Unreal estate No.03: The Easternmost House

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the third of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to The Easternmost House Juliet Blaxland’s book of the same name. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Juliet herself.

“On a stormy night, sleeping at the Easternmost House is like sleeping in a boat.” - Juliet Blaxland, The Easternmost House, 2019

Juliet Blaxland, writer, architect and illustrator, had lived in a coastal house by the North Sea with her family for more than a decade, until the eve of 2020. The house is not there anymore, but continues to live in a book she wrote about it. “The Easternmost House is a portrait of place that soon will no longer exist,” Juliet writes in the introduction of The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England, not yet realising how very soon that will be. “It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has all gone.” 

The Easternmost House was published last April, when the house was still standing on the edge of the cliff in Suffolk, England, overlooking the sea. It was demolished this February, so it wouldn’t fall into the sea. 

“The erosion process is historic and ongoing, with years of stability followed by great crashes of land-loss in a single tide.” 

The House

“From the sea, it appears as a house from an old fashioned story book,” Juliet writes, a house located “east of London, east of Ipswich and east of all the rest of England”. The name of the house is also a nod to The Outermost House, a seminal book by American author Henry Beston and one of Juliet’s favorites. In both books the land runs out, a fact that Juliet writes you can even sense without seeing, when driving along the road about a mile away.

“It is a windblown house on the edge of an eroding clifftop at the easternmost end of a track which leads only into the sea,” she writes. “There used to be a village here and there used to be several hundred more acres of farmland.” There was a time when the Easternmost House wasn’t a house on the edge, there was another building, which was demolished a few years earlier because of erosion. “Here, the history of houses and farmland being lost to the sea reaches far away back into time, a known unknown.” 

It was originally a row of three estate cottages, built for farm labourers or similar around 1800. “Practical, solid, honest and well-proportioned, with fireplaces and original features intact, but also a bit butchered by ‘improvements’ over the years.” It was red brick, with dark pantiles, “referred to in Suffolk as ‘blue’ pantiles, but actually as dark grey-black, and very typical of the local vernacular.” The wall facing the sea was painted pink, also very typically Suffolk. 

The house had its original bead-and-butt doors with Suffolk latches, “and the old threshold timbers are worn into soft curves by the boots of farm labourers past, hinting that it might be older than it at first looks.” The defining feature of the house, that made it recognisable from afar across the fields and trees, or from some distant part of the beach, Juliet writes, was its chimneys. “Because of being originally three cottages, with two being mirror images of each other in plan, plus the one nearest the cliff-edge, the chimney line goes: chimney, space, space, chimney, space, chimney. “Something like this: I__I_I”.”

The book is organised by months: there are twelve chapters, from January to December. Each is filled with the author’s observations, memories and details that help to re-create a strong sense of place on the page. A coastal house is never just a building. It is a place with a huge view of the sea, ever-present, ever-changing, while Juliet sits at a “clifftop kitchen table” and watches it, day by day, season by season. 

And so the seaside window is married to weather and its dramas, as are the inhabitants of the house. But it is not just what you can see; there are also smells and sounds. “A common sound of life on a windblown cliff is that of hammering nails into timber after gales. Repairs.” 

To help the reader imagine what the Easternmost House feels like inside, Juliet Blaxland writes about her own vivid childhood memories, because she lived somewhere nearby, in a different house as a kid. “A curious aspect of my childhood was the complete absence of modernity about it, even though it was the 1970s.” 

She remembers how old everything was, and not just the big things like the house, furniture or pictures, but the small, everyday items as well; she recalls that even the soap seemed to smell of ‘oldness’. “We went to bed in old beds, with old sheets, old blankets, old pillows, and old eiderdowns with the feathers falling out.” And she still did, while she wrote the book, because the Easternmost House was furnished “with a distillation of those same ‘old things’, it being filled with all the ‘old things’ that other members of our families didn’t want. The house itself is a refugee from a larger estate and most of the contents are similarly refugees from a past life larger than ours is now.” 

Juliet Blaxland keeps returning to scale in her book. The house appeared as a tiny dark rectangle in an enormous skyscape, she writes, “like a little matchbox placed on the mantelpiece in front of one of the larger of Turner’s most abstracted weather-inspired canvasses, sometimes all dark blues and steely greys, sometimes the wildest fires of unnaturally loud pinks and oranges, dazzling vast and bright and all-encompassing.” 

Juliet is an architect and is used to playing with scale in her work, drawing a building 1:50, “each line one-fiftieth of its real size, drawing a site plan at 1:500, making a model.” But it is more than just making models, it has become a mindset for her, and partly because of the place where she lives. “Living on a crumbling cliff with a dark night sky and a view of a sea horizon which hints at the curvature of the Earth, encourages consideration of scale on a grand scale, a universal scale, and the effects of thinking about a scale in this way can be mesmerising and amusing.” 

