The Sea, the Sea / Iris Murdoch 495 pp.

Charles Arrowby is just retired from a sparkling life as a London theatre director of some fame.  He chooses an isolated house on the south coast and begins his memoirs, in which he will presumably write of his long love affair with a much older actress.  Instead, he almost immediately becomes haunted by visions and strange sounds in his house and in the wild water where he daily swims.

And the isolation doesn't last.  He stumbles across Mary, a woman he loved as an adolescent and was mysteriously separated from.  She is frumpy and seems unhappy; Charles is a man of action and determines that he will rescue her and finally experience true love.  As he hatches his bizarre and rather frightening scheme, he is visited by a host of characters from his past, all crowded into his poorly-equipped cottage.

Charles is a horrible egomaniac but a fascinating narrator.  Toward the book's end, he acquires a kind of wisdom in beautiful passages that owe much to Eastern religious tradition.  I can't categorize this novel, but I recommend it nevertheless.