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The Black Prince
Bradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come live with him; his ex-wife, who has infuriating hopes of redeeming the past; her delinquent brother, who wants money and emotional confrontations; and Bradley's friend and rival, Arnold Baffin, a younger, deplorably more successful author of commercial fiction. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idylls, murder, and due process of law. Bradley tries to escape from it all but fails, leading to a violent climax, and a coda that casts shifting perspectives on all that has preceded.
408 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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About the author
Iris Murdoch
141 books2,548 followersDame Jean Iris Murdoch
Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.
"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...
Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.
"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...
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November 15, 2025
For fans of the author’s The Sea, The Sea, here’s a great book that has a similar tone and structure. The similarities with The Sea: we have a just-retired divorced man who has rented an ocean-front cottage. He has always ‘used’ women and treated them callously; old flames return making theatrical appearances at his door at inopportune times. These include his ex- and he assumes she wants to get back with him, which may or may not be true. And just like The Sea, we have a murder, an attempted murder and a suicide.
I’d say there are three main themes: love – the experience of falling in love and being in love; the pros and cons of marriage, and art.
On love: Iris Murdoch made this famous quote: “Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.” It’s about falling in love with the emphasis on “falling.” It happens to this 58-year-old man instantaneously over dinner one night with a woman barely 20 years old; a daughter of long-time friends of his. He is smitten as if he had heart attack. The author tells us in an aside that few authors write about the experience of being in love and that is mainly what the story is about. “The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular one and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.”
On marriage: “But there is a natural hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are more moral than you are. Moreover to help their case the unmarried person often naively assumes that all marriages are happy unless shown to be otherwise.” And “People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars…There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.”
On art: our main character worked in a tax office but his real love was literary things – he wrote book reviews and one critically-acclaimed book. He’s in a rivalry with another male author. He wrote one great book (his opinion) but his friend bangs one out every year. He believes he ‘discovered’ the other writer so we have this complicated mentor/protégée relationship. It revolves around the theme: is art supposed to be ‘difficult” or ‘fun’?
Other passages I liked:
“One can see many men who live happily, possessed and run (indeed manned, the way a ship is manned) by women of tremendous will.”
“Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have in the play of life, fewer good lines.” (written in 1973)
Do we keep secrets from friends to make ourselves feel superior? Is it because “To see someone as not ‘in the know’ is to see them as diminished.”
“Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.”
“One must constantly meditate upon the absurdities of chance, a subject even more edifying that the subject of death.”
“Her eyes were red and swollen with crying, and her mouth was rectangular with complaint, like the mouth of a letter box.”
“…you don’t know what it’s like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.”
And our lover? It ends badly for him, of course. So badly that at the end someone collects his memoirs and has each of the major characters react to them. So we are treated to new twists and turns about what really happened.
Like The Sea, The Sea, a great read that I added to my favorites.
I’ve enjoyed many other novels by Iris Murdoch and below are links to my reviews of them. GR ratings for all these novels are remarkably similar: all between 3.8 and 4.0. I listed them in order of how I rated them. I rated the first 3 books as 5.0; the next 4 as 4.0 and the last one as 3.0. The Sea, The Sea remains my favorite by this author.
The Sea, the Sea
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
The Good Apprentice
The Black Prince (this review)
The Time of the Angels
The Nice and the Good
The Bell
Under the Net
top image from thewordtravels.com
lower of London apartments from orchardsoflondon.com
I’d say there are three main themes: love – the experience of falling in love and being in love; the pros and cons of marriage, and art.
On love: Iris Murdoch made this famous quote: “Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.” It’s about falling in love with the emphasis on “falling.” It happens to this 58-year-old man instantaneously over dinner one night with a woman barely 20 years old; a daughter of long-time friends of his. He is smitten as if he had heart attack. The author tells us in an aside that few authors write about the experience of being in love and that is mainly what the story is about. “The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular one and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.”
On marriage: “But there is a natural hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are more moral than you are. Moreover to help their case the unmarried person often naively assumes that all marriages are happy unless shown to be otherwise.” And “People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars…There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.”
On art: our main character worked in a tax office but his real love was literary things – he wrote book reviews and one critically-acclaimed book. He’s in a rivalry with another male author. He wrote one great book (his opinion) but his friend bangs one out every year. He believes he ‘discovered’ the other writer so we have this complicated mentor/protégée relationship. It revolves around the theme: is art supposed to be ‘difficult” or ‘fun’?
Other passages I liked:
“One can see many men who live happily, possessed and run (indeed manned, the way a ship is manned) by women of tremendous will.”
“Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have in the play of life, fewer good lines.” (written in 1973)
Do we keep secrets from friends to make ourselves feel superior? Is it because “To see someone as not ‘in the know’ is to see them as diminished.”
“Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.”
“One must constantly meditate upon the absurdities of chance, a subject even more edifying that the subject of death.”
“Her eyes were red and swollen with crying, and her mouth was rectangular with complaint, like the mouth of a letter box.”
“…you don’t know what it’s like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.”
And our lover? It ends badly for him, of course. So badly that at the end someone collects his memoirs and has each of the major characters react to them. So we are treated to new twists and turns about what really happened.
Like The Sea, The Sea, a great read that I added to my favorites.
I’ve enjoyed many other novels by Iris Murdoch and below are links to my reviews of them. GR ratings for all these novels are remarkably similar: all between 3.8 and 4.0. I listed them in order of how I rated them. I rated the first 3 books as 5.0; the next 4 as 4.0 and the last one as 3.0. The Sea, The Sea remains my favorite by this author.
The Sea, the Sea
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
The Good Apprentice
The Black Prince (this review)
The Time of the Angels
The Nice and the Good
The Bell
Under the Net
top image from thewordtravels.com
lower of London apartments from orchardsoflondon.com
February 24, 2018
This is, somehow, my fourth Iris Murdoch novel in as many months, and some of her tendencies have become apparent. Here too we have a foppish, marginally asexual middle aged man who experiences a not-so-good awakening; we have a third act tragedy involving a supporting character; we have a bit character who scarcely ever appears but is mentioned frequently to give the illusion of time passing; we have philosophic departures into the nature of love; we have a queer supporting man who willingly becomes a butler-figure for sadomasochistic reasons; we have a love pentagram.
Fortunately, I love all these things, and so I love Iris Murdoch. THE BLACK PRINCE deviates from the form in a few ways - the narrative is a bit more nasty and sad (cruel depictions of middle-aged women abound, the philosophic sections are more separated), and there is immediate doubt given as to the reliability of the protagonist. Bradley Pearson, a failed author with a rival/best friend named Arnold. Bradley "writes the book" from an indeterminate location in space and time, and a sequence of letters at the end call into doubt swaths of the narrative.
The action starts with delay. Bradley keeps trying to get out of London to write his long delayed novel and keeps getting held back. Murdoch novels work like stages - the primary locations are always heavily permeable, with frequent, comedic entrances that add complications. There are numerous candidates for Bradley's love: his ex-wife is back in town and single; Arnold's wife likes him; Arnold likes Bradley's ex-wife; Bradley's ex-wife's brother likes him; Arnold's daughter likes him; his sister likes no one but is mucking everything up; everyone thinks Bradley and Arnold secretly like each other. Complexity stacks. Oh, she writes this kind of thing so well! And with Murdoch, there is always a hook. This one happens very late, almost exactly halfway through the novel, and from there on it catches fire, a thrilling novella that I won't spoil. Look at the writing when Bradley does fall in love, the prose is so pyrotechnic but simultaneously makes fun of him:
"But nothing really had prepared me for this blow. And it was a BLOW, I was felled by it physically. I felt as if my stomach had been shot away, leaving a gaping hole. My knees dissolved, I could not stand up, I shuddered and trembled all over, my teeth chattered. My face felt as if it had become waxen and some huge strange weirdly smiling mask had been imprinted upon it, I had become some sort of god. I lay there with my nose stuck into the black wool of the rug and the toes of my shoes making little ellipses on the carpet as I shook with possession. Of course I was sexually excited, but what I felt transcended mere lust to such a degree that although I could vividly sense my afflicted body I also felt totally alienated and changed and practically disincarnate."
Wow! There is a sequence of vomiting in the opera shortly after this that is one of the funnier things I can remember reading. I like BLACK PRINCE better than THE BELL and not as much as SEVERED HEAD or THE SEA, THE SEA. One needs to trust that Murdoch is both hilarious and wicked to stick with this one (which is why I think SEVERED HEAD makes the best gateway drug). I read it slowly and quickly at once; high praise.
Fortunately, I love all these things, and so I love Iris Murdoch. THE BLACK PRINCE deviates from the form in a few ways - the narrative is a bit more nasty and sad (cruel depictions of middle-aged women abound, the philosophic sections are more separated), and there is immediate doubt given as to the reliability of the protagonist. Bradley Pearson, a failed author with a rival/best friend named Arnold. Bradley "writes the book" from an indeterminate location in space and time, and a sequence of letters at the end call into doubt swaths of the narrative.
The action starts with delay. Bradley keeps trying to get out of London to write his long delayed novel and keeps getting held back. Murdoch novels work like stages - the primary locations are always heavily permeable, with frequent, comedic entrances that add complications. There are numerous candidates for Bradley's love: his ex-wife is back in town and single; Arnold's wife likes him; Arnold likes Bradley's ex-wife; Bradley's ex-wife's brother likes him; Arnold's daughter likes him; his sister likes no one but is mucking everything up; everyone thinks Bradley and Arnold secretly like each other. Complexity stacks. Oh, she writes this kind of thing so well! And with Murdoch, there is always a hook. This one happens very late, almost exactly halfway through the novel, and from there on it catches fire, a thrilling novella that I won't spoil. Look at the writing when Bradley does fall in love, the prose is so pyrotechnic but simultaneously makes fun of him:
"But nothing really had prepared me for this blow. And it was a BLOW, I was felled by it physically. I felt as if my stomach had been shot away, leaving a gaping hole. My knees dissolved, I could not stand up, I shuddered and trembled all over, my teeth chattered. My face felt as if it had become waxen and some huge strange weirdly smiling mask had been imprinted upon it, I had become some sort of god. I lay there with my nose stuck into the black wool of the rug and the toes of my shoes making little ellipses on the carpet as I shook with possession. Of course I was sexually excited, but what I felt transcended mere lust to such a degree that although I could vividly sense my afflicted body I also felt totally alienated and changed and practically disincarnate."
Wow! There is a sequence of vomiting in the opera shortly after this that is one of the funnier things I can remember reading. I like BLACK PRINCE better than THE BELL and not as much as SEVERED HEAD or THE SEA, THE SEA. One needs to trust that Murdoch is both hilarious and wicked to stick with this one (which is why I think SEVERED HEAD makes the best gateway drug). I read it slowly and quickly at once; high praise.
October 29, 2024
“Todo cuanto tiene valor es secreto.”Como secretas y misteriosas son para mí las razones por las que Murdoch me gusta tantísimo, igual de insondables que las que me empujan una y otra vez a leer autores como Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser o, por tocar también lo patrio, Vila-Matas, del cual tomo la idea y pienso que quizás me atraigan porque siempre parece faltarme algo que no alcanzo a ver, que se me escapa, el secreto, un valor que constato pero no concreto.
