Iris MurdochKirja-arvosteluja

Reason read: botm April 2024, Reading 1001

This is the first published novel of Iris Murdoch and the sixth novel that I've read by the author. I enjoy her writing and this one is probably one of the easier books to read. It explores existential themes and identity. Jake is a lazy, contemplative, hack writer who lives off others. He goes from Madge to Anna to Sadie to Hugo to Mrs. Tinckham. It's also a picaresque novel with an exploration of London and a short trip to Paris. Our protagonist does grow, he finds that his love of Anna is unrequited, his idolization of Hugo is misplaced, that Sadie loves him, that he wants to own Mr. Mars and the cat finally mated with the Siamese. Jake decides he is going to not translate anymore and focus on his writing and he will work part time.

One of the queerest, most manic, most wonderful books I have read in a long time.

Iris Murdoch's debut novel is a disconcerting, shabby picaresque novel following the young hack writer Jake Donahue through a series of adventures. For the most part, it falls into my particular favourite type of picaresque: the adventure novel largely set over a few days. Murdoch is already comfortably inhabiting the body of a downtrodden, almost-broken, deeply strange protagonist, whose voice we can never entirely trust (Jake is keen to narrate his own story - a little too keen), and whose world seems to be a series of set-pieces that emerge out of otherwise ordinary life.

What is the plot? This is the kind of novel where certain literary snobs would say "the plot doesn't matter" but, reader, do not listen to them. In this case, the plot is precisely point. In a nutshell: Jake is kicked out by a woman, goes fawning back to two actress sisters from his past, uncovers a potential conspiracy involving a screenplay secretly adapted from a translation of a French novel he wrote some time ago, goes on a mad pub crawl with his gadabout mates, steals a film star dog who subsequently saves him from a police raid in the aftermath of a socialist party riot amidst an Ancient Roman film set in the middle of London, is mistaken for an escaped mental patient by an alley full of suburban gossips, pursues his lady love through Paris on Bastille Day, takes an unexpected job as a hospital orderly where his doubts and concerns come back to haunt him during a daring midnight visit to an incapacitated friend, and must consider whether he will position himself high(brow) or low on the unsteady rope ladder that is a literary career - or whether he even has the chops to climb the ladder at all. Throw in some Plato and a dash of Wittgenstein, a starling invasion straight out of Hitchcock's The Birds, and an avant-garde mime theatre, and you have Under the Net.

Murdoch's novel, first published in 1957, seems to sit quite comfortably within the (poorly named) 'Angry Young Man' cultural epoch - although Jake is not so much a victim of society as a personal exploration of those who exist comfortably in the margins. He has never held a job aside from writing until he signs up as an orderly, and is impressed by how easily he gets this one given how much his friends complain about the process. ("You will point out, and quite rightly", Jake says in one of Murdoch's moments of wry hilarity, that hospital orderly is perhaps a job where supply eclipses demand, "whereas what my friends were finding it so difficult to become was higher civil servants, columnists of the London dailies, officials of the British Council, fellows of colleges, or governors of the BBC. That is true.") Whereas her fellow novelists were interested in the temporal, Murdoch constantly allows us to see the metaphysical moments, the sublime and the ridiculous. But she is not writing, contrary to the philosophers who want to claim this text as their own, about what lies beyond the plot; Murdoch is finding the sublime within what is taking place, within human interaction and yearning.

And there is so much yearning. Although we have reason to doubt some of Jake's suspicions very early, he is a man easily compelled to new feeling: sudden love, sudden self-doubt, convinced he has destroyed a friendship or is under attack from the slightest of impulses. He is a fascinating character and, while I might concede that I'm not sure Murdoch entirely captures what it is like to be a male, the fulcrum around which her fairytale-like world rotates. (On a more terrestrial note, how times have changed - Jake tells us on the first page that his friend-cum-assistant Finn usually waits for him in bed, and later spends much of the book deeply pining for an old friend named Hugo. I had to separate myself entirely from 2020 to see these as the perfectly normal actions of a sensitive and impoverished heterosexual man!)

It is clear that one of my great projects for the 2020s will be to read all twenty-six of Murdoch's novels in order. I listened to the audiobook narrated by the pitch-perfect Samuel West, and I heartily recommend it for the way that West teases out both the uproarious comedy and the more delicate variety, yet I found myself returning to my copy of the book often to reread paragraphs or phrases just to let the author wash over me. I suspect that, structurally, or literarily, Under the Net is not one of Murdoch's greatest novels. (As her debut, it hardly could be!) But clearly from the Top 100 lists it frequently appears on, the novel has a place in the heart of many writers, and is perhaps an easier access point to her oeuvre than most.

