Iris Murdoch: the work

Lat January I wrote a post about Iris Murdoch after reading a biography of her life as philosopher and writer. I immediately ordered every one of her novels thatr I could find at a price I could pay, and in September eg kindly carted them across the Atlantic to me.

Time passed and I didn’t read them. I genuinely thought that I would need a great deal of calm and fortitude to tackle these books by one who has been proclaimed the Dostoevsky of the 20th century. I remember Dostoevsky.

After more than two months I was faced with either beginning Murdoch or reading some violent modern books that are more noir than “Noir.” I picked up the first book of fiction she ever wrote: Under the Net. I started to read it.
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It’s funny! It’s charming, the characters are as flawed as they must be and I found myself both thinking about the underlying principles of what must versus what may be lived while laughing my head off. There’s even a great dog in it. The narrator is a wastrel writer who works hardest at finding people to take care of him. It tells of a short-term adventure at a crisis period when all his balls are in the air and he constantly has to choose to do the decent thing or the convenient thing. The details of 1950s London are wonderful.

Thus armed, I picked up the next in my series, The Nice and the Good.
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This is the book I needed a steady head for. Its style is more old fashioned, and because she is trying to tell us much more about good and truth and how they fit into life, there are a dozen plot lines going ahead at all times. It was, at times, heavy going. Some of the evil depicted seemed just silly to me from a viewpoint decades later, but the impulse to seek it, tolerate it, brush it off is still shocking. I think it is a book to read more than once. I found myself too taken up with the psychology of the characters and wanting to send them all to a good shrink to really understand how the theme of the nice versus the good was being played out. And it certainly was being played out, with an ending scene that is both terrifying and settling. In a way I feel the book should end there, but each character gets a final recap scene for those of you who insist on knowing what happened afterwards.

The underlying thread in both these books is that many of us value looking like we are good more than we value good. We omit, we elide, we follow rules in order to show ourselves to be good, and it makes us at best nice. It is only when we allow truth and memory and love to hurt us that we can do one good thing. And then, perhaps one more. The struggle, it seems, is daily. Murdoch makes a point that it is possible that justice is more just when offered by one person struggling for good than by adherence to the law.

Interestingly, Murdoch’s men are much more real than her women. The women seem more like expressions of ideals, each one embodying a type more than feeling like flesh and blood. In each of the two books I have read so far, the protagonist is a man, and in the first one, Under the Net, women can barely be said to exist. There are, handily, equal numbers of men and women in >
The Nice and the Good. There are also children, and really remarkable children at that. They were enormously important.

I will read these books again, because they are worth it. I will buy more of the twenty-six novels she wrote, too.
These pictured are all used and reprints. I bought them at amazon.com because the prices were better than amazon.uk, and they had all been translated into American English. That was disconcerting at times. Both vendors have used book dealers, but the postage from the UK is very high, and when ordering from secondary vendors, you can’t beef up the order to spread the postage out over more books. I struggle to get books, perhaps, more than I struggle to be good. Have to work on that.