“Sólo el arte explica, y en sí no puede ser explicado. Nosotros y el arte estamos hechos el uno para el otro, y cuando falla ese vínculo, falla la vida. Sólo esta analogía es válida, sólo este espejo refleja una imagen cabal. Claro está que nosotros tenemos una «mente inconsciente», y de eso trata en parte mi libro. Pero no existe un mapa general de ese continente perdido.”Bien es verdad que todos escriben sobre una vida que saben sin sentido, mofándose y compadeciéndose del ser humano, y de paso de sí mismos, por no tener más remedio que vivirla trágicamente pues más allá no hay, se lo aseguro a ustedes, nada. Es por ello por lo que todos revisten su escritura de la ironía y el humor que les permite tratar con el absurdo.
“Prácticamente toda la descripción de nuestros actos resulta cómica. Somos infinitamente cómicos para los demás… Dios, si existiera, se reiría de su creación. Sin embargo, también sucede que la vida es horrible, sin sentido metafísico, destrozada por el azar, el dolor y la cercana perspectiva de la muerte. De ello nace la ironía, nuestro necesario y peligroso instrumento.”Bueno, dejémonos de generalidades y digámoslo ya: esta novela es una de las grandes de Murdoch. Reúne todas sus excelencias, todas sus características maneras e ideas, una ligereza irónica que alterna sabiamente el vodevil con filosóficas lucubraciones sobre lo bueno, lo bello y lo verdadero, que, como el dios cristiano, es uno y trino.
“La belleza está presente cuando la verdad ha descubierto una forma idónea.”Su narrador y personaje central, Bradley Pearson, es del tipo poco fiable, además de soberbio, pedante y egocéntrico, por lo que será el lector el que tenga que discernir cuánto hay de parodia y cuánto de verdad en todo lo que en la novela reflexiona y cuenta semejante individuo (a lo que también contribuyen los testimonios de otros personajes que como epílogos Murdoch añade a la propia novela cuyo autor es Bradley Pearson). Bradley es mucho menos erudito y profundo de lo que él se cree y con él se ensaña la autora interrumpiendo constantemente su vida (siempre está a punto de partir pero algo se lo impide) y metiéndole en unos líos tremendos y ridículos que cambiarán la idea que de sí mismo tenía y su vida por completo.
“Soy consciente de que la gente suele tener unas ideas generales totalmente distorsionadas de sí misma.”También hay en la novela otros muchos temas propios de la autora, el arte, la metaficción, la moral, Shakespeare, la amistad, el matrimonio, la lealtad a uno mismo y a los demás, lo difícil que es proteger nuestros frágiles egos y lo que ello nos condiciona, la complejidad del comportamiento humano, su ridiculez, su imprevisibilidad, lo mucho que puede cambiar la vida en un instante (de los sorprendentes giros argumentales, tan típicos de la autora, aquí estarán más que sobrados)…
“Sé que la vida humana es horrible. Sé que en nada se parece al arte. No tengo religión, excepto mi propia tarea de existir. Las religiones convencionales son cosa de sueños. A escasos milímetros hay siempre un mundo de temor y de espanto. Todo hombre, hasta el más grande, puede ser destruido en un momento y no tener dónde refugiarse.”Pero por encima de todo, “El príncipe negro” es “Una celebración del amor”, así reza su subtítulo, aunque realmente debería ser algo así como “Auge y caída de esa terrible enfermedad llamada amor”.
“Nunca me había entregado, Francis, nunca me había puesto en juego de un modo absoluto. Me he pasado la vida siendo un hombre tímido y apocado. Ahora sé lo que significa estar más allá del alcance del temor. Ahora me encuentro donde mora la grandeza. Me he entregado. Y, con todo, es como estar bajo una disciplina. No tengo elección. Amo, venero y seré recompensado.”Murdoch resalta en la novela como el amor nos cambia la vida, nuestra percepción de nosotros mismos, del mundo, de nosotros en el mundo; lo demencial que es que una única persona atraiga toda nuestra atención en detrimento de todo y de todos, teniendo en cuenta que “Lo que ese ser amado «es» o «es realmente» importa un comino”. El amor nos hace únicos, nos sentimos privilegiados y llenos de gratitud, tan a gusto con nosotros mismos que casi ni necesitamos la presencia de la persona amada… hasta que empezamos a necesitarla, y el deseo nos desborda, el eros, ese príncipe negro (aunque a tal título nobiliario también son candidatos Hamlet y Julian vestida provocativamente de dicho personaje).
“El primer día Julian había estado en todas partes. El segundo había estado, sí, en alguna parte, vagamente localizada, todavía no terriblemente requerida, pero necesitada. Ella había estado, ese segundo día, ausente. Eso fue lo que inspiró el pequeño anhelo de una estrategia, un pequeño y ambicioso deseo de trazar planes. El futuro, previamente borrado por un exceso de luz, reapareció.”De pronto aparece el miedo, descubrimos el temor de perderlo todo, de que ese amor nuestro, que era el auténtico fin del universo, desaparezca… el horror. Y ya, si tenemos la suerte de que el amor no nos ha conducido a la persona equivocada, lo que supondría una serie de molestos problemas, ¿cuánto dura?, ¿en qué se convierte pasado un tiempo?, ¿eso en lo que se convierte es suficiente o necesitamos volver a sentir el amor para darnos sentido?, ¿compensa que pongamos nuestra vida patas arriba?, ¿tenemos elección?
“El arte dice la única verdad que en definitiva importa. Es la luz por la cual las cosas humanas pueden ser enmendadas. Y más allá del arte no hay, se lo aseguro a ustedes, nada.”
April 27, 2025
Funnier, lighter, and more in-depth, with stunning caricature accuracy.
To quote a few female authors, this work resembles Virginia Woolf, Lispector, or Sylvia Plath.
To quote a few female authors, this work resembles Virginia Woolf, Lispector, or Sylvia Plath.
January 5, 2018
«Ο Μαύρος Πρίγκιπας» είναι μια γιορτή, μια αρχαία τελετή, μια θεϊκή επιρροή αναφορικά με τα σκοτεινά, διφορούμενα και υπέροχα συναισθήματα της ανθρώπινης ψυχής.
Η συναισθηματική ανταπόκριση είναι αδιαμφισβήτητα η αρχή και το μεγαλείο της λογοτεχνικής κριτικής.
Η συγγραφέας σε αυτό το βιβλίο κάνει τις φαντασιώσεις της τέχνη, δημιουργεί χαρακτήρες πλήρως δομημένους και άθλιους, τόσο άθλιους και τόσο ανθρώπινους που φθάνουν στην έκσταση και θριαμβεύουν ως απόλυτα αποτυχημένοι.
Η Μέρντοχ γνωρίζει πολύ καλά την κόλαση.
Σχεδόν όλοι οι χαρακτήρες του βιβλίου ζουν εκεί. Απεικονίζει αριστουργηματικά την απελπιστική ανθρώπινη κατάσταση σε κάθε έκφανση της, μα κυρίως εισβάλει στην ψυχή του αναγνώστη έχοντας ως δούρειο ίππο τον Μαύρο Πρίγκιπα.
Μαύρος, όπως τα σκοτεινά αβυσσαλέα ψυχικά βάθη, Πρίγκιπας, όπως το τιμητικό και θριαμβευτικό αξίωμα, όπως ένας μεγαλειώδης τίτλος τιμής και εξουσίας που καθορίζει την ολοκλήρωση μέσα απο την αισθητική την αλήθεια και τον Μαύρο έρωτα.
Είναι ένα μυθιστόρημα προκλητικό, υπέροχο, ζοφερό και ιδιοφυές.
Σε περνάει σε ένα επίπεδο ταύτισης και αυτοσυνειδητότητας ακριβώς όπως πρέπει η τέχνη να σε περνάει σε άλλες σφαίρες παρηγοριάς, λύτρωσης και «διαλογισμού».
Οι αιώνιες αλήθειες διαχέονται μέσα στη γραφή της και φέρνουν πολυάριθμες επιρροές στους ήρωες του βιβλίου και στον αναγνώστη.
Η αγάπη, ως δύναμη ενοποίησης, η ομορφιά σε επίπεδο θεότητας, η αλήθεια που οδηγεί στον παράδεισο μόνο αν θελήσουμε να την ακολουθήσουμε, η επιθυμία, ο πόνος, η ευδαιμονία, ο εξευτελισμός, η δικαιοσύνη, έρχονται στον αναγνώστη τόσο οικεία και αδίστακτα όπως η ανελέητη βία.
Ο έρωτας, οι διφορούμενες αλήθειες, η τέχνη, το δράμα, το πνεύμα, η πολυπλοκότητα, το μίσος, η αποτυχία και η έκσταση της φαντασίας δαγκώνουν τον αναγνώστη θριαμβευτικά και υπέρλαμπρα.
Μέσα σε ένα μπερδεμένο πλέγμα ανθρώπινων αναξιόπιστων χαρακτήρων τοποθετείται ο ήρωας μας.
Ο αξιαγάπητος (προσωπική άποψη) και ασυμβίβαστος Μπράντλι είναι ο κεντρικός ήρωας της ιστορίας.
Ένας ώριμος άνδρας που αρρωσταίνει απο έρωτα και εμμονή για ένα νεαρό κορίτσι.
Απο κει και μετά ξεκινάει ένα επίτευγμα κλασικής λογοτεχνίας.
Ένας καταιγισμός τέχνης, ζωής και θανάτου που αρχικά μας παραπέμπει στο Πλατωνικό Συμπόσιο και κατόπιν στο μαρτύριο του Άμλετ πιστοποιώντας έμπρακτα μέσω της εξέλιξης όλα τα αιώνια συμπλέγματα της ερωτικής και σεξουαλικής ανθρώπινης υπόστασης.
Ταυτίστηκα με τον Μαύρο Πρίγκιπα...όπως ταυτίζεται ο το μαρτύριο του έρωτα με το θάνατο και την λύτρωση.
Αφαιρετικός, απαγορευμένος, καταστροφικός και εξεχόντως απολαυστικός σαν την ουσία της ζωής.
Ουσιαστικά κάτι πέρα και πάνω απο την αγάπη είναι η ουσία αυτού του βιβλίου.
Στο τέλος της ιστορίας μας βλέπουμε τα γεγονότα που μας αφηγείται ο Μπράντλι απο την άποψη των άλλων κύριων χαρακτήρων της ιστορίας.
Αυτό απλά μπορεί να χαρακτηριστεί ως μια συστροφή παραλυτικής έκπληξης για τον αναγνώστη και σίγουρα χαρακτηρίζεται ως εγκεφαλικό επεισόδιο ιδιοφυΐας.
Προφανώς,το λάτρεψα αυτό το βιβλίο.
Διαβάστε το
και θα καταλάβετε, ή μάλλον όπως είπε ο Μπράντλι σε κάποια στιγμή της αφήγησης του :
•Όποιος έχει αγαπήσει θα με καταλάβει ...•
🖤💔🖤💔🖤💔🖤💔🖤💔🖤💔🖤💔
Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.
Η συναισθηματική ανταπόκριση είναι αδιαμφισβήτητα η αρχή και το μεγαλείο της λογοτεχνικής κριτικής.
