Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea is looking to be a dreadful novel (tho I'll give it another day's reading)

I'm gonna give it one more day of reading because - well, because it won a Booker Prize (though we know the politics behind that) and because the author was well-known and at the pinnacle of her career and because it received lavish critical praise from Dwight Garner in the NYT (though I often disagree w/ him) and because it's a long (500-page) novel and may take more time than I've given it so far - but at this point (just finished section one, Prehistory, and am about 20 percent along) Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea is a dreadful novel (with a dreadful title as well). Sorry. But the story line, such as it is - elderly, famous playwright/actor/director retires to the remote English coast and takes u writing his memoir in the most desultory fashion imaginable - is going nowhere. The narrator establishes from the outset that he's gonna meander and put down his thoughts and memories as they occur to him, so for the first 100 or so pages we get almost nothing but back story, and none of that presented in a dramatic or dynamic way. This novel is a textbook case of telling, not showing: The narrator (Charles), for example, tells us he has been scarred for life by his first love, then spends many pages telling us how he and she were in love through school and their teenage years, he goes away to acting school, she tells him from afar that she can never marry him, and she disappears from his life, impossible to track her down in any way (he believes she may have died). If Murdoch had made this idyll of young love and heartbreak believable or dynamic in any way we might persist w/ this novel and wonder: Will he find her? What's happened to her? But this just seems to be one of many strands Murdoch spins then drops. By imagining a narrator who just writes "what comes into his head" she has given herself full artistic license to create a novel with no discernible plot or direction and, to me, of little interest. Somehow she seems to have gotten it into her head that a 500-page novel is of greater merit than a 200-pager (on which her reputation was built), and maybe she was right - this novel was a self-announced event - but would anyone read it today? And why am I reading it?