Time is a scale, a dimension that opens a more philosophical pocket in the book. It is also the time of tides, a clock of coastal erosion, inevitably ticking if you live in a house by the sea. “Living in a place where the church fell into the sea three hundred years ago makes it quite easy to imagine life in the future: not just a decade hence, but fifty years, a century, or three centuries hence. What will be exactly here, at X? What will the world be like?” 

One of the more peaceful passages in the book is when Juliet describes a warm June night spent outside with her family. “For a night on the dune we need no camping kit, no cutlery, no rucksack, no map, no whistling kettle, no nothing. Just an old wool rug and the billy-kid sausages and the rosemary twigs.” Juliet imagines for a moment what would be left if a freak wave would suddenly wash them away: just buttons of their shirts and soles of their sun-bleached canvas shoes, while wool, cotton and wood is biodegradable and would leave no trace. “We lie out on the dune, in silence under the vast universe, as the waves shush us to a state of half-watchful near-sleep, then just the waves and breathing, and then the sleep itself.”

The house has disappeared now, leaving no trace in the landscape. In early March Juliet Blaxland published a photo on her Twitter account. It was the familiar scenery of land, of sea and sky, but now without the tiny matchbox of the Easternmost House.

***

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

Unreal estate No.02: Quoyle's Point

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the second of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Quoyle’s Point from Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Annie Proulx herself.

“The sea breathed in the distance. The coast around the house seemed beautiful to him. But the house was wrong. Had always been wrong, he thought.”
- Annie Proulx, The Shipping News, 1993

“There was something about that hard, bare rock, the whistling wind, I found very appealing,” American author Annie Proulx said about her first time in Newfoundland, when she went there on a fishing trip, for a The New York Times interview 26 years ago. “I liked the loneliness and desolateness, the heavily wooded feeling of it. I felt clasped to that stony bosom in a way. I was physically shaken.” 

The idea for The Shipping News, her second book, was born. Annie Proulx fell in love with the landscape on this large island in Atlantic Ocean off eastern Canada, and later even bought her own house in Newfoundland, a cottage where she spent part of the year, dividing time between her other house at that time in Wyoming.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News, published in 1993, 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 at Quoyle’s Point, a house that is itself a vivid character, dusty and gaunt, moaning in the wind.

“I feel that stories come out of geography, climate, weather,” Annie Proulx said in an interview for SaltWire, “out of wind and mud, the placement of houses and villages, local landscape markers and anomalies.” 

The House

Quoyle’s Point is an imagined place in Newfoundland. For forty-four years a house has stood there empty, until the protagonist Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and “thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love”, travels to Newfoundland with his two little daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, and aunt Agnis Hamm, who was born in the house years ago. Quoyle’s faithless wife, and the girls’ mother, dies in a car accident after selling her two daughters to a sexual molester. Quoyle gets his girls back and they are ready to leave the broken life in New York and start anew. Aunt isn’t sure if the house is still standing, but inwardly believes that something had held, “that time had not cheated her of this return”. For Aunt the house is filled with good and bad memories.

The house was built a long time ago on Gaze Island (also a fictional place), where all Quoyles once lived. They were pirates that lured ships onto the rocks. When Gaze Island became flooded with Christians, the Quoyles dragged the house over a frozen bay to the shore and put it “like a hat on a rock”. In the beginning of the book it is hard to imagine that Quoyle’s ancestors were pirates. He is afraid of water and is described as a failure at life. On the ferry to Newfoundland, to his new life, Quoyle sits seasick, his face “the color of a bad pearl”. 

On the western side of the fictional Omaloor Bay, the Quoyle’s Point thrusts into the Atlantic Ocean like a bent thumb. Aunt left the house behind when she was fifteen. She wonders now which has changed the most, place or self? “She leaned on the rail, looking into the dark Atlantic that snuffled at the slope of the past.” When a ferry approaches the coast, Aunt suddenly has a glimpse of the building into the stirring mist. “I saw the house. The old windows. Double chimneys. As it always was. Over there! I’m telling you I saw it!” 

When they arrive at the Quoyle’s Point, it is all foggy until the wind goes under the fog and drives it up. The gaunt building appears. The house is the green of a grass stain. Bunny hates the colour, it makes her nauseous. The distinctive feature of the house is a window flanked by two smaller ones, “as an adult might stand with protective arms around children’s shoulders.” Half the panes are gone. Paint flakes from wood. There are holes in the roof. “Miracle it’s standing. That roofline is straight as a ruler,” Aunt says. Quoyle wants to check inside, if floors haven’t fallen into the cellar, but Aunt laughs. “Not likely,” she says joyfully. “There is no cellar.” 