Η συγγραφέας σε αυτό το βιβλίο κάνει τις φαντασιώσεις της τέχνη, δημιουργεί χαρακτήρες πλήρως δομημένους και άθλιους, τόσο άθλιους και τόσο ανθρώπινους που φθάνουν στην έκσταση και θριαμβεύουν ως απόλυτα αποτυχημένοι.
Η Μέρντοχ γνωρίζει πολύ καλά την κόλαση.
Σχεδόν όλοι οι χαρακτήρες του βιβλίου ζουν εκεί. Απεικονίζει αριστουργηματικά την απελπιστική ανθρώπινη κατάσταση σε κάθε έκφανση της, μα κυρίως εισβάλει στην ψυχή του αναγνώστη έχοντας ως δούρειο ίππο τον Μαύρο Πρίγκιπα.
Μαύρος, όπως τα σκοτεινά αβυσσαλέα ψυχικά βάθη, Πρίγκιπας, όπως το τιμητικό και θριαμβευτικό αξίωμα, όπως ένας μεγαλειώδης τίτλος τιμής και εξουσίας που καθορίζει την ολοκλήρωση μέσα απο την αισθητική την αλήθεια και τον Μαύρο έρωτα.
Είναι ένα μυθιστόρημα προκλητικό, υπέροχο, ζοφερό και ιδιοφυές.
Σε περνάει σε ένα επίπεδο ταύτισης και αυτοσυνειδητότητας ακριβώς όπως πρέπει η τέχνη να σε περνάει σε άλλες σφαίρες παρηγοριάς, λύτρωσης και «διαλογισμού».
Οι αιώνιες αλήθειες διαχέονται μέσα στη γραφή της και φέρνουν πολυάριθμες επιρροές στους ήρωες του βιβλίου και στον αναγνώστη.
Η αγάπη, ως δύναμη ενοποίησης, η ομορφιά σε επίπεδο θεότητας, η αλήθεια που οδηγεί στον παράδεισο μόνο αν θελήσουμε να την ακολουθήσουμε, η επιθυμία, ο πόνος, η ευδαιμονία, ο εξευτελισμός, η δικαιοσύνη, έρχονται στον αναγνώστη τόσο οικεία και αδίστακτα όπως η ανελέητη βία.
Ο έρωτας, οι διφορούμενες αλήθειες, η τέχνη, το δράμα, το πνεύμα, η πολυπλοκότητα, το μίσος, η αποτυχία και η έκσταση της φαντασίας δαγκώνουν τον αναγνώστη θριαμβευτικά και υπέρλαμπρα.
Μέσα σε ένα μπερδεμένο πλέγμα ανθρώπινων αναξιόπιστων χαρακτήρων τοποθετείται ο ήρωας μας.
Ο αξιαγάπητος (προσωπική άποψη) και ασυμβίβαστος Μπράντλι είναι ο κεντρικός ήρωας της ιστορίας.
Ένας ώριμος άνδρας που αρρωσταίνει απο έρωτα και εμμονή για ένα νεαρό κορίτσι.
Απο κει και μετά ξεκινάει ένα επίτευγμα κλασικής λογοτεχνίας.
Ένας καταιγισμός τέχνης, ζωής και θανάτου που αρχικά μας παραπέμπει στο Πλατωνικό Συμπόσιο και κατόπιν στο μαρτύριο του Άμλετ πιστοποιώντας έμπρακτα μέσω της εξέλιξης όλα τα αιώνια συμπλέγματα της ερωτικής και σεξουαλικής ανθρώπινης υπόστασης.
Ταυτίστηκα με τον Μαύρο Πρίγκιπα...όπως ταυτίζεται ο το μαρτύριο του έρωτα με το θάνατο και την λύτρωση.
Αφαιρετικός, απαγορευμένος, καταστροφικός και εξεχόντως απολαυστικός σαν την ουσία της ζωής.
Ουσιαστικά κάτι πέρα και πάνω απο την αγάπη είναι η ουσία αυτού του βιβλίου.
Στο τέλος της ιστορίας μας βλέπουμε τα γεγονότα που μας αφηγείται ο Μπράντλι απο την άποψη των άλλων κύριων χαρακτήρων της ιστορίας.
Αυτό απλά μπορεί να χαρακτηριστεί ως μια συστροφή παραλυτικής έκπληξης για τον αναγνώστη και σίγουρα χαρακτηρίζεται ως εγκεφαλικό επεισόδιο ιδιοφυΐας.
Προφανώς,το λάτρεψα αυτό το βιβλίο.
Διαβάστε το
και θα καταλάβετε, ή μάλλον όπως είπε ο Μπράντλι σε κάποια στιγμή της αφήγησης του :
•Όποιος έχει αγαπήσει θα με καταλάβει ...•
🖤💔🖤💔🖤💔🖤💔🖤💔🖤💔🖤💔
Καλή ανάγνωση.
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.
November 27, 2020
First thing to say, if you don't like unlikeable characters stay clear of this. The narrator of this novel is as unlikeable as they come. He's a misogynist, delusional, self-righteous, self-absorbed, easily unmanned, neurotic, infantile, priggish and yet at the same time he can be piercingly wise. He's also wildly unreliable as the narrator of his own story. William Bradley is a bachelor with exalted aspirations to be a great writer. He'd rather write nothing than anything substandard. So he writes nothing. His friend Arnold is a prolific and successful novelist. He is scornful of his friend's literary achievements. At the beginning of the novel he receives a panicked phone call from Arnold who tells him he has killed his wife. He rushes to the house and finds Rachel, the wife, badly bruised and distraught. Not long afterwards he will share an amorous moment with Rachel. But soon he will fall in love with Arnold and Rachel's daughter. He's so in love with her that he vomits over her dress on their first date at the opera - one of the funniest literary moments of my year. This family provide him with the whole gamut of his imaginative life. Is it real life or is it fantasy?
To begin with one takes the narrator at his word. But, in degrees, his version of events becomes ever more difficult to believe. And as this shift occurs one begins to feel more sympathy for him. I guess at the end it doesn't matter much whether his story is true because he's offered us so much in the way of truth about human existence. It was spoilt a little for me by the postscripts of the other characters telling their conflicting versions of the truth, all of which were irritatingly opaque and overly misleading.
The most prominent idea I took from this book is that we can't help telling the truth about ourselves even when we lie.
To begin with one takes the narrator at his word. But, in degrees, his version of events becomes ever more difficult to believe. And as this shift occurs one begins to feel more sympathy for him. I guess at the end it doesn't matter much whether his story is true because he's offered us so much in the way of truth about human existence. It was spoilt a little for me by the postscripts of the other characters telling their conflicting versions of the truth, all of which were irritatingly opaque and overly misleading.
The most prominent idea I took from this book is that we can't help telling the truth about ourselves even when we lie.
August 6, 2020
Dissatisfied with my review, I need to say a few words more. It is difficult to properly explain how real the characters become. What each one does is what that person has to do. There are characters that will frustrate you. You ask yourself, “How could he do that!?” On reflection, you realize this is exactly what such a person would do. Each character IS who they are. Bradley is not capable of confronting problems He tries but inevitably fails. His pestering, annoying brother-in-law ends up being amusing. A character can make you both laugh and cry. People are not simple, and so it is perfectly possible to have conflicting emotions toward a person. Murdoch captures this wonderfully.
***********************
Bradley Pearson, a London tax inspector of fifty eight years of age, retires to invest all his time to writing. He had years ago published two novels and a collection of essays. With a little peace and some time to himself, he is sure he will be able to write again. He rents a cottage in the countryside. Before his planned escape, his friend calls, asking him to come over immediately. It’s an emergency. He goes. The ball starts rolling—one emergency after another occurs. His sister has a mental breakdown. His divorced wife turns up from America. Her psychoanalyst brother places demands on him too. Bradley cannot say no to any of them! What happens when a person is pulled in ten directions? Does anything end up right?
Bradley’s book does get written, but not as planned. It is his book we have in our hands. It tells of that which unfolded after that initial phone call.
This book is a character study. You come to know all those mentioned above in depth, with an addition of two. Bradley’s friend is an author, just as Bradley is, but he is an author able to spit out a book every year! This so-called “friend”, their friendship is fraught with tension, has a wife and daughter. With the wife and daughter included, what is delivered is a character study of six. Each of these six are amazingly well drawn.
The author, Iris Murdoch, understands people and knows how to capture in words how people behave. She adds humor and suspense to the story.
And surprise. The book begins with two forewords and ends with six postscripts. These are written by characters in the story. These are as much a part of the story as the central portion which they bookend. The forewords make the reader curious—you don’t quite understand what is going on. The postscripts add the element of surprise. All that you have been told must be reanalyzed. Whose version is right?! This putting together of the different parts is cleverly done!
Murdoch’s writing, her description of people, landscapes and thought processes, is topnotch. The choice of details mentioned, how ideas are expressed and the means by which information is delivered are all well done—for example in the delightful description of a pair of purple boots, how happy such beautiful boots make a woman feel and how the book’s author inserts himself into the telling and speaks directly to readers. He informs us that irrelevant people and events have been eliminated from the telling. One cannot help but wonder what has been altered or removed!
Some people analyze this story in terms of Hamlet. Others focus on the Oedipus complex. For me it was enough to see this simply as a character study. Themes are jealousy and friendship, love and hate, art and mysticism, and the process of writing a story.
Anthony Howell narrates the audiobook very well. His narration I have given four stars. His intonations fit the personality of the person speaking marvelously. It is amusing to compare American and English accents. You hear every word clearly, and the tempo is perfect.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I will continue to read all the books I can get by the author.
********************
*The Black Prince 4 stars
*A Fairly Honourable Defeat 4 stars
*The Sandcastle TBR
*The Sea, The Sea TBR
*The Good Apprentice TBR
*The Bell TBR
*The Unicorn TBR
*The Time of the Angels TBR
*The Flight from the Enchanter TBR
***********************
Bradley Pearson, a London tax inspector of fifty eight years of age, retires to invest all his time to writing. He had years ago published two novels and a collection of essays. With a little peace and some time to himself, he is sure he will be able to write again. He rents a cottage in the countryside. Before his planned escape, his friend calls, asking him to come over immediately. It’s an emergency. He goes. The ball starts rolling—one emergency after another occurs. His sister has a mental breakdown. His divorced wife turns up from America. Her psychoanalyst brother places demands on him too. Bradley cannot say no to any of them! What happens when a person is pulled in ten directions? Does anything end up right?
Bradley’s book does get written, but not as planned. It is his book we have in our hands. It tells of that which unfolded after that initial phone call.
This book is a character study. You come to know all those mentioned above in depth, with an addition of two. Bradley’s friend is an author, just as Bradley is, but he is an author able to spit out a book every year! This so-called “friend”, their friendship is fraught with tension, has a wife and daughter. With the wife and daughter included, what is delivered is a character study of six. Each of these six are amazingly well drawn.
The author, Iris Murdoch, understands people and knows how to capture in words how people behave. She adds humor and suspense to the story.
And surprise. The book begins with two forewords and ends with six postscripts. These are written by characters in the story. These are as much a part of the story as the central portion which they bookend. The forewords make the reader curious—you don’t quite understand what is going on. The postscripts add the element of surprise. All that you have been told must be reanalyzed. Whose version is right?! This putting together of the different parts is cleverly done!
