcards, letters, files and memos, newspaper articles, and old photos. Tracing backwards into the distant past, these artefacts begin to feel like evidence – the only proof the past was not a dream, a denial that lives could disappear and leave no traces. In the office of the detective agency, there are dark wooden shelves lined with street-and-trade directories: ‘these directories and year-books constituted the most valuable and moving library you could imagine, as their pages listed people, things, vanished worlds, to which they alone bore witness.’ 

In his Nobel speech, Modiano describes writing his first books, and looking at old Parisian telephone directories, their names, addresses, phone numbers and imagining the lives of those inside: ‘I had the feeling as I turned the pages that I was looking at an X-ray of the city – a submerged city like Atlantis – and breathing in the scent of time.’

Modiano’s work is interested in the way memories can arrive unexpectedly, and their connection to place. In the book, the narrator begins to walk the streets, attempting to retrace his steps and to piece together flashes of memory, like the traces of a dream on waking up: ‘I was like a water-diviner watching for the slightest movement of his pendulum. At the top of each street I would stop, hoping that the trees, the buildings, would make me suddenly remember.’

In his writing, Modiano explores the idea that places hold traces of the lives of those who have passed through, and that certain areas of the city retain a mystery and strangeness. The novelist becomes a seismograph, ‘standing by to pick up barely perceptible movements.’ The city is a site of memory, a layered surface that merges with the present and retains traces of the past; a haunting that can be detected in vibrations or waves within the spaces of the city itself: ‘I believe that the entrance-halls of buildings still retain the echo of footsteps of those who used to cross them and who have since vanished.’ Certain streets create a particular affect, as though they are weighted with the past. There is a feeling of peril in certain locations, as if some areas of the map are charged with meaning or tension and shape the present city. 

Missing Person is saturated with the oppressive atmosphere of the occupation. The darkness of the blackout and the silence of the curfews creates ‘a city which seemed to be absent from itself’. It is a place of transitory encounters, false papers, and random police checks, where on the surface life continued but in which ‘adults and children could disappear without a trace from one moment to the next.’ 

There is a sense of menace and fear to the city that pervades the novel, a feeling of suffocation, of the net closing around you. The city feels haunted and uncanny, as if it carries the weight of the past alongside it. ‘He remembered that tiny snowflakes – almost raindrops – were swirling outside the window. And this snow, the night outside, the bareness of the room, made him feel he was suffocating. Was it still possible to get away, even with money?’

The atmosphere feels shrouded in mystery and shadow, as though the encounters take place in a dream, half glimpsed and uncertain. It is as if the past city emerges through the fog, and Modiano uses imagery to create an atmosphere of fragility and a lack of solidity: ‘Everything about us was deserted, frozen. Even the Eiffel Tower, which I could make out on the other side of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower generally so reassuring, looked like a hulk of oxidized scrap-iron.’

In this city, Modiano places shadowy figures of uncertain identity, ‘the strange people who discussed their affairs in low voices’. His characters drift through an untethered existence, plagued by doubts or a sense of guilt and unease about the events of the past. They are stateless and exiled emigres of indeterminate nationality: ‘They spring out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense.’

The act of vanishing is one of the central metaphors of the book, and Modiano’s work is full of characters who go missing. The occupation is portrayed as a time of disappearances, and the threat of obliteration feels present. Retracing his footsteps to Megève, the whiteness of the snow-covered landscape is like the amnesia that grips him. He finds himself surrounded by snow which seems to suggest invisibility: ‘All around me there was nothing but whiteness.’

In his Nobel speech, Modiano spoke of memory as engaged in ‘a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies.’ 

Modiano’s work has been guided by this prevailing interest in the silences and omissions of memory, an attempt ‘to shine a light into the darkness’ and to trace what is left of the disappeared, of those who left few traces. ‘Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.’

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Out of Place No.01: ‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

It is better to have nothing': Transience in Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious. It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words.

