He is able to eloquently insist that he is acting for the good of all concerned while he manipulates and bullies Hartley.

There's no doubting Murdoch's mastery when it comes to portraying Arrowby's self-deceit. Charles decides to rescue her – even though she repeatedly tells him she'd prefer to be left alone. Hartley is now stuck in what Arrowby is determined to portray as an unhappy marriage, living a humdrum life with a violent husband. She was his great teenage love, but jilted him, and he claims to have been pining for her ever since. In a clunking coincidence, he also bumps into the great love of his life, a woman called Hartley. A theatrical series of scorned lovers and betrayed lovers come to haunt him from London.

His peace is quickly disturbed by a series of blasts from the past. A brilliant satire on the pomposity of a certain breed of theatre director, he sees himself as a Prospero figure who has 'abjured' the 'magic' of the stage and his successful career in London in order to 'become a hermit: put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.' To that end, he has bought himself a strange little house without electricity called Shruff End, which perches on the edge of the North Sea in an isolated coastal town.īut instead of 'learning to be good', Charles demonstrates how bad he can be.

At the centre of this maze of contradictions lies the narrator Charles Arrowby.

The sea the sea iris