Murdoch’s writing, her description of people, landscapes and thought processes, is topnotch. The choice of details mentioned, how ideas are expressed and the means by which information is delivered are all well done—for example in the delightful description of a pair of purple boots, how happy such beautiful boots make a woman feel and how the book’s author inserts himself into the telling and speaks directly to readers. He informs us that irrelevant people and events have been eliminated from the telling. One cannot help but wonder what has been altered or removed!
Some people analyze this story in terms of Hamlet. Others focus on the Oedipus complex. For me it was enough to see this simply as a character study. Themes are jealousy and friendship, love and hate, art and mysticism, and the process of writing a story.
Anthony Howell narrates the audiobook very well. His narration I have given four stars. His intonations fit the personality of the person speaking marvelously. It is amusing to compare American and English accents. You hear every word clearly, and the tempo is perfect.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I will continue to read all the books I can get by the author.
********************
*The Black Prince 4 stars
*A Fairly Honourable Defeat 4 stars
*The Sandcastle TBR
*The Sea, The Sea TBR
*The Good Apprentice TBR
*The Bell TBR
*The Unicorn TBR
*The Time of the Angels TBR
*The Flight from the Enchanter TBR
September 4, 2023
"I wish I wrote Treasure Island."
This novel is the most brutal take-down of critics and criticism in general that I have ever read.
And I loved it, despite being a critic.
Because I love criticism.
And the best kind of criticism is when it's revealing. Not just when it makes a good point. But when it helps you develop and address your approach to media.
I think a lot of writers are attracted to criticism (both good and terrible) because a lot of writers are their own worst critics. They want to hear other perspectives of their work, even (or especially) if they don't agree with those perspectives (positive or negative).
Not just to find what 'works' and what 'doesn't'. But sometimes to just dismiss their own criticism of themselves by seeing it in a different light. Sometimes seeing criticism that holds you back presented from a different person can show you how petty, insecure or ineffective your own doubts about your work can be.
In this novel Murdoch disassembles so many ways of thinking about writing and creative work, it's comical.
One particular scene takes apart a self-absorbed Shakespeare idolater. Where a critic raves about Hamlet as not only the greatest written work ever, but as a work that has become 'thought itself' and 'humanity itself'.
Hamlet has become all of us and we all have become Hamlet. To be or not to be Hamlet.
And then the same critic falls into a near dead-faint when he realises a decently attractive young woman listens to his ideas, wants to hear them and is impressed.
The critic has an emotional meltdown and spins around the room in an absolute frenzy of bliss, because he's obtained someone's attention and is being taken seriously.
"My god, she actually listened to me! And she liked it!"
He's so overwhelmed that he falls madly in love with the girl, despite being old enough to be her grandfather. But not just a sexual love, because that would be too 'cliche'. No sir. The critic is refreshed, he's renewed, he's bathed in the fountain of Athena. People are telling him how young he looks. What could possibly go wrong?
OH MY JESUS.
And this particular arc of tragedy climaxes when he sees the younger woman cosplaying as Hamlet, becoming a living embodiment of the critic's analysis of Hamlet's homosexuality in dress. And so the critic races to this emotional car-wreck, arms wide open, abandoning an older mentally ill person in need. Who does their own cosplay ...of Ophelia.
Thus the critic is revealed. Running from real life problems to embrace his own vision of fantasy. A man who holds out on giving praise to his own friends, needing and seeking validation like a beggar dying of thirst in the desert. A person who prides themselves on principals and traditions ultimately abandoning all principals for the promise of instant gratification. Clinging to intellectualism as a shield to protect their obviously immature and emotionally fragile ego.
It is one of the most wildly effective and brutally dissecting moments of parody I've ever read in a novel.
And mind you, this was written over 20 years before Harold Bloom released Shakespeare: The Invention of The Human. Reading Bloom's analysis of Shakespeare and then stumbling onto this scene in this book? I felt like I walked onto a landmine trap set by Tiresias.
Click-click, boom.
Thou art undone.
It's one thing to burn critics from your own era or the past, but when you're still effectively torching them over 20 years after?!
Goodness gracious, Iris. You're a demon. You're a devil. You're no good. Your head is full of spiders. You're a nightmare. I love you.
Iris takes apart a lot modern and post-modern criticism by spreading it across a series of characters in this book and brings it home in the finale, as both a wicked condemnation and a kind, affectionate and understanding hand.
She takes apart the need to look down on 'fun, fantastic adventure stories' as the ironic height of emotional immaturity. She also takes apart the need to celebrate fun, fantastic work above all other works as emotionally self-destructive, overly traditionalist and at times intellectually insecure.
She sees the gatekeepers of culture and the barbarians at the gate as ultimately two sides of the same pretentious coin.
She brutalises the Jung/Freudian critic and their attempt to psychoanalyse fiction and writing as some kind of reveal of a writer's hidden character. She connects this kind of criticism to homophobia and discrimination of the mentally ill.
Overall she doesn't condemn what anybody reads, but how they use what they read to prop up their own egos and identities. How criticism is often a sibling to immaturity, emotional fragility, misogyny, bigotry, abuse and even murder.
And if this was the sum total of the novel's worth? It would be better than 99% of what I read in a year.
But again, as I've pointed out previously in my reviews of her other work, what is Mount Olympus for most writers is the tip of the iceberg for Iris Murdoch.
In The Black Prince, Murdoch deftly disassembles and parodies true crime novels and Agatha Christie whodunit mysteries and turns them into a magnifying glass to study human behaviour and our approach to art and writing as a philosophical experiment.
Also: Iris Murdoch is very likely the best writer of all time when it comes to plot design.
Her peerless ability to intertwine genres, philosophy, art theory, romance, fantastic elements and characters on a dozen different levels while maintaining an engaging and thoroughly entertaining story is astonishing.
Iris ropes in readers with archetypes that seem so generalised they're almost pure fantasy. She has her signature insecure, slim, fey, older men searching for romance and thrown into dizzying fits of hilarious melodrama. (No writer has ever taken apart male insecurity better than Iris Murdoch) She has predatory, impish, younger women attracted to older men (OR ARE THEY) with a sense of free spirit and self-control that defies their age. She has mystical, spiritual (but not religious) figures with a deep philosophy connected to various faiths (but especially Buddhist/Jewish beliefs). And she has older women on the sexual prowl who are sometimes much more (and much less) than what they seem. And it's all very fantastic. It's very fun. And if it was all just surface level work, it would be intriguing, but ultimately cliche.
But the thing with Iris is that it's never just surface level.
Every character is like a shallow pool disguising massive depths. Each character is like a prism and the deeper elements of these characters refract through themselves in a dozen different ways. Murdoch sets a whole cast of characters against each other and at the same time sets the characters against different aspects of themselves, in the same scene, on multiple levels, sometimes in the same action, while maintaining a thorough line of internal, evolving and conflicting themes. And she adds hilarious symbolism and puns that will take you years to find. It's a juggling act comparable to keeping 500 balls in the air and making it look easy.
At the risk of repeating myself (and sounding like a cliche), the only writer I can say who is comparable in these regards is Shakespeare.
And that brings us back to Hamlet.
And so we must give The Black Prince his due. 10/10.
"To Be, or Not To Be? Not to be." - Arnold Schwarzenegger, Last Action Hero
This novel is the most brutal take-down of critics and criticism in general that I have ever read.
And I loved it, despite being a critic.
Because I love criticism.
And the best kind of criticism is when it's revealing. Not just when it makes a good point. But when it helps you develop and address your approach to media.
I think a lot of writers are attracted to criticism (both good and terrible) because a lot of writers are their own worst critics. They want to hear other perspectives of their work, even (or especially) if they don't agree with those perspectives (positive or negative).
Not just to find what 'works' and what 'doesn't'. But sometimes to just dismiss their own criticism of themselves by seeing it in a different light. Sometimes seeing criticism that holds you back presented from a different person can show you how petty, insecure or ineffective your own doubts about your work can be.
In this novel Murdoch disassembles so many ways of thinking about writing and creative work, it's comical.
One particular scene takes apart a self-absorbed Shakespeare idolater. Where a critic raves about Hamlet as not only the greatest written work ever, but as a work that has become 'thought itself' and 'humanity itself'.
Hamlet has become all of us and we all have become Hamlet. To be or not to be Hamlet.
And then the same critic falls into a near dead-faint when he realises a decently attractive young woman listens to his ideas, wants to hear them and is impressed.
The critic has an emotional meltdown and spins around the room in an absolute frenzy of bliss, because he's obtained someone's attention and is being taken seriously.
"My god, she actually listened to me! And she liked it!"
He's so overwhelmed that he falls madly in love with the girl, despite being old enough to be her grandfather. But not just a sexual love, because that would be too 'cliche'. No sir. The critic is refreshed, he's renewed, he's bathed in the fountain of Athena. People are telling him how young he looks. What could possibly go wrong?
OH MY JESUS.
And this particular arc of tragedy climaxes when he sees the younger woman cosplaying as Hamlet, becoming a living embodiment of the critic's analysis of Hamlet's homosexuality in dress. And so the critic races to this emotional car-wreck, arms wide open, abandoning an older mentally ill person in need. Who does their own cosplay ...of Ophelia.
Thus the critic is revealed. Running from real life problems to embrace his own vision of fantasy. A man who holds out on giving praise to his own friends, needing and seeking validation like a beggar dying of thirst in the desert. A person who prides themselves on principals and traditions ultimately abandoning all principals for the promise of instant gratification. Clinging to intellectualism as a shield to protect their obviously immature and emotionally fragile ego.
It is one of the most wildly effective and brutally dissecting moments of parody I've ever read in a novel.
And mind you, this was written over 20 years before Harold Bloom released Shakespeare: The Invention of The Human. Reading Bloom's analysis of Shakespeare and then stumbling onto this scene in this book? I felt like I walked onto a landmine trap set by Tiresias.
Click-click, boom.
Thou art undone.
It's one thing to burn critics from your own era or the past, but when you're still effectively torching them over 20 years after?!
Goodness gracious, Iris. You're a demon. You're a devil. You're no good. Your head is full of spiders. You're a nightmare. I love you.
Iris takes apart a lot modern and post-modern criticism by spreading it across a series of characters in this book and brings it home in the finale, as both a wicked condemnation and a kind, affectionate and understanding hand.
She takes apart the need to look down on 'fun, fantastic adventure stories' as the ironic height of emotional immaturity. She also takes apart the need to celebrate fun, fantastic work above all other works as emotionally self-destructive, overly traditionalist and at times intellectually insecure.
She sees the gatekeepers of culture and the barbarians at the gate as ultimately two sides of the same pretentious coin.
She brutalises the Jung/Freudian critic and their attempt to psychoanalyse fiction and writing as some kind of reveal of a writer's hidden character. She connects this kind of criticism to homophobia and discrimination of the mentally ill.
Overall she doesn't condemn what anybody reads, but how they use what they read to prop up their own egos and identities. How criticism is often a sibling to immaturity, emotional fragility, misogyny, bigotry, abuse and even murder.
And if this was the sum total of the novel's worth? It would be better than 99% of what I read in a year.
But again, as I've pointed out previously in my reviews of her other work, what is Mount Olympus for most writers is the tip of the iceberg for Iris Murdoch.
In The Black Prince, Murdoch deftly disassembles and parodies true crime novels and Agatha Christie whodunit mysteries and turns them into a magnifying glass to study human behaviour and our approach to art and writing as a philosophical experiment.
