First impressions of Iris Murdoch's Booker-winning novel

Iris Murdoch at last won a Booker Prize in 1978 for her novel The Sea, The Sea. Everyone knows what these prizes represent: a bit of log-rolling, and honorifics for a career rather than for a particular work. That is, the prize often goes to a writer for a lesser, later-career work. In this case, The Sea, etc. despite is ridiculous title, is one of IM's most ambitious works, a jaw-dropping 500 pages (most of her other novels, as far as I know, tend to be 200-page quick reads with a high intellectual gloss). So far I've read about 50 pp of TS,TS and find it quite readable, at least up to this point: A first person account by a just-retired, world-famous theater director (and actor), Shakespeare specialist - bears some resemblance of Olivier but is clearly a pastiche. This man - never married, no children - is writing from a coastal house he's just bought and moved into, an old structure w/ no heat, no hot water, dubious construction quality, nearly two miles up a remote road to the nearest (small) village. Why would anyone settle there? He's clearly hiding from something, but what exactly? He has a strange vision of a sea monster raising its head above the waters - but what this represents, he has no idea (does Murdoch, or does she improvise as she moves along?). So far this is enough to get me intrigued by this character, but I must make 2 notes: First of all, IM is writing like an author who is review-proof and publisher-proof; any editor in his or her right mind presented w/ this ms. would tell the author you have to get this story moving somewhere before p. 50; we've got 50 pp in which nothing happens except that the narrator describes the various challenges or his life on the coast and reflects, without much detail, on his various triumphs and failures in art and in love. Something  may seem to be moving as one of his exes writes to him and says she still loves him deeply. We'll see what happens. Second, no male writer could get away w/ the attitude toward women and the incessant narcissism that his narrator, Charles, unleashes. He's an unlikable guy who's totally full of himself, and if he were an Updike or a Roth or a Mailer character this would fuel the outrage against male sexism and privilege.