_We all come to a point in our lives when we start to look back, sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with regret, over the lost days of youth. Scads of books address that exact topic, but few with the penetration and compassion of this Booker Prize winning work by Murdoch.

Charles Arrowby, successful theatre director, bored with his life and certain he is being dragged down and oppressed by the women in it, retires to a house by the sea in order to concentrate on writing his memoirs. When he discovers that his first love Mary - whom he hasn’t seen since they were both adolescents - lives nearby he abandons work on his book to hatch a plot to abduct her and save her from what he is convinced is an unhappy marriage.

Arrogant and self-satisfied, Arrowby is blind to his own motivations. He longs for a return to the simplicity and ardour of youth, but can’t admit to feeling anything so banal. Instead he relies on high minded and romantic notions of perfect love to justify his attempts to force the now middle aged Mary to fall for him again. He likes to think of himself as sophisticated, but inside he’s the usual mess of raging and contradictory needs, which is where the sea comes in. It’s a constant presence through the book, a symbol for Arrowby’s restless id, his primal driving force, and in the same way as we conceal our most unspeakable fantasies under the surface of consciousness Murdoch’s sea contains monsters, as well as the power to become destructive when thwarted.

Midway through the book, Charles reflects on a period of peace just before he kidnaps Mary:

“When I grew tired of hunting for stones I used to sit for long periods upon the rocky archway bridge beneath which the angry tide raced in and out of Minn’s Cauldron, dangling my feet over the edge and letting them bathe in the flying rainbow of the spray. It gave me a gloomy fatalistic pleasure to observe the waves as they rushed into that deep and mysteriously smooth hole, destroy themselves in a boiling fury of opposing waters and frenzied, creaming foam. “

Arrowby’s soul is that cauldron. He senses the turmoil, but never identifies it as belonging to him. Instead he lets the sea show him serpents and lets them slide away again beneath the surface, without ever recognizing their true provenance. In the end, he’s as unchanged as the sea and just as relentlessly destructive to the lives he touches.

_Another story of escape, and in this story Proulx’s hapless character (“hero” just isn’t the right word) Quoyle is running from another woman: the dead and deadly Petal Bear, mother of his children and crusher of men’s hearts. He hopes a return to his ancestral property in Newfoundland with his two daughters, Bunny and Sunshine and his tough-as-a-newly-forged-tyre-iron aunt, Agnis Hamm, will prove a fresh start for them all and a chance to forget.

The house, he discovers, is half-ruined and only still in place because it is chained to the rock on which it is built. Beyond it the sea rolls and rolls and in this story it represents the huge and indifferent forces to which we all are subject, like it or not. Proulx’s thesis is that our control over our lives is much weaker than we imagine or are prepared to admit, that while we pretend that where we end up represents the sum of the choices we have made, we’re all just like the house: only able to resist the elements with the assistance of some stout cable and driven in cleats. The primal force Quoyle has to tackle is the sea, of course and he’s more aware than most of his ultimate frailty. He’s scared of water, refuses at first to try to sail, buys the wrong boat, suffers humiliation at the hands of the locals, learns how it should be done and also listens to their stories of the sea, because every single person who lives in Kerrick-Claw has a story to tell about it, from harbourmaster Diddy Shovel’s tales of shipwrecks and other disasters, to Englishman Nutbeem and the probably fictional oriental junk he claims to have built from sheets of plywood and a batten sail bought at auction.

Quoyle learns to overcome his fear of the sea, well founded though that is, and sail the strip of water between Quoyle’s Point and Kerrick-Claw. He learns that although nature can’t be conquered, it can be negotiated and this allows him to bargain his way to peace with Petal Bear’s uneasy spirit. He finds someone else he can love and when the house is blown from the rock, inevitably, as we all must one day be, he talks of building a summer place there; another, smaller foothold on the unforgiving coast.

In this extract, Quoyle takes a trip to the house and finds a body in the sea. Gripped with urgency, he sets sail in rough water trying for the first time to take his boat across the bay so he can summon help:

“The boat pitched and plunged headlong, the bow digging into the loud water while the propeller raced. Quoyle was frightened. Each time he lost the rudder and the boat yawed. In a few minutes his voyage ended. The bow struck like an axe, throwing the stern high. At once a wave seized, threw the boat broadside to the oncoming sea. It broached. Capsized. And Quoyle was flying under the water.”

_Dunmore is a poet, first and foremost, but one who, thankfully for the rest of us, has also applied her skills to the novel. She, of this group of three authors, is the one who has returned to the sea as a motif and setting more than once: the novels With Your Crooked Heart and Talking to the Dead also both feature the sea at points in the story, but it is in Your Blue-Eyed Boy that it becomes almost a character in its own right.

Simone, a London solicitor, is forced by the collapse of her husband’s business to take a job as a District Judge in a remote coastal town. Her sons hate the change; her husband bitterly resents his reliance on her. Her job is stressful, demanding, but at least it pays the bills. Then one day a phone call comes from a man Simone hasn’t seen since the laid back seventies. Simone was a student when she and Michael spent a summer in Annasett, dropping acid, making love and having their photo taken by Michael’s buddy Calvin. Michael still has the shots. He wonders what Simone’s employers might make of them.

Simone sits in judgment over other people’s lives. She hears custody cases, disputes between parents over visiting rights. Yet when her own moral compass spins, there’s no presiding authority to which she can appeal. She’s rudderless – caught between conflicting imperatives and in the long walks she takes along the sea-wall, attempting to work out how to deal with Michael’s blackmail and at the same time save her marriage and protect her children, the sea becomes Simone’s judge.

When Michael travels from the US, photos in his pocket, unspoken hopes of resuming their relationship on his mind, Simone walks with him along the sea-wall, then slips away and goes out past the breakers to swim.

‘I stop floating and tread water. I can’t see far, because of the rise and fall of the swell. The land looks small from this angle, so much less real than the cluck of water in my ears. There’s an enormous pale sky behind the sea-wall. When you’re walking on land you don’t realize that it’s just a little strip between sky and sea. Land is like being alive. It slips away when you’re not looking.’

We spend the first nine months of our lives floating; we crossed oceans to conquer the world. And when we cry our tears are salt. As Robert Frost points out in the poem Neither Out Far Nor In Deep, on beaches we turn our backs to the land and watch the sea. In these three works of fiction the sea becomes our ultimate authority, the implacable forces which shape our lives and a metaphor for the subconscious desires which drive us. Small wonder we want to keep an eye on it.