Also: Iris Murdoch is very likely the best writer of all time when it comes to plot design.
Her peerless ability to intertwine genres, philosophy, art theory, romance, fantastic elements and characters on a dozen different levels while maintaining an engaging and thoroughly entertaining story is astonishing.
Iris ropes in readers with archetypes that seem so generalised they're almost pure fantasy. She has her signature insecure, slim, fey, older men searching for romance and thrown into dizzying fits of hilarious melodrama. (No writer has ever taken apart male insecurity better than Iris Murdoch) She has predatory, impish, younger women attracted to older men (OR ARE THEY) with a sense of free spirit and self-control that defies their age. She has mystical, spiritual (but not religious) figures with a deep philosophy connected to various faiths (but especially Buddhist/Jewish beliefs). And she has older women on the sexual prowl who are sometimes much more (and much less) than what they seem. And it's all very fantastic. It's very fun. And if it was all just surface level work, it would be intriguing, but ultimately cliche.
But the thing with Iris is that it's never just surface level.
Every character is like a shallow pool disguising massive depths. Each character is like a prism and the deeper elements of these characters refract through themselves in a dozen different ways. Murdoch sets a whole cast of characters against each other and at the same time sets the characters against different aspects of themselves, in the same scene, on multiple levels, sometimes in the same action, while maintaining a thorough line of internal, evolving and conflicting themes. And she adds hilarious symbolism and puns that will take you years to find. It's a juggling act comparable to keeping 500 balls in the air and making it look easy.
At the risk of repeating myself (and sounding like a cliche), the only writer I can say who is comparable in these regards is Shakespeare.
And that brings us back to Hamlet.
And so we must give The Black Prince his due. 10/10.
"To Be, or Not To Be? Not to be." - Arnold Schwarzenegger, Last Action Hero
December 21, 2010
I read this years ago and thought it was hilarious, especially when the old prissy geezer was taking the young lovely student he was hopelessly in lurve with to the Opera and was so excited and overwhelmed by the whole inebriating ineffable scrotum-bedevilling lurve thing that he vomited all over the row in front. Which quite curtailed the passion for that evening.
I actually re-read this not that long ago and it wasn't quite so side-splitting but the vomit scene still brought forth a few chortles.
All the characters in Iris Murdoch's novels are little upper middle class clockwork figurines, she winds them up and they rush here and shag, and rush there and existentialise, and rush there and divorce. It's funny and exhausting and you often need a chart.
But one Iris Murdoch novel is a must.
So it should be this one.
I actually re-read this not that long ago and it wasn't quite so side-splitting but the vomit scene still brought forth a few chortles.
All the characters in Iris Murdoch's novels are little upper middle class clockwork figurines, she winds them up and they rush here and shag, and rush there and existentialise, and rush there and divorce. It's funny and exhausting and you often need a chart.
But one Iris Murdoch novel is a must.
So it should be this one.
March 19, 2023
4.5 stars
This is a beautifully written book. The writing pulls the reader in, from the first page to the last. It is written as a memoir by Bradley Pearson, with postscripts from Dramatis Personae. It is about a phase in Bradley’s life where his relationships with people around him, like his sister Priscilla, his mentee/nemesis/friend Arnold Baffin, Arnold’s wife Rachel, Arnold’s daughter Julian and Bradley’s ex-wife Christian, is as complicated as can possibly be. These complications end in a disastrous consequence.
Murdoch is a genius in writing flawed and misguided characters. Especially people with sadistic and narcissistic qualities. A common characteristic in each of the Murdoch books I have read, is that the lead character is unlikeable. But, in this case, I did not dislike him as much as I did Charles Arrowby (The Sea, The Sea).
This is an amazing character study and meditation on love and art, with a drizzle of some suspense involved. The words combined to weave a wonderful tapestry of emotions. It was heavy with emotions, of love, envy, hatred, sympathy, and so on.
The author knows people. She has studied humanity, and human emotions in a way that we can only hope to even discern. She also has a very good way of somehow bringing a doubt in the reader’s mind that there was some unreliability in the narrative we just read. This thought will cross the reader’s mind till we reach the end of the book. Whether it is indicated by the narrator themselves or can be guessed from the point of view of other characters.
I heavily annotated this book! At one point I gave up the underlining because I might have marked the whole of it.
There were some wonderful quotes.
Only art explains, and that cannot itself be explained
We forgive those who have seen us vile sooner than those who have seen us humiliated
The natural tendency of the human soul is towards the protection of the ego. The Niagara-force of this tendency can be readily recognized by introspection, and its results are everywhere on public show. We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else. I say 'apparently because the average man while he covets real wealth, normally covets only apparent good. The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives. Of course very occasionally and for an instant even the worst of men may wish for goodness.
Anyone who is an artist can feel its magnetism. I use the word ‘good' here as a veil. What it veils can be known, but not further named. Most of us are saved from finding self-destruction in a chaos of brutal childish egoism, not by the magnetism of that mystery, but by what is called grandly 'duty' and more accurately 'habit'. Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life-long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage.
There is an analogous transition in the everyday proceedings of the moral agent. We ignore what we are doing until it is too late to alter it. We never allow ourselves quite to focus upon moments of decision; and these are often in fact hard to find even if we are searching for them. We allow the vague pleasure-seeking annoyance-avoiding tide of our being to hurry us onward until the moment when we announce that we can no other. There is thus an eternal discrepancy between the self-knowledge which we gain by observing ourselves objectively and the self-awareness which we have of ourselves subjectively: a discrepancy which probably makes it impossible for us ever to arrive at the truth.
A huge thanks my friend Chrissie for recommending me this book! :)
This is a beautifully written book. The writing pulls the reader in, from the first page to the last. It is written as a memoir by Bradley Pearson, with postscripts from Dramatis Personae. It is about a phase in Bradley’s life where his relationships with people around him, like his sister Priscilla, his mentee/nemesis/friend Arnold Baffin, Arnold’s wife Rachel, Arnold’s daughter Julian and Bradley’s ex-wife Christian, is as complicated as can possibly be. These complications end in a disastrous consequence.
Murdoch is a genius in writing flawed and misguided characters. Especially people with sadistic and narcissistic qualities. A common characteristic in each of the Murdoch books I have read, is that the lead character is unlikeable. But, in this case, I did not dislike him as much as I did Charles Arrowby (The Sea, The Sea).
This is an amazing character study and meditation on love and art, with a drizzle of some suspense involved. The words combined to weave a wonderful tapestry of emotions. It was heavy with emotions, of love, envy, hatred, sympathy, and so on.
The author knows people. She has studied humanity, and human emotions in a way that we can only hope to even discern. She also has a very good way of somehow bringing a doubt in the reader’s mind that there was some unreliability in the narrative we just read. This thought will cross the reader’s mind till we reach the end of the book. Whether it is indicated by the narrator themselves or can be guessed from the point of view of other characters.
I heavily annotated this book! At one point I gave up the underlining because I might have marked the whole of it.
There were some wonderful quotes.
Only art explains, and that cannot itself be explained
We forgive those who have seen us vile sooner than those who have seen us humiliated
The natural tendency of the human soul is towards the protection of the ego. The Niagara-force of this tendency can be readily recognized by introspection, and its results are everywhere on public show. We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else. I say 'apparently because the average man while he covets real wealth, normally covets only apparent good. The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives. Of course very occasionally and for an instant even the worst of men may wish for goodness.
Anyone who is an artist can feel its magnetism. I use the word ‘good' here as a veil. What it veils can be known, but not further named. Most of us are saved from finding self-destruction in a chaos of brutal childish egoism, not by the magnetism of that mystery, but by what is called grandly 'duty' and more accurately 'habit'. Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life-long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage.
There is an analogous transition in the everyday proceedings of the moral agent. We ignore what we are doing until it is too late to alter it. We never allow ourselves quite to focus upon moments of decision; and these are often in fact hard to find even if we are searching for them. We allow the vague pleasure-seeking annoyance-avoiding tide of our being to hurry us onward until the moment when we announce that we can no other. There is thus an eternal discrepancy between the self-knowledge which we gain by observing ourselves objectively and the self-awareness which we have of ourselves subjectively: a discrepancy which probably makes it impossible for us ever to arrive at the truth.
A huge thanks my friend Chrissie for recommending me this book! :)
July 19, 2017
ΕΔΙΤ 1
Ο Σύνδεσμος στην Λεσχη του Βιβλίου:
http://www.λέσχη.gr/forum/showthread....
Ο Μπράντλι Πίαρσον είναι ένας συνταξιούχος εφοριακός, ο οποίος ονειρεύεται να γράψει ένα δυνατό λογοτεχνικό μυθιστόρημα σχετικό με την αλήθεια. Ένα πραγματικό λογοτεχνικό αριστούργημα. Γύρω του διάφοροι χαρακτήρες… Φθαρμένοι κυρίως από τον συζυγικό βίο…
Η ψυχολογικά διαταραγμένη αδελφή του, η πρώην γοητευτική συζυγός του, ο κολλητός του φίλος ο συγγραφέας, ο κάπως ιδιόμορφος κουνιάδος του, ο κύριος Λοξίας… Και μέσα σε όλες αυτές τις καρικατούρες, και το σκοτεινό αντικείμενο του πόθου, η άφθαρτη εικόνα της μικρής Τζούλιαν. Θα καταφέρει όμως να απαλλαγεί από την παρουσία των τοξικών ανθρώπων, να γράψει το μυθιστόρημα του και να ανακαλύψει την μοναδική αλήθεια που φανερώνει ο έρωτας;
Η Άιρις Μέρντοχ πιάνεται κυρίως με 3 θέματα.. Τι είναι τέχνη και πως πρέπει να εκφράζεται, τι είναι ο γάμος και πως μπορεί να φθείρει τους ανθρώπους μέσα από την δική του φθορά και τέλος τι σημαίνει αλήθεια και πόσο μπορεί κανείς να την αντιληφτεί… Η Μέρντοχ αφηγείται την ιστορία του Μπράντλι Πίαρσον με έναν αρκετά πρωτότυπο τρόπο (το καταλαβαίνουμε αμέσως από τον πιο ευφάνταστο πρόλογο επιμελητή!! ). Την ιστορία ουσιαστικά την μεταφέρει στον αναγνώστη ο επιμελητής του βιβλίου κος Λοξίας.
Η αγάπη της συγγραφέως για τον Σαίξπηρ και την Αρχαία Ελληνική τέχνη είναι κάτι παραπάνω από εμφανής. Ο Μπράντλι μιλάει σε ένα φίλο του όπως ο Άμλετ μιλάει στο φάντασμα αναζητώντας την δικαίωση των πράξεών του ακόμα και μέσα από έναν φανταστικό (;;;) φίλο. Ο εκδότης και φίλος του Μπράντλι είναι ο κος Λοξίας, ένα όνομα διόλου τυχαίο μιας και ήταν ένα από τα παρωνύμια του Θεού της Τέχνης Απόλλωνα. Έτσι μοιραία οι χαρακτήρες του βιβλίου φέρουν το αρχαίο δράμα αλλά και την Σαιξπηρική λιτότητα κάνοντας την ανάγνωσή του απολαυστική.
