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. ( )

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. ( )

Protagonist and narrator Bradley Pearson, a fifty-eight-year-old retired tax accountant, intends to retreat from society to write his masterpiece. He is about to leave town when he receives a series of phone calls. We meet Bradley’s ex-wife, Christian, brother-in-law, Francis, and sister, Priscilla. We meet fellow author, Arnold, his wife, Rachel, and their twenty-year-old daughter, Julian. Bradley is called to intervene in a domestic violence episode between Arnold and Rachel. After a brief dalliance with Rachel, he believes he has found the ultimate in true love with Julian. Bradley writes about a critical period in his life. He presents his version of events, then four of the main characters offer postscripts to provide their viewpoints.

The reader will need to pay close attention to the details of the story in order to figure out what to believe. Bradley admits that he lies to the other main players. He makes excuses. He does not accept responsibility for his actions. He often behaves atrociously. He seems deluded in many ways. He says he has learned something through his ordeal, and we want to believe him. But he also seems reprehensible and hypocritical in his actions.

We spend lots of time in Bradley’s thoughts, and these thoughts meander into ponderous inner dialogues about life, love, art, marriage, morality, self-deception, jealousy, and suffering. The characters are well developed. It contains elements of both comedy and tragedy.

The story is written in such a way that spurs the reader’s curiosity. I came up with a satisfactory interpretation and I think part of the fun of reading this novel is analyzing it at the end. Published in 1973, this is the second novel I have read by Iris Murdoch. I very much enjoy her writing style and plan to read more of her works.

Memorable passages:

“People who model their experiences on works that they admire are all too likely to be egocentric lovers, seeking to cast the beloved into a scenario dreamed up inside their own fantasy.”

“We are always representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways…that gratify our egos and serve our own ends. To see truly is not the entirety of virtue, but it is a very crucial part.”

“If one is prepared to publish a work one must let it speak for itself.”

“She [Julian] had filled me with a previously unimaginable power which I knew that I would and could use in my art. The deep causes of the universe, the stars, the distant galaxies, the ultimate particles of matter, had fashioned these two things, my love and my art, as aspects of what was ultimately one and the same. They were, I knew, from the same source. It was under the same orders and recognizing the same authority that I now stood, a man renewed.”

“Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.”
( )

This is literary fiction at it's most up its own arse. Not my thing. I accept that may well be my failing, not the book's.
I've read two books by Murdoch now and enjoyed neither. This might be the last one. ( )

I still love Murdoch, but this one flies a tad too close to the Nabokovian wind for my liking. It's the unreliable narrative of retired exciseman and disappointed writer Bradley Pearson, framed by diversionary fore- and afterwords by his dubious literary executor and Charles Kinbote-a-like P. A. Loxias. Like all Murdoch's novels, it's unabashedly clever, a daedal web of corrupt passions and artistic intrigues freighted with fat globs of philosophy. Like her other books, it's a masterclass in sentences, paragraphs, interrupted dialogues. Honestly, the confidence of the writing:

I went out slowly and closed both doors and began turning lights on. The apparition of Francis was still sitting on the stairs. He smiled an isolated irrelevant smile, as if he were a stray minor spirit belonging to some other epoch, and some other story, a sort of lost and masterless Puck, smiling a meditative cringing unprompted affectionate smile.

The plainness of the first sentence with its twinned ands. The hissing, stuttering second sentence: sh, s-s, st, st, st. Then that incredible unwinding, that thought circling buzzardlike around its prey, the assonance of lost and masterless and that dive-bombing adjective pile-up as we zoom in on Francis's smile, smile, smiling, smile. Those absurd smiles!

So of course I inhaled The Black Prince like I have the other six or seven Murdochs I've read. Of those, this felt closest to The Sea, the Sea, with the crucial difference that there's never any real doubt as to the insanity or possibly even non-existence of its central character. For all its flair it's wholly heartless and academic, its Hamlet leitmotif ultimately thudding and wearisome. Maybe I've come to expect too much of Iris? ( )