Housekeeping, the first novel by Marilynne Robinson, published in 1980, is a book that is strongly resonant of place. It is a book with themes of transience and ideas about the meaning of home, even if that home is found elsewhere. Rooted in nature, it is also deeply human. It is a striking and singular book, full of beautiful imagery, written with a philosophical lyricism. When I first read it, I felt that it existed on its own plane, somehow. 

In the book, Sylvie, described as a transient and drifter, returns to her childhood town to look after her orphaned nieces. It is partly a coming-of-age story, about separation, memory, and loss. It begins with a train derailment, and the haunting image of a train disappearing into the lake. The train lies lost and submerged, hidden in its depths, becoming a legend in the town of Fingerbone, a story which also foreshadows the lives of its characters.

Housekeeping was highly acclaimed on publication, to the surprise of its author. In an interview with Thomas Schaub, Robinson remarks that when writing the book, she felt its style went against the tide of contemporary literature, and of what might be considered publishable: ‘part of what I was doing was trying to write a book that I would want to read, just to see what one would look like.’

It is a book that has language at its centre, and that uses language and metaphor to take us elsewhere. In the Schaub interview, Robinson talks about her interest in the idea that lived experience is something that transcends spoken, everyday language, and that people are more than what they say. In the book, Robinson uses metaphor to explore ideas through the thoughts of her narrator, Ruthie. She says that what interested her in writing was ‘in trying to be beyond my own grasp or outside my own expectations.’ 

The idea behind this series is partly to consider what it is about literature that seems particularly displacing, and what novels can tell us about being in the world. As Robinson puts it: ‘Art in a sense is recurring at the frontier of understanding because it integrates the problems of experience and the ordering of experience.’

In the book, dreams appear as real as memories, and the line between them is blurred: ‘I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming. I know my life would be much different if I could ever say, This I have learned from my senses, while that I have merely imagined.’ 

The fictional town of Fingerbone is based on Sandpoint in northern Idaho, which is situated on a vast lake, Lake Pend Oreille, between three mountain ranges and surrounded by National Forests. A long railroad bridge crosses the lake, as in the book, ‘from any distance its length and the vastness of the lake made it seem fragile and attenuated.’ The Northern Pacific Railroad built a depot at Sandpoint in 1882 opening a trade route for timber and freight trains, and the railroads played an important role in the arrival of settlers into this remote part of North Idaho. Amtrak’s long distance Empire Builder train route, which travels between Chicago and Portland or Seattle, stops at Sandpoint. 

Landscape plays a central role in the story, and is based on the place Robinson grew up, a part of the country where her family had lived for a long time. She describes the early parts of the book as ‘either memories from my childhood in some oblique form or stories from my family.’ Robinson’s all-female cast of characters are significant. When writing the book, she was aware of an imaginative lack and misrepresentations in stories and accounts of the American west, including the absence of women from these portrayals.  

Throughout, the book enacts a tension between transience and settlement, and between movement and stasis. Sylvie likes to watch the passing trains, and all the stories she tells are about boxcars and train or bus stations. She retains her transient habits, preferring food that can be eaten on the move, and the only place she will shop is the five and dime store.  She keeps her clothes in a cardboard box under the bed, and sleeps on top of the covers, fully clothed and with her shoes on. The book plays with the figure of the hobo, and with depictions of female drifters and migrant workers. For Sylvie, the trains represent a home that is always on the move, and through which pass the lives of many people, the invisible transient souls who claim a space within its wagons.

Sylvie’s drifting seems to arise partly as a response to Fingerbone’s isolation and instability. It is dominated by the lake that surrounds and threatens to overwhelm the physical spaces of the town. In Fingerbone, even the wind is watery. Each year the lake freezes over, and then thaws dramatically. Its houses seem like insecure and fragile dwellings, and there is recurring imagery of fallen houses, lost to the weight of snow and ice, and of houses adrift or unmoored: ‘a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel.’ 

Water imagery and metaphors of flooding and drifting recur throughout its pages. This connects to the idea of transience: ‘our lives floated as weightless, intangible, immiscible, and inseparable as reflections in water.’ The word ‘transient’ comes from the Latin transiens which means ‘to cross’, and this crossing of boundaries, the seeping and infiltration of water, is everywhere in the book. The lake is a constant presence reaching deep into their imaginations, infringing the boundaries between land and water.  