Σε αρκετά σημεία του βιβλίου υπάρχουν αναφορές για κρυμμένες ομοφυλοφιλικές τάσεις και Συμπλέγματα της Ηλέκτρας. Ο κάθε χαρακτήρας του βιβλίου είναι κ��ι μια διαφορετική ερμηνεία της Μέρντοχ για τις διαφορετικές πτυχές του ανθρώπινου χαρακτήρα.
Ο Μαύρος πρίγκιπας είναι ο διάβολος ή ο έρωτας; Η αλήθεια έρχεται μέσα του έρωτα όπως έλεγε ο Πλάτωνας ή τελικά όλα είναι μάταια;
5/5…
Ο Σύνδεσμος στην Λεσχη του Βιβλίου:
http://www.λέσχη.gr/forum/showthread....
Ο Μπράντλι Πίαρσον είναι ένας συνταξιούχος εφοριακός, ο οποίος ονειρεύεται να γράψει ένα δυνατό λογοτεχνικό μυθιστόρημα σχετικό με την αλήθεια. Ένα πραγματικό λογοτεχνικό αριστούργημα. Γύρω του διάφοροι χαρακτήρες… Φθαρμένοι κυρίως από τον συζυγικό βίο…
Η ψυχολογικά διαταραγμένη αδελφή του, η πρώην γοητευτική συζυγός του, ο κολλητός του φίλος ο συγγραφέας, ο κάπως ιδιόμορφος κουνιάδος του, ο κύριος Λοξίας… Και μέσα σε όλες αυτές τις καρικατούρες, και το σκοτεινό αντικείμενο του πόθου, η άφθαρτη εικόνα της μικρής Τζούλιαν. Θα καταφέρει όμως να απαλλαγεί από την παρουσία των τοξικών ανθρώπων, να γράψει το μυθιστόρημα του και να ανακαλύψει την μοναδική αλήθεια που φανερώνει ο έρωτας;
Η Άιρις Μέρντοχ πιάνεται κυρίως με 3 θέματα.. Τι είναι τέχνη και πως πρέπει να εκφράζεται, τι είναι ο γάμος και πως μπορεί να φθείρει τους ανθρώπους μέσα από την δική του φθορά και τέλος τι σημαίνει αλήθεια και πόσο μπορεί κανείς να την αντιληφτεί… Η Μέρντοχ αφηγείται την ιστορία του Μπράντλι Πίαρσον με έναν αρκετά πρωτότυπο τρόπο (το καταλαβαίνουμε αμέσως από τον πιο ευφάνταστο πρόλογο επιμελητή!! ). Την ιστορία ουσιαστικά την μεταφέρει στον αναγνώστη ο επιμελητής του βιβλίου κος Λοξίας.
Η αγάπη της συγγραφέως για τον Σαίξπηρ και την Αρχαία Ελληνική τέχνη είναι κάτι παραπάνω από εμφανής. Ο Μπράντλι μιλάει σε ένα φίλο του όπως ο Άμλετ μιλάει στο φάντασμα αναζητώντας την δικαίωση των πράξεών του ακόμα και μέσα από έναν φανταστικό (;;;) φίλο. Ο εκδότης και φίλος του Μπράντλι είναι ο κος Λοξίας, ένα όνομα διόλου τυχαίο μιας και ήταν ένα από τα παρωνύμια του Θεού της Τέχνης Απόλλωνα. Έτσι μοιραία οι χαρακτήρες του βιβλίου φέρουν το αρχαίο δράμα αλλά και την Σαιξπηρική λιτότητα κάνοντας την ανάγνωσή του απολαυστική.
Σε αρκετά σημεία του βιβλίου υπάρχουν αναφορές για κρυμμένες ομοφυλοφιλικές τάσεις και Συμπλέγματα της Ηλέκτρας. Ο κάθε χαρακτήρας του βιβλίου είναι κ��ι μια διαφορετική ερμηνεία της Μέρντοχ για τις διαφορετικές πτυχές του ανθρώπινου χαρακτήρα.
Ο Μαύρος πρίγκιπας είναι ο διάβολος ή ο έρωτας; Η αλήθεια έρχεται μέσα του έρωτα όπως έλεγε ο Πλάτωνας ή τελικά όλα είναι μάταια;
5/5…
April 2, 2025
My first venture into reading La Murdoch's work. A twisted soap opera of sorts- finds Bradley Pearson jealous of Arnold Baffin, a lesser known writer. Enter the two women of Baffin's life- his neurotic wife Rachel, and his seductive and intuitive daughter Julian who find themselves vying for Pearson's affections.
What begins as a comedy of manners winds up a tragicomic and ultimately really sad novel about unhappy lives. Add Pearson's depressed sister Priscilla, and Pearson's former brother n'law Francis, an aging homosexual- their dramatic declarations of jealously, love, lust are all at war, alluding to Shakespeare's Hamlet and other tragedies.
What begins as a comedy of manners winds up a tragicomic and ultimately really sad novel about unhappy lives. Add Pearson's depressed sister Priscilla, and Pearson's former brother n'law Francis, an aging homosexual- their dramatic declarations of jealously, love, lust are all at war, alluding to Shakespeare's Hamlet and other tragedies.
July 11, 2025
That a book of this density and difficulty kept me up late into the night to finish it is a testament to its effectiveness. Possibly the smartest novel I’ve ever read. Murdoch’s powers as an artist and a philosopher are on full display, as are her coexisting cynicism and hope in humanity.
This also, incidentally, contains some of the most interesting thoughts on writing as an art form that I’ve read—very meta for a novel to do that, but altogether successful in my view!
Will revisit often for inspiration in my own writing.
This also, incidentally, contains some of the most interesting thoughts on writing as an art form that I’ve read—very meta for a novel to do that, but altogether successful in my view!
Will revisit often for inspiration in my own writing.
December 17, 2015
3.5/5
The term "unreliable narrator" is a popular one in literature. As are "creativity", "art", and "great", words whose definitions are thrown around so quickly that the mind can hardly fix on one before another, more "truthful" one is sailing past. As if truth had anything to do with it.
Let's start with the "unreliable" part of the first term. Unreliable how? What standard of reliability do we actually have at our disposal? The simplest answer is the book itself, an answer that quickly devolves into an inescapable paradox from the purely objective point of view. As a result, one must step back from the lenses of objectivity, and trust in the states of transience that meaning undergoes for each and every occasion.
This book has an unreliable narrator. In fact, it has many, and one would go mad in the attempt to discover the "real" story based on the accounts of all of these different and differing voices. Pardon my usage of concrete ideals that belie their inherent complexity, but the story is not of real importance here. There is a story, that is true, but this story is something that was viewed through the perspectives of many human beings, each with prejudices and motives and other mental biases that warp and twist whatever observations they manage to capture from reality. It is these disconnections between whatever constituted these observations and their final rendition on paper that are of interest. Or, more accurately, just how much havoc these disconnections wreak when one comes in contact with another through that vague film of "reality".
The real chaos provoked by the clashing of abstract interpretations is even more pronounced here, in a book wholly consumed with the idea of "art". What is art? How does one define its many aspects, and more importantly, how does one come to create their own? Should one be prolific in their attempts at this most beautiful of substances, or should one wait until one has enough experience/the right state of mind/the most fruitful life opportunity close at hand?
I do not have an answer for that. But many of the characters in this book do, each as varied and conflicting as their inherent characteristics. One thing they all hold in common, though, is their ability to "clean up" the story in their recounting, shape it to a single theme that guides their individual story to their own satisfactory ends. Seemingly well-constructed interpretations are prolific here, all the more striking when contrasted with the glimpses of the most banal of realities that each writer lets slip in their own fashion.
In my mind the former interpretations, while admittedly much more impressive in terms of thematic power and linguistic expression, would not be nearly so impressive without the latter banalities. Why? Because it is this pervasive contrast between high-flown words of interpretation and the mundane "facts" of what "really happened" that is so fascinating. Especially when each narrator wishes to tell the truth, and many of them wish to do it in a way that they consider "art". Words and reality (physical, mental, sociocultural, political, rational, so many multitudes of -al's swirling about and shifting the story at hand) have equal amounts of power over each other. It only requires a small change in either of them to drastically change the results of their constant war.
One event. Two people see it. Each pens down their own version of what they believe happened. One person reads the writings of the other, and responds with a more "correct" version of the others. One reader reads all of these linguistic exercises and theoretical meanderings. One reader wonders at the discrepancies, the accusations, the drama. One reader wonders.
The term "unreliable narrator" is a popular one in literature. As are "creativity", "art", and "great", words whose definitions are thrown around so quickly that the mind can hardly fix on one before another, more "truthful" one is sailing past. As if truth had anything to do with it.
Let's start with the "unreliable" part of the first term. Unreliable how? What standard of reliability do we actually have at our disposal? The simplest answer is the book itself, an answer that quickly devolves into an inescapable paradox from the purely objective point of view. As a result, one must step back from the lenses of objectivity, and trust in the states of transience that meaning undergoes for each and every occasion.
This book has an unreliable narrator. In fact, it has many, and one would go mad in the attempt to discover the "real" story based on the accounts of all of these different and differing voices. Pardon my usage of concrete ideals that belie their inherent complexity, but the story is not of real importance here. There is a story, that is true, but this story is something that was viewed through the perspectives of many human beings, each with prejudices and motives and other mental biases that warp and twist whatever observations they manage to capture from reality. It is these disconnections between whatever constituted these observations and their final rendition on paper that are of interest. Or, more accurately, just how much havoc these disconnections wreak when one comes in contact with another through that vague film of "reality".
The real chaos provoked by the clashing of abstract interpretations is even more pronounced here, in a book wholly consumed with the idea of "art". What is art? How does one define its many aspects, and more importantly, how does one come to create their own? Should one be prolific in their attempts at this most beautiful of substances, or should one wait until one has enough experience/the right state of mind/the most fruitful life opportunity close at hand?
I do not have an answer for that. But many of the characters in this book do, each as varied and conflicting as their inherent characteristics. One thing they all hold in common, though, is their ability to "clean up" the story in their recounting, shape it to a single theme that guides their individual story to their own satisfactory ends. Seemingly well-constructed interpretations are prolific here, all the more striking when contrasted with the glimpses of the most banal of realities that each writer lets slip in their own fashion.
In my mind the former interpretations, while admittedly much more impressive in terms of thematic power and linguistic expression, would not be nearly so impressive without the latter banalities. Why? Because it is this pervasive contrast between high-flown words of interpretation and the mundane "facts" of what "really happened" that is so fascinating. Especially when each narrator wishes to tell the truth, and many of them wish to do it in a way that they consider "art". Words and reality (physical, mental, sociocultural, political, rational, so many multitudes of -al's swirling about and shifting the story at hand) have equal amounts of power over each other. It only requires a small change in either of them to drastically change the results of their constant war.
One event. Two people see it. Each pens down their own version of what they believe happened. One person reads the writings of the other, and responds with a more "correct" version of the others. One reader reads all of these linguistic exercises and theoretical meanderings. One reader wonders at the discrepancies, the accusations, the drama. One reader wonders.
August 17, 2022
This is an astonishingly written, complex, sad, hilarious, and deeply felt exploration of how difficult it is for human beings to know themselves and understand their actions (and inactions). It’s my first encounter with the prolific Iris Murdoch’s work, and it won’t be my last.
