The Sea, The Sea; A Severed Head; by Iris Murdoch, with introduction by Sarah Churchill. Everyman’s Library, 2016

This nicely bound volume contains two of Murdoch’s works; ‘A Severed Head’ written in 1961, and ‘The Sea, The Sea’, penned in 1978. While both have male narrators and deal with love affairs, they are very different in tone.

‘A Severed Head’ is a bedroom farce, a short work (less than 200 pages) that details a short time in the life of comfortably well off wine dealer Martin. Martin has both a wife (Antonia) and a mistress (Georgie). All is well in his world. Then Antonia tells him that she wants a divorce; she is in love their friend and therapist, Palmer. She wishes to leave immediately. Palmer and Georgia wish to stay good friends with Martin, though, which Martin accedes to. It’s all very, very civilized. As the tale goes it, it turns out that nothing is as it seemed to Martin; people are coupling up all over the place and with everyone else. Despite his being cuckolded before he ever strayed, and being jerked around by everyone, I found it impossible to feel any sympathy for Martin; it’s not far into the story before he begins hitting people, something he continues to do. No one seems to have a whole lot of brains, just lust and manners. It’s funny in ways, a satire of morals and manners.

In ‘The Sea, The Sea’, the narrator is older and single, a retired actor and director who has bought a remote house on the coast that is falling into decay. He begins to write a combined memoir and diary, which is the story we read. Charles Arrowby is over sixty, and is wifeless, childless, brotherless, sisterless, and well known- although not as well-known as he likes to think. At his new home, he enjoys swimming in the sea, looking for pretty rocks, making horrible sounding meals, and fixating on women from his past. First he lights on Lizzie, who, having given up on Charles, is happily cohabiting with a gay friend. After he sends her a letter indicating he wants her back, she is ready to drop her partner. Then he accidently runs into a woman from even further back in his past: Hartley, the girl he grew up with and who was his first live, the girl who vanished and never made contact again, whose mother told Charles she was married and never wanted to see him again. One contact and he becomes obsessed with her. She admits she’s afraid of her husband Ben, and that their son ran away to escape him. This convinces him she’s trapped in an abusive marriage, and he is going to save her. He begins to stalk her, and eventually kidnaps and imprisons her in his house.

Meanwhile, he is dealing with the plague that everyone who moves to a holiday-ish locale has to live with: everyone he knows comes to visit. An old girlfriend, Lizzie and her partner, more old friends, Hartley’s estranged son, and his cousin James that he hasn’t seen for decades, all come calling without warning- of course, he doesn’t have a phone. Also, the house may be haunted. These people allow us to see things through eyes other than Charles’s; Hartley’s son fills in some of the background of Hartley’s marriage and Ben’s brutishness, while others see Ben in a very different light.

I had a hard time keeping track of the passage of time in this novel; Charles seems to exist in an alcohol fueled cloud of obsession. While the book was interesting, and I couldn’t stop reading it, I really disliked Charles. He is very much the center of the universe and no one else’s needs or wants intrude upon his thinking. His friends I have to wonder about, as they continue to party while being aware of his prisoner. I have to say the ending surprised me; it seemed tacked on in a way, but though short, it grabbed my interest in a way parts of the main story didn’t. We are left with the mystery of who and what Cousin James really was; I would have liked to know more about him than Charles!

While both stories contain people who act like fools, the writing is top notch and I enjoyed reading them- ‘The Sea, the Sea’ is some 450 pages long but I read it in a couple of days. 

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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande. Metropolitan Books, 2014

This is an amazing book. Dr. Gawande is a natural writer, a person who makes the hard facts easy to assimilate. And the facts are hard and unpleasant. Both modern medicine and modern life have made a good death- and a good life leading up to it- hard to achieve. The nuclear family means multigenerational living arrangements are largely a thing of the past; modern life decrees that most families have both partners in the couple have to have full time jobs, so no one has time to take care of a senior, whose needs become more as time goes by. Modern medicine has made it possible to keep a body “alive” when heart and lung function is lost. Except in the rare cases where the body is suitable for organ donation, what is the purpose of this? The ‘person’ is gone- or at least I hope they are gone and not trapped inside that hell.

Gawande proposes a few ways of dealing with the problem that’s already hitting the US: the Boomer generation is in its 60s and even 70s. America is going to be forced to find solutions to aging well. So far, when home care cannot be managed, assisted living homes that allow pets, children, smaller units so residents can feel like neighbors, plants, and allowing the residents to take risks are working out best. People in these types of homes live longer and take fewer pain killers. The animals give them a reason to get up and to walk around. Rather than being taken care of, they are being caretakers. But this type of home is rare. More common is the unit where the residents are treated like prisoners and given no autonomy. No wonder we all fear aging so much!

Besides creating acceptable places to live, Gawande stresses the need for people to be fully informed as to what their options are- which requires a shift in how doctors treat the aging and dying population. Everyone needs to ask themselves how much they are willing to give up to stay alive. One person’s answer was that as long as they could watch football on TV and eat chocolate ice cream, he would be happy. Everyone has a different idea of acceptable and they need to think about it before undergoing treatments, many of which sacrifice quality of life for a short extension of time. Doctors, patients, and families are all twitchy about having those talks. Everyone needs to read this book. 

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The Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly. Ballantine Books, 2016

It’s 1939. Upper class Caroline, working in New York City for her pet cause, the French Families Fund, is scrambling for money for French orphans. In Poland, teen aged Kasia is helping the boy she loves deliver things for the resistance, as the Germans have taken over her town, when she, her mother, her sister, and the boy are all taken captive by said Germans and sent to a re-education camp. German Herta, trained as a doctor but passed over for men, is working for her despicable uncle in his butcher shop when an opportunity arises to be one of the doctors in the re-education camp. She jumps at the chance to get away and to practice her profession. Through the course of WW 2, the lives of these very different women will become linked.

The most sympathetic character is, of course, Kasia. Her fate in Ravensbruck camp is better than many, but still horrendous. Herta, sexually abused by her uncle, is sympathetic at first, but as she becomes involved in the Ravensbruck experiments, even though she had little choice, I just couldn’t care about her feelings. Caroline, while important for the ending, seems extraneous. She’s a woman who did good things for the camp survivors, but reading about her life actually took away from the suspense of Herta and Kasia.

This is not an easy book to read. The gruesome atrocities of the concentration camp are vividly described. But it’s a compelling read; once I got past the first few chapters, I couldn’t stop reading. The tension is nearly unbearable at times. I was surprised to find at the end that these were real women, and the story is based on their lives. While books like this can be painful to read, I’m so glad to see them being published at a time when the world is in such turmoil as it is now! 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents. 

I received this book free from Net Galley in return for an unbiased review. 

Neither of these things influenced my review.