Such fun.

Another Iris Murdoch book, with many of the usual themes - a curious collection of people fall in and out of love and get into some unlikely situations. There is a lot of hand-wringing about religion and loss of faith, as well as about an unexpected inheritance and the characters are on the whole quite an endearing bunch.½

There is something about Iris Murdoch's novels that haunts me in a rather profound way. It has to do with being British. At the time of writing this, it has been 196 years since my ancestors left South West England to push out to Australia, and this sense of separation from the motherland is a strange, raspberry-coloured strain of my personality. I am not English, but I relate to that culture more than to any other (aside from my own Australian one). So when I read "The Bell", sixty years after its publication, I am struck by how familiar and yet eerily unfamiliar everyone feels. I understand what is being said, and what the characters are feeling, but at the same time I really, really don't. What I mean is - it's not just time. When I read Australian novels from the 1950s, I get the characters in a way that I don't entirely get these ones. Most people are thicketed by their culture (to use a Murdochian word) to the extent that it bursts out of them without realising it. Turns of phrase, implications of word choice, what we see and hear and what we feel.

All of which is to say that Murdoch's novels might be more descriptive than I would like in the twentieth century (very Zola), her characters prone to outbursts with origins I can't fully comprehend, and her sense of plot sometimes grinding mercilessly over her forever maudlin figures, trapped in an aspic-like web of memory (in How Fiction Works, James Wood paints Murdoch as a "poignant figure" because - as she herself admitted - she could never create fully psychologically independent characters, like Shakespeare could, but instead despite her best efforts, her characters were in some ways extensions of herself), but what distances me from the novel most is a sense that I'm not quite with the characters in this lay religious community.

In spite of all this, it might actually be impossible to get bored during a Murdoch novel. She weaves around you. She might be - as Wood argues - rehashing nineteenth-century styles and ideas with a twentieth-century melodrama facade, but I still think she's pretty damn good, and I'm haunted by that bell. As I wrote in my rather underwhelmed review of The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch was prolific, one of the last survivors of an age when "literary" writers could churn out stories without undue pressure that every work had to be a masterpiece. I don't actually expect every book to be a masterpiece, and I would much rather we return to a mentality when we can just enjoy works, great or minor, as stories.

Which is a needlessly lengthy way of saying that I enjoyed the book, I didn't love the book, I'm intrigued by Murdoch's characters, I'm disconnected from her characters, I'm haunted by that bell, and I also think that people whose lives are so fixated on a church bell need to consider other avenues of intellectual stimulation. That's clear, right?

Iris Murdoch was a true 20th century great.

From a 1975 review published in Kirkus:
"There is an inescapable air of casuistry about Murdoch's plots: it's not hard to imagine her as a 17th-century Jesuit or Jansenist, settling suppositious moral hashes with the most enviable certainty. Here, in one of her rare first person narratives, she gives us Hilary Burde, a fortyish civil servant whose rages and obsessions stem partly from the hideously deprived Calvinist childhood he escaped through a talent for languages, partly from the inexpiable horror of having caused the death of another man's wife--an event which ended his promising Oxford career and sent him into a decade of grotesque self-thwarting. Gunnar, the wronged widower, reappears remarried but as paralyzed as Hilary by the events of twenty years ago. Through the agency of an unfathomable half-Indian servant, Gunnar's second wife begins an equivocal intrigue with Hilary on the pretext of getting Gunnar to come to terms with his feelings about Hilary and Anne's death. The moral imperatives of the developing situation are perceived in contradictory terms by Hilary and his small circle of confederates: a persistent, half-wanted mistress; a placid co-worker and his effusively solicitous wife; a rancorous homosexual friend; the beautiful and mysterious servant; his unpresentable but adored sister and her humbly devoted fiance. Murdoch gives us all the machinery, and then some, for a casus conscientiae of the most perverse, contradictory, and surreal complexity--in a subjectively perceived, post-Christian universe where moral impasses obstinately continue to exist and to have consequences, but no canon law can help us predict them. The familiar Murdochian materials are all here, but the sum total is less than a resounding triumph. One can see themes and motifs being applied to events like traction to an elbow; the first person narrative often seems like a have-your-cake-and-eat-it compromise between limited fictional point of view and free rein for desired stylistic effects. (On the other hand, Hilary's compulsion for scheduling gives the book a neat, obvious, and effective structure.) Murdoch cannot be less than maddeningly challenging, but one puts this down feeling that only some of the goods have been delivered."