This being a 50-year-old novel about middle class English folks, I had expected it to be stilted, formal, and tame, and it is anything but those things. Somehow, Murdoch burrows deeply into the psyche of her narrator, a 58-year-old aspiring (failed?) writer named Bradley Pearson, and brings him into such vivid life — his obsessions, his neuroses, his passions, his relationship to love and sex — that if I’d read this not knowing it was written by a woman, I would never have imagined that would be possible.
I imagine this novel wouldn’t be for everyone; it’s dense, florid, and at times almost farcical, and Pearson’s narrative voice — while always ringing true to itself — can be almost willfully pretentious. But this novel feels essential to me. It asks incredibly worthy, timeless questions about how we see ourselves, how others see us, whether the motives behind anything we ever do or say can really be known by ourselves or anyone, and whether and how art plays a role in answering those questions. Truly one for the ages.
This being a 50-year-old novel about middle class English folks, I had expected it to be stilted, formal, and tame, and it is anything but those things. Somehow, Murdoch burrows deeply into the psyche of her narrator, a 58-year-old aspiring (failed?) writer named Bradley Pearson, and brings him into such vivid life — his obsessions, his neuroses, his passions, his relationship to love and sex — that if I’d read this not knowing it was written by a woman, I would never have imagined that would be possible.
I imagine this novel wouldn’t be for everyone; it’s dense, florid, and at times almost farcical, and Pearson’s narrative voice — while always ringing true to itself — can be almost willfully pretentious. But this novel feels essential to me. It asks incredibly worthy, timeless questions about how we see ourselves, how others see us, whether the motives behind anything we ever do or say can really be known by ourselves or anyone, and whether and how art plays a role in answering those questions. Truly one for the ages.
March 19, 2022
I enjoyed this very much. It’s definitely peculiar, and can be tedious at times. I personally liked all the inside-a-writer’s-head parts, but they won’t be for everyone, so I definitely wouldn’t recommend it as a first Murdoch. This is my third of hers, and I will now call myself a fan. For years, Fay Weldon was my go-to for reliably strange and captivating stories, and I think I’ll put Murdoch in this category. I don’t pretend to completely understand her philosophies, but I do love reading about them through her entertaining characters.
Murdoch balances the ridiculous with the profound. The multiple narrators in this tale are all wholly unreliable, and the story is farcical--both comic and tragic. If we’re honest, we’ll see parts of ourselves in one or another of this motley crew of characters, and possibly question our own reliability.
There are some wonderful musings
on art:
“Art is a vain and hollow show, a toy of gross illusion, unless it points beyond itself and moves ever whither it points.”
on human nature:
“We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else.”
and on love, when it goes tragically wrong:
“It was like going through a glass and finding oneself inside a picture by Goya.”
Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Children,” perhaps?
“That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad.”
Murdoch balances the ridiculous with the profound. The multiple narrators in this tale are all wholly unreliable, and the story is farcical--both comic and tragic. If we’re honest, we’ll see parts of ourselves in one or another of this motley crew of characters, and possibly question our own reliability.
There are some wonderful musings
on art:
“Art is a vain and hollow show, a toy of gross illusion, unless it points beyond itself and moves ever whither it points.”
on human nature:
“We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else.”
and on love, when it goes tragically wrong:
“It was like going through a glass and finding oneself inside a picture by Goya.”
Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Children,” perhaps?
“That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad.”
March 26, 2012
once again iris murdoch makes my head explode. each time i think i'm in the wrong place when i start: everything seems so conventional and normal, even boring: so british, and calling, and tea cups and all, and then, oh then, it just sort of explodes into sparks of clarity dancing around sordidness combined with philosophy -- its meditations primarily on art, and love. i found several lengthy sections to type out, after the quote below, but cannot now bring myself to do so as the book has exhausted me. it has rung me out but i will not forget it. i do not say i like it, and yet, i cannot say i don't love it. with this, and the unicorn, murdoch has taught me much about suffering, and madness.
a quote from the narrator, which perhaps gives credence to those that align bradley pearson with humbert humbert in their minds.
"I felt that I was, at every instant, creating Julian and supporting her being with my own. At the same time I saw her too in every way as I had seen her before. I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say love is blind. I could even judge her, I could even condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer. But this was still the stuff of paradise because I was a god and I was involved with her in some eternal activity of making to be which was of sole and absolute value. and with her the world was made, nothing was lost, not a grain of sand nor a speck of dust since she was the world and I touched her everywhere."
a quote from the narrator, which perhaps gives credence to those that align bradley pearson with humbert humbert in their minds.
"I felt that I was, at every instant, creating Julian and supporting her being with my own. At the same time I saw her too in every way as I had seen her before. I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say love is blind. I could even judge her, I could even condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer. But this was still the stuff of paradise because I was a god and I was involved with her in some eternal activity of making to be which was of sole and absolute value. and with her the world was made, nothing was lost, not a grain of sand nor a speck of dust since she was the world and I touched her everywhere."
September 1, 2022
What a beautifully flawed, genuine, keenly observed, and wonderfully human collection of neuroses. Cunningly framed, and revealed in a captivatingly uninterrupted stream of thoughts and undictated conversations. Heartfelt soul-searching, and unexpectedly incidental hilarity.
Stunningly real, and realistically absurd character portrayal.
This was my first from Murdoch, and it will absolutely not be the last; thrilled to have encountered such a confident wordsmith.
_____
The reading updates.
Stunningly real, and realistically absurd character portrayal.
This was my first from Murdoch, and it will absolutely not be the last; thrilled to have encountered such a confident wordsmith.
_____
The reading updates.
November 28, 2025
Hands down, one of the best books I've read this year. ~ which shocks me, since I never imagined myself singing the praises of Iris Murdoch. Until picking this novel up, I hadn't thought of her for quite a long time.
Years ago, I did try both 'A Severed Head' and 'The Bell' but made little progress with either; they weren't pulling me in. I only tried because of one of my close friends. This was someone who was an English lit major who proclaimed "I hate all novels! (!) - except the ones by Iris Murdoch."
Recently, in a number of places, I had seen 'The Black Prince' referred to as Murdoch's best book, or one of her best. So I made another attempt - and was soon hooked.
~ mainly because it was soon apparent that Bradley Pearson, the protagonist and narrator, was asking for empathy. So I gave it to him. Not that recognition was a large part of that: I didn't necessarily relate to him - but later, in parts, I did. (And I'm not even heterosexual.)
For some reason, it had been in my mind that a Murdoch experience was, overall, heavy-going. 'The Black Prince' began to dispel that, alerting me that I was... essentially... reading a comedy.:
I feel fortunate to have found 'a way in' to Murdoch. With this read, she did have me turning this way and that - not unlike being in a courtroom - all in the cause (to the extent that it's possible) of demystifying the human condition.
Years ago, I did try both 'A Severed Head' and 'The Bell' but made little progress with either; they weren't pulling me in. I only tried because of one of my close friends. This was someone who was an English lit major who proclaimed "I hate all novels! (!) - except the ones by Iris Murdoch."
Recently, in a number of places, I had seen 'The Black Prince' referred to as Murdoch's best book, or one of her best. So I made another attempt - and was soon hooked.
~ mainly because it was soon apparent that Bradley Pearson, the protagonist and narrator, was asking for empathy. So I gave it to him. Not that recognition was a large part of that: I didn't necessarily relate to him - but later, in parts, I did. (And I'm not even heterosexual.)
For some reason, it had been in my mind that a Murdoch experience was, overall, heavy-going. 'The Black Prince' began to dispel that, alerting me that I was... essentially... reading a comedy.:
Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep.At the same time, I was aware that this was comedy wrapped around more serious matters.:
The human soul is not framed for constant proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement. There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.Aside from one rather loopy depiction of a gay man (who becomes more so in one of the epilogues; more on those later), Murdoch stages her take on the 'war' between men and women, esp. the ones who tend to over-think.:
Why did women have to make things so definite? Why could she not have let our strange experience drift in a pleasant vagueness?Although it's hard to say for sure, the author seems to have less sympathy for women, finding them crafty without the sturdiness of successful craft.:
"... Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there."For the most part, these characters come off as pathetic, as though they had designed and firmly embraced their own undoing. For all of the thinking they do, they don't give much thought to workable options. Murdoch suggests that doing so can be close to impossible.:
In fact the problem remains unclarified because no philosopher and hardly any novelist has ever managed to explain what that weird stuff, human consciousness, is really made of.As well, the impasse can seem more pleasurable than the step forward.:
One tends to live at a sort of level of anxiety and resentment where one's protecting oneself all the time.Iris sprinkles her merry-go-round of farce-like, madcap misadventures with potent philosophical passages that are not as daunting as they might at first seem. And a large number of them hit with lightning insight.:
When we try, especially in times of pain and crisis, to penetrate the mystery of another mind, we are inclined to picture it as being, not a shadowy mass of contradictions like our own, but a casket containing entities which are clear-cut and definite but hidden.Some of them read like wise words in 'Affairs of the Heart for Dummies':
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular one and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.There's a lot of uncalled-for pain here - yet Murdoch reiterates that you sometimes need to use a laugh to keep pain at bay.:
"Yes. Happiness must exist. It can't all be made of pain. But what is happiness made of? ... What's the worst image of suffering you can think of?"'The Black Prince' ends triumphantly with a short series of statements made by key characters in the 'novel' who have read Bradley's side of the story. The last one could not be more perfect. It puts the entire book in its proper perspective - but, of course, you have to read the book to get there.
"A concentration camp."
"Yes. I'll meditate on that. Good night."
I feel fortunate to have found 'a way in' to Murdoch. With this read, she did have me turning this way and that - not unlike being in a courtroom - all in the cause (to the extent that it's possible) of demystifying the human condition.
August 1, 2019
Murdoch’u Sera’dan görüp listeme eklemiş, sanıyorum büyük bir idefix indirimiyle almıştım. O zamanlar hala blog yazıyordum, antik çağlardan bahsediyoruz yani :) Editör önsözünden sonra okumayı bırakmışım, o birkaç sayfada da birkaç yere işaret koymuşum, büyük ihtimalle daha geniş bir zamanda okumayı planlamışımdır. Neyse, Murdoch’ın dolmakalemli fotoğrafı sonra Jale Özata Dirlikyapan’ın twiti ile yeniden elime aldım birkaç gün önce. Okurken zorlanmadığımı söyleyemeyeceğim. Sanırım Geçtan’dı, yüzleşmeye hazır olduklarımız önümüze geldiğinde kitaplar sadece zihnimizi çalıştırmakla kalmaz, bunun yanında bir değişiklik yaratabilir, diyen (birebir değil, aklımda kalan). Yüzleşmeye hazır olduklarımla nispeten boş yaz günlerim birleşince (itiraf ediyorum, bayram temizliği vaktinden çaldım) nihayet Murdoch’u okuyabildim. Durarak, düşünerek, yavaşça. Şimdi iyi ki o zamanlar okumamışım diyorum. Aşkla, sanatla ve hayatla hesaplaşmasındaki çoğu noktayı büyük ihtimalle anlamazdım. Sıra Yourcenar’da.
May 2, 2010
Assuming that The Black Prince is a fair representation of Iris Murdoch's work, I think its unlikely I'll read any more of her books.