The house is lashed with cable to iron rings set in the rock. The cables bristle with broken wires. Long before Aunt was born, there were no cables. The house rocked in storms like a big rocking chair, back and forth. “Made the women sick, afraid,” Aunt tells Quoyle, “so they lashed it down and it doesn’t move an inch but the wind singing through those cables makes a noise you don’t forget. Oh, do I remember it in the winter storms. Like a moaning.”

“Even when fresh the rooms must have been mean and hopeless,” Quoyle thinks, when exploring the inside of the abandoned, dusty house. Through the windows he sees the cool plain of the sea. “The bay rolled and rolled.” Square rooms, lofty ceilings. The floorboards slant under the feet, wood as bare as skin. “And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe.” 

In a couple of weeks with the help of a local carpenter Dennis Buggit the house is fixed as far as to be safe to move in. “Dad, I thought it was going to be a new house,” says Bunny, when they arrive with bags. “That Dennis was making it new. But it’s the same one. It’s ugly, Dad. I hate green houses.”

No matter what they did to the house, it kept its gaunt look, never altered from that first looming vision behind the fog. “How had it looked, new and raw on Gaze Island, or sliding over the cracking ice?” Quoyle wonders. The idea fixed in him that the journey over the frozen bay had twisted the house out of true, wrenched the timbers into a rare geometry. At one point in the book he visits the Gaze Island and finds a place of flat rocks laid out, where his house once stood. 

They had started to live at Quoyle’s Point in May; the end of September is the first time Quoyle is alone in the green house. He stomps around the still underfurnished rooms as “dusty air seemed to wrinkle as he moved through it”. At night the wind moans through the house cables, a sound that invokes a sense of hopeless abandonment. But he pulls the sleeping bag corner over his upper ear and sleeps again; “Getting used to nightmares.”

When winter nears, Aunt becomes worried. Snow could keep them trapped inside the house, quite far from everything. She encourages them to move across the bay to the city for the winter. “Consider this place a summer camp,” she says. “We can move out to the green house again in spring, as soon as the road is open. It’ll be the sweeter for waiting. I mean, if you still like it here. Or maybe you’re thinking of going back to New York?”

They can’t buy a new house for the winter season, because Quoyle has put a lot of money into the old house. He doesn’t have much left. They have to rent a place to stay. Quoyle returns to the green house, to pick up the rest of the things. The gravel road to Quoyle’s Point, had never seemed so miserable to him. Inside the house the abandoned silence. The stale smells. As it was the first time. As though they had never lived in it.

“The house was heavy around him, the pressure of the past filling the rooms like odourless gas. The sea breathed in the distance. The coast around the house seemed beautiful to him. But the house was wrong. Had always been wrong, he thought. Dragged by human labor across miles of ice, the outcasts straining against the ropes and shouting curses at the godly mob. Winched onto the rock. Groaning. A bound prisoner straining to get free. The humming of the taut cables. The vibration passed into the house, made it seem alive. That was it, in the house he felt he was inside a tethered animal, dumb but feeling. Swallowed by the shouting past.”

Winter in Newfoundland is savage cold. Early spring brings a huge storm. Wind noises at night causes nightmares to Bunny. She sees the green house being blown away by the wind. “Each of the taut cables shouted a different bull-roarer note, the mad bass driving into rock, the house beams and timbers vibrating. The walls chattered, shot nails onto the heaving floors. The house strained towards the sea.” Then cables snap one after another in her nightmare, caused by the real storm outside. Glass burst in her dream. House lifts in wind at the freed corners. “The last cables snapped, and in a great, looping roll the house toppled.” 

Was it just a dream? What Bunny saw turns out to be prophetic.

“You know I believe your ’ouse is gone. Take a look.” Archie says on the next morning with cigarette in his mouth and hands to Quoyle his old-fashioned binoculars. “No, you won’t find ’er for she’s not there. I looked out for ’er this morning, but she’s not where she was. Thought you might want to go along down and see if she was just tipped over or sailed away. Was some shocking ’ard wind we ’ad. How many years was them cables ’olding ’er down?” Quoyle didn’t know. Since before the Aunt time, what sixty-four years and many more. Since the old Quoyles dragged the house across the ice. 

“The great rock stood naked. Bolts fast in the stone, a loop of cable curled like a hawser. And nothing else. For the house of the Quoyle was gone, lifted by the wind, tumbled down the rock and into the sea in a wake of glass and snow crystals.” 

Good thing, Aunt had insured the green house, first thing she did when they arrived in Newfoundland. Quoyle didn’t know that. Aunt didn’t worry too much about the loss and planned which place to buy for the insurance money, for Quoyle and Wavey, his new love that he will marry, and girls. 

“In a way it’s a blessing the old place is gone.”

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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

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