Robinson writes: ‘Below is always the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains.’ We are used to hearing about the movement of people as streams, flows, and floods. In the book, the lake becomes a container for the lost: ‘all those who were never found and never missed, who were uncommemorated’.  

Fingerbone is described as insignificant and negligible, melting into the darkness, as if glimpsed from the window of a moving train. The town’s residents feel unsettled by the presence of the transients who arrive with the railroad, or from the mountains, who are found by the shores of the lake, and in the forests. They are described as ghosts, wandering through Fingerbone, ‘like people in old photographs’, ‘the nameless’ and ‘the dispossessed’. Their presence threatens the stability of the town, its claim to be a tenable and rooted place, and implies a recognition, of something too close for comfort. Robinson writes that, ‘a diaspora threatened always,’ and the book creates a space for the displaced and unknown who haunt its edges. 

Throughout the book, there is a tension between domestic life and drifting. Sylvie struggles with the feeling of being contained within a house, and her housekeeping begins to overlap the boundaries between inside and outside: ‘Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude.’ She opens the windows and turns out the lights, and every evening they have dinner in darkness, with the sounds of the night outside. Leaves begin to gather in the corners of the room. Crickets and squirrels begin to reside in the house, sparrows and swallows begin to nest in the attic. 

The book traces the narrator Ruthie’s thought process as she tries to come to terms with what makes her feel different from others. She describes feeling invisible, like a ghost: ‘It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.’ She experiences the absence of her mother, her sense of loss, as a constant waiting and expectation, so that ‘the ordinary demanded unblinking attention.’ The book’s characters feel an intense quiet awareness and stillness: When we did not move or speak, there was no proof we were there at all.’

Ruthie begins to find a greater awareness of fragility, of instability and impermanence. To stay still in the book, is to be caught up in the ordered time of the domestic. It can be a way to hold the past at a distance and keep out the ghosts of those who are absent or lost. For Ruthie and Sylvie, these fragments of memory threaten to overwhelm the present, and a life of drifting become a way of comprehending the ghosts of the past, of keeping them alive through movement. 

Becoming transient is to reach an awareness of the unsheltered, the nameless, the lonely; those who drift outside the lighted windows of the houses. Ruthie begins to feel that she is ‘breaking the tethers of need, one by one’, moving further from the comforts of the settled world, in which the sense of security, of permanence is an illusion: ‘It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.’

In Housekeeping, the idea recurs that families should not be broken: ‘That’s how it is with family, Sylvie said. You feel them the most when they’re gone.’ As I write this, I have been thinking about the separation of families in a more recent context, about migration and detention; about children caught up in war and conflict. Long journeys across impossible spaces; the events that cause people to become separated, to become lost. 

I’ve been thinking about the Sylvie who exists in me, my own restlessness and tendency to drift. And about the problems with a romanticized impression of life on the road or rails. But the invocation of this book, that families cannot be broken, brings back the idea of displacement. The book makes its transients central, rather than leaving them on the edges of things. 

Housekeeping portrays a longing for movement that is also a deep awareness, that registers the presence of those who have vanished; the unrecorded lives of those who left few traces behind. Perhaps a troubled line runs between these kinds of longing, and the small gratitude of having safety and security, somewhere to hide away, when needed, and to sleep in peace. 

Housekeeping depicts a different way of living in the world and evokes a belonging that can exist outside ideas of home as being rooted in one place. The book questions the notion of a stable past, a version of home that is not available to everyone. It is about the insecurity at the heart of living, of finding meaning and a place to be, within movement.

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Quoyle's Point... an interview with Annie Proulx

As a companion piece to the second of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – Quoyle’s Point from The Shipping News – we present an interview with Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel.

Interview by Anna Iltnere:

The Shipping News (1993) by Annie Proulx is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of a family moving to Newfoundland and starting to live among local fishermen in an abandoned seaside house, moored to a rock. The house at Quoyle’s Point is a vivid character in the book, dusty, gaunt, despite the efforts, and moaning in the wind. 

