The main narrative section is presented to us by a fictional editor, P. Unlike those recent books in which she handsomely manipulates dozens of puppet-like people in an ornate but diminishing design, 'The Black Prince' has only six main charactersĪnd a psychologically complex hero-narrator whose growth we follow and about whose fate we care. Than they usually do in Iris Murdoch's fiction. But the intricately patterned plot and the audacious symbolism come closer to being functions of character and action Scenes of domestic frenzy mingle with reflectionsĪbout the nature of art, and to cap the antic festivities there is a last-page shock guaranteed to leave everyone gasping. Doorbells still bring trouble, phone calls disaster, and omnipresent Eros has lost none of his disrespect for gender, age or custom. Less preoccupied with her special blend of magic and suspense. Philosophy has recently seemed to do little more than make her people theoretically interesting.Ĭan an Iris Murdoch novel be a house for free characters to live in? Inevitably, 'The Black Prince' raises the old question, but more than any Murdoch novel in years it gives something close to a reassuring answer. Despite the inventiveness of the situations and the brilliance of the design, Miss Murdoch's 'A Fairly Honourable Defeat' or 'An Accidental Man,' one is likely to remember situations not character, mechanisms not worlds. Thinking back now on books like 'The Unicorn,' 'The Red and the Green,'

Yet in practice, the more she talked about freedom and opaqueness, the more over-determined and transparent her novels seemed to become. Has asked that novels be houses 'fit for free characters to live in,' and has praised those 19th-century realists - Balzac, Tolstoy, George Eliot - who respected the impenetrability of individuals and the contingent world in This insubstantiality is usually traced to the thinness of Miss Murdoch's characters, an especially ironical linkage, since she is a famous critic of the narrow view of personality found in much of modern fiction.

Kermode) cannot quite forgive her for failing to make the spirit flesh. Inside, the ghost of a major novel,' and some people (although not Mr. But as Frank Kermode has put it: each of her books contains 'somewhere Ingenious storytelling, elegant design, the provocations of myth and philosophy - so many pleasures, in fact, that it may seem ungrateful to ask for still more. Most readers agree that she offers an unusual compound of pleasures: Rudging admiration has long been a common response to Iris Murdoch's fiction. JA New Novel by Bradley Pearson (His Last) in a New Novel by Iris Murdoch (One of Her Best) By LAWRENCE GRAVER A New Novel by Bradley Pearson (His Last) in a New Novel by Iris Murdoch (One of Her Best)

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch