The Sea, the Sea by Iris MurdochPenguin Books, 2001 (originally Chatto & Windus, 1978)

“Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit”: this on the second page of this book, and of its narrator’s diary, but of course nothing goes as planned. Charles Arrowby, fancying himself Prospero, can’t really give up power (or the illusion of it): the playwright-director can’t stop scripting scenes, moving people one way and another. A novel that’s beautiful and uncomfortable: beautiful descriptive passages narrated by Charles, threads of magic and myth and humor, and then Charles’s awful deluded actions: what he can see clearly and what he can’t or won’t.