I contacted Annie Proulx to ask her four questions about the role of Quoyle’s seaside house in her book and about her own relationship with water.

What is your relationship with water and with the sea? What does the sea mean for you?

Like most people I am attracted to shorelines, whether lake, river or ocean. All of these locales have been severely damaged by humankind over the millennia—wetlands drained, rivers dammed, ocean-shores faced with armored rock walls, estuaries polluted. My interest in today's warming oceans is based on concern as the waters move toward acidity, as coral reefs die, as kelp and eelgrass decline. I watch with trepidation as fish stocks dwindle and the shells of tiny pteropods dissolve. I walk regularly on the shore, picking up plastic as I go and feeling grief at the damages inflicted on these habitats. 

Quoyle is afraid of water and yet he has to overcome his aquaphobia to own a boat and live by the sea. What does his fear symbolize in the book?

I’m not big on symbols. His fear can mean whatever the reader thinks. Books are somewhat cooperative in this way, that a reader can use her or his own experience of life to interpret the actions and thoughts of a book’s protagonists.

What role does the house at Quoyle’s Point play in The Shipping News?

The house is his link with the past—it is the ancestral home of the Quoyles. It also carries bad memories for the Aunt so that what happened in that house a generation before drives the story. And it is a testament to the staying power of Newfoundlanders of the fishing-village period when people lashed their houses to the rocks against the pounding seas and hurricane-force winds. 

Would you agree to spend a summer at Quoyle’s house (if it would be still standing)?

Of course! Where do I sign up?

***

Read Anna Iltnere’s essay about Quoyle’s Point here.

Anna is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia and the author of our ‘Unreal estate’ series of essays on literary houses by the sea. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Shruff End… an interview with Miles Leeson

As a companion piece to the first of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – Shruff End from The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch – we present an interview with Miles Leeson, lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review:

“Having lived all my life near to the sea I’m in the same mind as Murdoch; the importance of the sea to mental health and wellbeing, and to freeing the creative part of the mind. Iris Murdoch always wishes in her letters to friends that she could have a cottage by the sea and one wonders why she didn’t as she could have afforded one.”
– Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester

Interview by Anna Iltnere: 

What was Iris Murdoch’s relationship with water and with the sea? What the sea meant for her?

A very long relationship! I can’t think of any novels in which water isn’t mentioned or used as a symbol in some way. It’s always connected with boundaries, whether it’s the Thames that Blaise crosses to meet his mistress Emily, or the gap between reality and the unconscious in The Sea, The Sea which Charles constantly struggles with. Iris herself was, as we know, drawn to the sea throughout her life and regularly swam in the wild – near Oxford, in lakes, in the Sea, or indeed in the pond in the back garden at Steeple Aston! It’s her most enduring image I think, and one which the film Iris from 2001 makes much of as well.

 “To be able to swim, for Murdoch, is within her fiction almost to possess moral competence,” Peter Conradi writes in his essay “Iris Murdoch and the sea”. Is there more to swimming, near drowning and drowning in Murdoch’s books than just thrilling plot turns?

As I’ve hinted at above water is much more than just a useful fictional device for Murdoch. Peter is right of course, a sense of the moral life is tied up with images of confidence, or lack of confidence, in water. We remember that early scene in The Unicorn when Marion has her experience on the beach below the cliffs at Gaze, she meets the seal perfectly happy in his environment whereas Marion is very much a fish out of water in the space she now finds herself in. Effingham in the same novel and his revelation as he sinks slowly into the bog. Quite often our male protagonists, Blaise, Charles, Bruno in Bruno’s Dream, Tim Reed in Nuns and Soldiers, and others have a complex relationship with water and find themselves faced with set-pieces – who could forget Tim’s near-drowning in France? – that force them to face reality. 

What role does the seaside house Shruff End play in The Sea, The Sea?