Iris Murdoch takes you into the religious world of Imber Abbey, a cloistered community of nuns. This devout group is about to receive a long awaited bell to replace one lost to magic and mystery. The Bell's plot focuses on a cast of damaged people living outside Imber Abbey: Paul Greenfield, there to translate fourteenth century manuscripts; his wife Dora, there because she feels obligated to stay in a loveless marriage; Michael, the leader of the lay community; Tobey, a curious man about to attend Oxford; Catherine, a beautiful woman about to entire Imber Abbey; her twin brother, Nick, there to be close to her one last time; and the old Abbess, the wise and all-seeing head of Imber Abbey.
Lurking in the background of The Bell is the legend of the original bell named Gabriel. The story goes, as Paul relayed to Dora, a fourteenth century nun was supposedly having an illicit affair but could not and would not confess to it. Because he could not punish the singular guilty woman, the Bishop cursed the entire abbey, causing the tower bell, the aforementioned Gabriel, to catapult itself (himself?) into a nearby lake. The guilty nun was so distraught by this phenomenon she was rumored to have drowned herself in the selfsame lake. When Gabriel unexpectedly resurfaces, with the help of Dora and Tobey, each character wonders what it could mean to Imber Abbey and to themselves.
Confessional: The character of Dora confused me almost as much as she confused herself. I wasn't even sure I liked her. Extremely immature, she would make up her mind to not do something but then go ahead and the thing anyway (not buy multicolored skirts, sandals and jazz records, not go back to Paul, the abusive husband; not give up her seat on the train. I could go on). There is a dazed and confused ignorance to her personality that I found either charming or annoying, depending on the minute. Dora is described as an "erring" wife, but how errant can she with an abusive ogre of a husband? He is condescending and cruel, telling her she is not his woman of choice.

The world is a strange and beautiful and frightening and tragic and painful and unknown and banal and crowded place. There are old friends and enemies, unfamiliar new places, angry scenes and everyday meals. There is the weather. And also seals and sea monsters (maybe), and deaths, kidnapping and attempted murders (maybe). And love and desire too, of course, but often mixed with misunderstanding, jealousy, obsession and dependency in complicated combinations.

All of that is to say that 'The Sea, The Sea' represents all of the above in a story bordering on the quixotic and surreal in places, but is shot through with enough of the quotidian to keep it from slipping entirely into magical realism.

The writing seems effortless, the pages practically turn themselves, even in the first quarter or so of the book when nothing much seems to happen - as you would expect in a tiny coastal village - where the protagonist and narrator, a newly retired theatre director, tries to escape from his previous life. A revolving door cast of characters from that life then intrude, and the tone eventually becomes more frenetic, chaotic and eventually darker - even 'mad' - as our unreliable narrator falls into a whirlpool of his own fantasies and the unclear motives of others. Tragedy, reconciliations and betrayals bring the curtain down eventually, and the end peters out ambiguously.

Just like life. Brilliant.

One of the Murdoch novels that I have enjoyed the most. One reason is the manageable number of characters. Another is the theme which Murdoch pursued through many novels, the nature of goodness. What especially happens when goodness is expected to exist in a world in which God has been left behind?
Disaster ensues when Carel, the priest who has lost his faith and has been shunted to a parish without a church, disintegrates mentally, morally and fatally, bringing down all those around him. They are left with remnant lives from which some form of reconstruction may be possible.
Fascinating writer of books that make a reader eager for another of her novels.

As usual a cast of dreadful people fall in and out of love with each other and ludicrous situations ensue. Its really enjoyable to read, but has a completely mad ending.

This one is a reread this year, but the last time I read it was over a decade ago, and all I really remembered clearly was the chore of carrying stuff, an idea I liked a lot, and the sinister creepiness of Mother May and her daughters. I read a print book the first time, and this time it was an audiobook. I definitely liked this book better this time. Midge is awful, Harry is worse, and Edward is an idiot, but this book is well enough written that I still was engaged in the story all the way to the end despite the horribleness of those characters.

Très amusing. Similar in tone to Pursuit of Love. Funny and sweet. A young man in search of himself, found with the help of a dog (not quite, but there is a dog that seems to act with a domesticating influence)

Iris Murdoch argues that morality and the quest for Good is missing from modern philosophy.

Charles Arrowby er på overfladen en succesfuld mand, der endelig har opgivet en glorværdig karriere for at leve afsondret og afslappet. Han har været teaterinstruktør i London – med gæstespil over det meste af verden – men nu har han fundet sig et gammelt hus ved en klippefyldt kyst. Tiden er inde til at skrive sine erindringer, nyde de daglige svømmeture og ellers bare læne sig tilbage.