Oh, Shruff End, and the immediate landscape, is the setting for all of the central action; it’s very much the ‘stage’ and everything else really happens ‘off stage’ in a sense. What is little known is that Murdoch wrote a stage version of The Sea, The Sea that was never put on in her lifetime. Much has been said about what Murdoch takes from Shakespeare and here, of course, it’s The Tempest. We have our Prospero who has, of course, recently retired from the Theatre and his ‘court’ who end up following him out to the seaside. One way of reading the house is the mind of Charles writ large; how the rooms relate to his conscious and unconscious thought and so on; especially once he captures Hartley. That’s only interesting in part I think, we lose much if we give a simplistic psychoanalytic reading to the text; it should be enjoyed as a comedy in form, with Charles as a quasi-tragic figure.

Would you agree to spend a summer at Shruff End? Why or why not?

Oh, I think so, so long as Charles was no longer resident! The setting is rather bleak in some ways but at least I could get down to some serious writing. Having lived all my life near to the sea I’m in the same mind as Murdoch; the importance of the sea to mental health and wellbeing, and to freeing the creative part of the mind. Iris Murdoch always wishes in her letters to friends that she could have a cottage by the sea and one wonders why she didn’t as she could have afforded one with John if she wanted to; especially after the success of the 1970s. Shruff End probably needs some major updating and renovation in any event; I certainly don’t remember it having central heating!

***

About Miles Leeson: As well as being the lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, Miles also published Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist in 2010, the edited collection Incest in Contemporary Literature in 2018, the festschrift Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration this year and is currently writing Iris Murdoch: Feminist. 

About Anna Iltnere: Anna is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia and the author of our ‘Unreal estate’ series of essays on literary houses by the sea. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Unreal estate No.01: Shruff End

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the first of a new series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Shruff End from Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea. Each essay will be about a different house, illustrated by the artist Katrina Gelze. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester. 

“What madman built it?”
– Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea, 1978

“My imagination lives near the sea and under the sea,” Iris Murdoch said in 1978. She had never lived by the sea herself, but water played a big role in her books and her life.

A passionate swimmer and with characters who are thrown into water by her pen, Iris Murdoch was fascinated by the sea. Shruff End is one of the seaside houses of her mind, enlivened in her book The Sea, The Sea. 

“Water had a quickening effect on Iris Murdoch’s imagination,” writes Olivia Laing in her book To the River, “for her novels brim over with rivers and pools and chilly grey seas.”

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1919, as the only child of a singer and a civil servant. When Iris was a few weeks old the family moved to London. She would go on to study philosophy and wrote 26 novels, before being diagnosed with Alzheimers disease in 1997. Iris Murdoch died in 1999 aged 79, her brilliant mind relentlessly erased by dementia during the last two years of her life.

Iris Murdoch’s book The Sea, The Sea was published in 1978 when she was 59, was her nineteenth novel and the one which brought her the Booker Prize. The story is about a retired middle-aged actor, playwright and director Charles Arrowby, who leaves glittering London and moves to a house by the sea to write his memoirs. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.  

“Strange novel”, writes Philip Hoare in RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. “Faintly ridiculous” admits Olivia Laing, but this tragi-comic drama sinks in, and you become soaked in its story just as Shruff End remains forever dampened by the mysterious sea.

The House

Shruff End is a fictional house on an unidentified English coast. Charles Arrowby buys it in a fever of haste, selling his big apartment in Barnes, London, by the Thames. The sea-house takes most of his savings, but Arrowby imagines living simple, hermit days here, far away from his previous life on the London stage. But this dream that has come true soon turns into a strange nightmare, and Shruff End has its own role in the gripping story.

Shruff End is perched upon a small promontory, not exactly a peninsula, and stands on the very rocks themselves. “What madman built it?” Arrowby wonders. The facade, looking out onto the road, is “not in itself remarkable”, but in its lonely situation is strangely incongruous. The house would scarcely attract notice in a Birmingham suburb but all alone upon that wild coast it certainly looks odd. “Exposed and isolated,” writes Arrowby about his first impression. He falls in love with it.