Sådan er udgangspunktet i Havet Havet, som Iris Murdoch fik Bookerprisen for i 1979, men det viser sig selvfølgelig hurtigt, at tingene ikke er så enkle endda. For det første skinner det snart igennem, at Arrowbys selvbillede ikke rigtig holder stik. Han var muligvis succesfuld, men han var måske aldrig den store originale kunstner, som han havde drømt om at være. Og selvom han har haft mange kvinder, der stadig opsøger ham og forstyrrer hans ro, så har han aldrig rigtigt oplevet kærligheden som voksen. Tættest på har været forholdet til den ældre skuespiller Clemence, men selv det blev aldrig til et rigtigt samliv – og bag det lurer endnu større tab. Familie har han ikke meget af, faktisk er der stort sen kun en fætter James tilbage, og deres forhold er også komplekst. Charles’ forældre var aldrig lige så rige som James’, og Charles føler stadig spor af underlegenhed over for den militæruddannede fætter.

Alt dette er slemt nok, men bogen tager en voldsom drejning, da opdager Mary Hartley i landsbyen. Det er hans gamle kærlighed fra skoletiden, som han tilbragte al sin fritid med, inden han drog til London for at slå igennem som skuespiller. Hartley, som han kaldte hende, og som han stadig kalder hende, ville ikke have sex med ham, før hun blev 18, så de nåede aldrig af være sammen. Planen var, at de skulle giftes, når de blev voksne – eller måske var det altid kun hans plan? – men da tiden er inde, bryder hun forlovelsen og forsvinder sporløst.

Han har ikke set hende siden, men den gamle besættelse bliver lynhurtigt vakt til live igen. Hun er gift med Ben, der er krigsveteran og gået på pension, men det er ingen hindring for Charles. Han er desperat efter at tale med Hartley, og selvom hun beder ham blive væk, følger han efter hende og trænger sig på. Han er overbevist om - eller bilder sig selv ind – at Hartley fastholdes i et voldeligt ægteskab mod sin vilje, og han bliver besat af at befri hende, uanset om hun vil eller ej. Da Hartleys stedsøn og den gamle inderkreds fra London dukker op i huset ved havet til pinse balancerer historien mellem det absurde og det tragiske.

Charles Arrowby er åbenlyst en upålidelig fortæller, og gennem romanen bliver det også tydeligt, at han er meget dårligere til at gennemskue andre menneskers følelser og motiver, end han selv tror. Men det er aldrig entydigt. For eksempel er hans ønske om at redde Hartley uden tvivl drevet af egoistiske motiver, men det ændrer ikke på, at der ER noget ubehageligt ved hendes ægteskab. Det gør læsningen interessant, selvom nærmest alle bogens hovedpersoner er selvoptagede og ubehagelige.

I knew nothing about this when I picked it up, other than it was famous. The cover said 'a rich, crowded, magical love story', but it is a twisted and painful tale of self delusion and cruelty. I guess it is a story that contains both magic and love, but that is not quite the same thing.

This book is 500 pages of living inside the head of Charles Arrowby. He is beautifully and painfully drawn, but deeply unlikable. Completely self obsessed, with no real model of how other people feel or want, he has bullied his way through his career in the theatre and now has retreated to the sea in retirement. A chance meeting with a long lost person from his childhood tips him over into obsession, from which much tragedy results. He ends a little older, and a little wiser, but still oh so very Charles.½

The best essay in this book for me is by far Iris Murdoch's "The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited" - in fact I think this has influenced more than just my views on novels but rather on general ethics and how people should treat one another entirely. I recently read this again and was no less moved than by the first time I read it over ten years ago.

"Under the Net" is Number 95 on the Modern Library’s list of 100 best novels of all time. How it got on that list is a complete mystery to me. It is the story of a detestable “young man” James (his age is never given) but if he is indeed young it might be the only redeeming quality about him because one could then plead he was “too young to know any better.”

James admits in Chapter One that he lies to everyone, lives by mooching off other people (mostly women), moving from one acquaintance to another living rent free until they get tired of him and throw him out. James does not believe in holding a “real” job so lives on small commissions he earns for translating French books to English, and when that does not provide sufficient income he just borrows from friends and acquaintances - or worse - just leaves them holding the bill for taxi rides, massive bar bills, and other miscellaneous expenses. Oh, and did I mention James also is great at picking locks and spends a good deal of time during the plot in places he broke into?

The plot takes place in just a few short weeks as James is once again being thrown out of his rent free living arrangement, and he must scramble to find a new place to sleep. Had the writing been less pretentious I may have taken the plot more seriously. But the story is filled with obscure observations from James, “The Bounty Belfounder studio is situated in the suburb of Southern London where contingency reaches the point of nausea.” (page 139) And, “I wondered what curious fault in the social stratification should have brought her into contact with a man who could inspire her to dress like that.” (page 11) Not only is the dialogue superficial, but it implies that James thinks himself superior to most of the other characters - which is irritating, and inconceivable. And since he is the one telling the story, it certainly decreased the motivation to keep reading.

But then again, the plot could not be taken seriously because it was idiotic, nonsensical, and preposterous. I should have suspected as much, since the back cover of the novel has a sentence of praise from Kingsley Amis saying, “A winner… she is a distinguished novelist of a rare kind.” Kinglsey Amis is one my least favorite authors and I absolutely detested his novel "Lucky Jim".

Perhaps reading about the incompetence and idiotic behavior of others bolsters some readers egos. Or perhaps some readers will actually find this novel to be humorous and entertaining. For me it was an absolute waste of time and I have totally lost faith in the capacity of the Modern Library to judge which novels belong on the list of best 100 of all time.

Rated 1 Star, July 2023

I like Murdoch, so I probably liked this one. I can't remember much about this book, after all the years since I read it.

It's been some time since I read this, and I don't recall any details.

This book was a very pleasant surprise for me. Lately I have been picking up more books at the thrift store, simply based on the blurb and often I will look up the rating on here. The Green Knight was one such book.

Murdoch knows how to write a character. The perspective often shifts around between a few members of a small circle of friends in London, and all of these people seem to leap off the page. They are all certainly characters, yet they feel so much like people you could actually run into and meet. Murdoch does not over-describe their appearances, but does so enough that I had a clear picture in my mind for each of them.

Although there is a certain mystery in the plot, the book mainly revolves around the psychology of the people you meet. This may not be for everyone, but personally I do enjoy quite slow-burn stories and diving into characters’ thoughts and motivations. This is combined with numerous references to literature, art and spirituality, elements which I very much enjoyed but does not make it the most accessible read. It also expects that the reader has some basic knowledge of French, as French terms and sentences are not translated.

This is not to put potential readers off, as the story does in fact have many twists and turns that keep you on your toes, and made me at least, desperately curious to see where all this would be going.

In the beginning, I was a bit confused as to when the story was taking place. The way people live and dress initially made me think it was set maybe in the 1960s, only later it became clear to me that it was set in the early 1990s.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, and would absolutely recommend it to anyone looking for something to cozy up with on a rainy afternoon.

Now that I've decided to try to 'review' each book that I have cataloged, there will be books( like this one) where I may recall reading it some years ago, may or may not remember how or why I liked it, but still can recall only a few or maybe no details about the experience.

I recently watched a film called Iris, in which Kate Winslet plays a young and vibrant Iris Murdoch and Judy Dench plays an older Iris Murdoch battling Alzheimer's disease. I've heard about Murdoch but had somehow never gotten around to reading any of her works. What a misfortune. I absolutely loved this book. The main character Jake, is a deeply troubled and very flawed man, and many of the reviews of this book talked about how when Hugo entered the story the book changed for them. And yes, I can see that. But truly, the character that completely Jake's life, and therefore the book was the dog Mars. The introduction of Mars made this a completely different book than what it was before he entered the story. This is truly, a story about the importance of man's best friend ! And what a difference they make in our lives.

Have I mentioned that I love Iris Murdoch? I love this book, its like a practice run for The Sea The Sea, with a dreadful and deluded male narrator, convinced of his own genius and importance, but constantly thwarted by the interruptions of others. As ever the complex interactions of the cast unfold with both horrible and hilarious consequences, the final postscripts giving a somewhat different version of events.

A lot of the usual Murdoch tropes here, a cast of bizarre characters having strange interactions, partner swapping, relationship breakdown, family disagreements. Its quite dark but funny, with quite the trail of death and destruction following the 'main' character, Austin. There is also broken pottery and owl attacks. Its a good one.

No idea what whoever designed the cover was thinking.

At first I didn't think that I was going to like this book but in the end it was a 4* read. The main character Charles was incredibly conceited! Despite the slow beginning and this obnoxious narrator, I became quite involved in the situation and characters.

La convivencia de un grupo de personas que deciden llevar a cabo una experiencia de vida comunitaria permite a Iris Murdoch hacer una exploración filosófica sobre el origen de la moralidad y de los comportamientos humanos a través de la confrontación entre los impulsos carnales y los relgiosos. A la sombra y amparo de un convento habitado por una pequeña comunidad de monjas, cuya superiora ejerce una omnipresente función de orientación y control de vidas ajenas, un grupo de homosexuales, esquizofrénicos y alcohólicos enfrentan sus represiones, sus miedos y sus culpas con la inocencia de la juventud.