The house is a brick, ‘double-fronted’ villa, with bay windows on the ground floor and two peaks to the roof. From the upper seaward windows the view is almost entirely of water, unless one peers down to glimpse the rocks below. From the lower windows the sea is invisible and one sees only the coastal rocks that surround the house, elephantine in size and shape. “How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life,” Charles Arrowby writes of the view. 

The pale buff-coloured blinds, which hang in almost every room, are “in excellent condition”, with glossy wooden toggles on strings, silk tassels, and lace fringe at the bottom. When these blinds are drawn down, Shruff End, as seen from the road, has a weird air of complacent mystery.

The bricks are dark red. The back of the house has been horribly “pebble-dashed” against the weather. “Little do they realise how ardently I look forward to those storms, when the wild waves will beat at my very door!” Charles Arrowby is rather exalted in the first pages of his memoirs: “What a paradise, I shall never tire of this sea and this sky.”

Mr Arrowby lives entirely on the seaward side of the house, upstairs in his bedroom and what he calls his drawing room, and downstairs is the kitchen and a small den next to it known as “the little red room”, where there is a fireplace. On the other side of the house are the the book room, where he has put the crates of his still unpacked books, and the dining room, where he stores his wine. 

The chief peculiarity of the house, and one for which Charles Arrowby can find no rational explanation, is an inner room found on both floors.They are rooms with no external window, but lit by internal window giving onto the seaward rooms. These two “funny” inner rooms on two floors are extremely dark. Throughout the book they seem to be a rib-cage containing the soul of the house. 

The house is “mysteriously damp”, its floor is “curiously damp”. The large – and damp – larder is full of woodlice. “Is it conceivable that the sea could be rising up through a hidden channel under the house?” Charles Arrowby prises up some linoleum in the hall, and replaces it with a shudder. There is a salty smell, he observes. At the end of the book he tries to get rid of the house, and admits that no one seems to want to buy the place, “perhaps because of the dampness, perhaps for other reasons”.

The sea becomes a canvas for Mr Arrowby’s own inner demons. “It is after tea and I am sitting at the drawing-room window watching the rain falling steadily into the sea. There is a terrible grim simplicity about this grey scene. Apart from an iron-dark line at the horizon the sea and the sky are much the same colour, a muted faintly radiant grey, and expectant as if waiting for something to happen. As it might be flashes of lightning or monsters rising from the waves.” 

One morning he does see a monster rising from the waves, while the sea also mysteriously and repeatedly unties the rope that he ties to the shore to help himself get out of the water after his daily swims. It provides one of the most quoted lines from the book: “Time, like the sea, unties all knots.”

The house starts to play tricks on his mind. Is the house haunted? He asks about a poltergeist in a nearby bar. “Any house might be haunted,” someone answers. At first it is a vase that falls down and is smashed to pieces. Then – a mirror. And then there’s a face he sees in the window at night. Or was it moon?

Shruff End seems to have not only its own ghost, but also its own climate, independent from the weather outside. It feels cold even on warm days. One day Arrowby comes in from the brilliant light outside and the air in the house seems grey and thick. The house is gloomy, and there are strange sounds too, or perhaps it is just the bead curtain clicking in the draught from the open door...

“The house was still acting up, but I felt by now that I was getting to know its oddities and I was more friendly towards it,” writes Arrowby. “It was not exactly a sinister or menacing effect, but as if the house were a sensitized plate which intermittently registered things which had happened in the past – or, it now occurred to me for the first time, were going to happen in the future. A premonition?”

When Mr Arrowby puts Shruff End up for sale and runs back to London, he moves to “a peculiar miserable derelict” new flat. If he ever wanted to live as a hermit, retired from the world, then this – he concludes – would be a far better habitat. “It is oddly enough easier to write here, amid all this cramped chaos, than in the open spaces at Shruff End.” 

In the end, he hadn’t been able to concentrate in a house by the sea. 

“Throughout the book water runs like a spell or a curse. The sea of the title is not just a background or vista, it is a character,” writes Daisy Johnson in the introduction of a special edition of The Sea, The Sea. It was published by Vintage Books in the summer of 2019 to celebrate the 100th birthday of Iris Murdoch. 

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About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website