That's not to say she's a poor author, nor is it to suggest I didn't like The Black Prince. She is a fine author, and I liked The Black Prince well enough. But my experience with this book and what that means to my future engagement with Murdoch's novels is a bit like my experience with swimming laps in the local pool without a loftier purpose: neither is worth the effort.
I love swimming. I really do. And I like how I feel after I've gotten back into the routine of swimming. But I have to make time, get ready, get to the pool, put in the effort to swim those laps, stress out my lungs, feel the ache in my muscles the next day, and work on staying motivated despite my enjoyment. Yet I get just as much enjoyment out of sitting on my sofa watching a rerun of Match Game, which takes no effort at all, and much more enjoyment out of swimming, biking and running with a sprint triathlon as the end goal -- more effort, but it's effort well spent.
If Match Game is the literary equivalent of a fun Terry Pratchett novel and triathlon training is the equivalent of Ulysses, I'll always avoid the middle ground that The Black Prince fills. It's good, but the effort really isn't worth the payoff.
If I am wrong, however, and Murdoch's other books are worth the effort, I would love to hear a convincing argument and some recommendations because, if nothing else, this book shows that she is a good author.
That's not to say she's a poor author, nor is it to suggest I didn't like The Black Prince. She is a fine author, and I liked The Black Prince well enough. But my experience with this book and what that means to my future engagement with Murdoch's novels is a bit like my experience with swimming laps in the local pool without a loftier purpose: neither is worth the effort.
I love swimming. I really do. And I like how I feel after I've gotten back into the routine of swimming. But I have to make time, get ready, get to the pool, put in the effort to swim those laps, stress out my lungs, feel the ache in my muscles the next day, and work on staying motivated despite my enjoyment. Yet I get just as much enjoyment out of sitting on my sofa watching a rerun of Match Game, which takes no effort at all, and much more enjoyment out of swimming, biking and running with a sprint triathlon as the end goal -- more effort, but it's effort well spent.
If Match Game is the literary equivalent of a fun Terry Pratchett novel and triathlon training is the equivalent of Ulysses, I'll always avoid the middle ground that The Black Prince fills. It's good, but the effort really isn't worth the payoff.
If I am wrong, however, and Murdoch's other books are worth the effort, I would love to hear a convincing argument and some recommendations because, if nothing else, this book shows that she is a good author.
February 10, 2009
Granted, I did not pick this book, but I did blindly and eagerly consent based on the fact that I had heard of Murdoch's work and as a result of my experience with other British/Irish women novelists being so rich and rewarding, assumed I would love it. Oh, folly! Iris Murdoch is a philosopher (and a lover of Sartre, worst offender of all, if you ask me), and I generally make it a rule never to read the novels of philosophers because they know shit about character development and even less about plot. Now, mind, as a lover of Joyce and Woolf, I can worship and venerate a plotless novel like it's my job (which it kind of is) as long as there is some lyricism and some wordplay. Not so The Black Prince . Now, all the faux editorial prefaces and postscripts would suggest that I am supposed to hate Bradley and feel that the narrative has no centre. But I hated everyone from the vacillating, talentless Baffins to whining homosexual stereotype Francis Marloe. It's 1973: take a Valium, see a therapist. As such, I resented the hell out of this novel: its endless pontificating on art and existentialism, its mangling of Shakespeare and Dante, its endless reliance on Freudian paradigms only to ridicule them ex-post-facto. I don't see how creating a cast of miserable, despondent, self-obsessed people merits a Booker Prize. I learned nothing from this book and will never read her again. It could've done with a lot more preface/postscipts and a lot less novel. Bottom line: lame.
April 25, 2017
Hilarious, stylish, and profound--what more do you want out of a novel? A master class in unreliable narration.
November 17, 2010
As usual, I just can't remember a thing that happened, at least to the extent of assigning it to this rather than some other Iris Murdoch novel. Probably an insane billionaire has a scheme to destroy the world and 007 needs to infiltrate his shadowy organisation, having sex with several hot women en route and finally defusing the atomic weapon when there are only seconds left on the clock.
Wait. That was the other series, wasn't it? In that case, pretty much the same, but take out the atomic weapon and the billionaire and add some Wittgenstein.
Wait. That was the other series, wasn't it? In that case, pretty much the same, but take out the atomic weapon and the billionaire and add some Wittgenstein.
Read
February 28, 2022On the very last pages, my entire view of the novel changed and I immediately wanted to reread it.
December 29, 2022
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2022...
"El arte dice la única verdad que en definitiva importa. Es la luz por la cual las cosas humanas pueden ser enmendadas. Y más allá del arte no hay, se lo aseguro a ustedes, nada."
Este es el cuarto libro que leo de Iris Murdoch y exceptuando "El Unicornio", que es una rareza, los demás que han caído en mis manos, incluyendo El Príncipe Negro, tienen en común que son mucho más complejos de lo que parecen a simple vista en el sentido de que Iris Murdoch establece una especie de juego o divertimento, no sé si con ella misma o dirigido al lector, profundizando continuamente en el registro de sus personajes. Por ejemplo, en esta novela que nos ocupa, narrada en primera persona, a la larga vamos descubriendo que su protagonista, Bradley, es un narrador que no resulta para nada de fiar, su percepción de lo que nos va contando por muy seguro que se muestre, llegado un punto nos hace desconfiar de que sea veraz. Teniendo en cuenta que la mayor parte de la novela está narrada en primera persona, solo tendremos la perspectiva de Bradley y aunque nos vaya creando alguna duda o desconfianza, es tanta la información que nos va relatando, tan intensas sus reflexiones y cómo ve al resto de los personajes, que apenas seremos conscientes de que esa perspectiva tan cerrada pudiera ser producto de sus fantasías. La narración en primera persona por Bradley formará parte de la estructura fundamental de la novela, luego tendremos una serie de epílogos narrados por otros personajes, que ampliará nuestra perspectiva de la historia tanto que llegaremos a dudar de ese relato en primera persona de parte de Bradley, pero llegado un punto también desconfiaremos de estos nuevos puntos de vista…, hay tantos giros, tanta fragmentación, tantos intereses ocultos por parte de estos personajes, que el lector se preguntará donde está la verdad de lo que ha leído.
"Pero existe una hostilidad natural, tribal, entre las personas casadas y las solteras. No soporto las exhibiciones, a menudo instintivas, que hacen las personas casadas a fin de insinuar no solo que son más afortunadas, sino en cierto aspecto más morales que tú."
El Príncipe negro está dividida en dos partes con un ritmo bastante diferenciado entre la primera y la seguna parte.
En la primera parte y como es ya normal en las novelas de Doña Iris, se nos presentan varios personajes que van entrando y saliendo de escena, en un único escenario o dos. Bradley Pearson que ha sido Inspector de Impuestos y está retirado, se considera un escritor mayúsculo obsesionado por retirarse al campo y escribir su obra maestra. Sin embargo desde el momento en que comenzamos la novela, todas las excusas serán válidas para retrasar esa salida al campo y entretenerse en cuestiones domésticas... Por una parte, Arnold Baffin escritor de éxito, su protegido, reclama su atención continuamente. Rachel, la esposa de Arnold, también reclama continuamente la atención de Bradley y le hace ver que se siente atraída por él. Entra también en escena Christian, la ex mujer de Brad de la que huye continuamente, también Frances, su cuñado y finalmente Julian, la hija veinteañera de Arnold y Rachel. Cinco o seis personajes entre los que parece que no ocurre nada, con una trama ausente y sin embargo, personajes, giros, conversaciones y cartas. Bradley se pasa esta primera parte huyendo de algunos personajes y encontrándose con otros; es egocéntrico, algo pedante y en ningún momento parece que se interese por nadie más que por sí mismo.
”Pero no hay lenguaje con el que expresar la verdad sobre nosotros, Julian."
- En la segunda parte hay ya un cambio de ritmo y casi de escenario. Bradley se enamora y eso le hace suavizarse y crear una empatía hacia los demás que hasta ahora había brillado por su ausencia. Una historia de amor que pasará por todas las etapas por los que puede pasar el amor a la velocidad de la luz. Se podría decir que llegado a este punto, Iris Murdoch ha encontrado la gran temática en torno a la cual girará la novela: el amor en todo el sentido de la palabra.
"-El amor es una suerte de certeza, acaso la única
- Es un estado de ánimo."
El Príncipe Negro es una novela extraña porque el lector va pisando continuamente terreno inseguro. Cuando en un principio parecía ser una novela satírica en torno a los conceptos de arte donde la Murdoch establece la diferencia entre el arte más comercial reflejado en Arnold frente a literatura más pura dura que viene de parte Bradley (aunque en ningún momento veamos a Brad escribiendo ni siquiera sabremos qué libros ha escrito) poco a poco se va convirtiendo en otra cosa y de repente se convierte en una novela romántica en torno al concepto del amor y de sus registros que van desde el amor ideal pasando por los celos y la desconfianza y el abandono.
"Quizá el mundo pueda ser fundamentalmente descrito como un lugar de sufrimiento. El hombre es un animal que sufre, sujeto a persistente angustia, dolor y temor, sujeto a la regla de lo que los budistas llaman dukha, la infinita e insatisfecha ansiedad de un ser que desea apasionadamente bienes ilusorios. Todos sufrimos, pero sufrimos de manera distinta."
Los personajes de Iris Murdoch no dejan de ser caricaturas y no deja títere con cabeza en ese aspecto, creo que no se salva ninguno en el retrato que hace de ellos. Iris Murdoch por otra parte construye una novela cuyo eje central será Hamlet en el sentido de que las pistas y la simbología que pueden dar algo de luz a estos giros continuos, provendrán precisamene de ahí en su reflexión de la homosexualidad, el arte y el amor. Y a pesar del sentido del humor, del ritmo, de los giros continuos, de los enredos que pudiera parecer que estamos dentro de un vaudeville, nada más lejos: la prosa de Iris Murdoch es el punto clave que marcará el ritmo fluido a través de una simbología siempre presente ya sean las marcadas por unas botas púrpuras o por una estatua de bronce.
"Soy, lo confieso, un escritor de cartas obsesivo y supersticioso. Cuando me siento preocupado prefiero escribir una larga misiva que hacer una llamada telefónica. Tal vez ello se deba a que atribuyo un poder mágico a las cartas. Expresar algo por carta, pienso a menudo de modo irracional, equivale a hacerlo realidad."
[...]
"Una carta es una barrera, una remisión, un sortilegio contra el mundo, un método casi infalible de actuar a distancia. Es una manera de pedir al tiempo que se detenga."
[...]
"Qué peligrosos instrumentos son las cartas. Una carta puede ser infinitamente releida y reinterpretada, estimula la imaginación y la fantasía, persiste, es un testimonio candente."
Y quizás uno de los puntos clave de esta novela se revele en la simbología de las cartas. En muchos momentos, sus personajes se comunican a través de cartas y puede que sea el único momento durante la novela, en que se expresen con sinceridad, sin subterfugios, usando estas epístolas como el único momento en que se desnuden para revelar ciertos secretos, ciertos secretos que se ven incapaces de desvelar a la luz del día. En definitiva, una novela magnífica de una autora que puede absorber mucho, Doña Iris es intensa como ella sola. Sus personajes pueden resultar caricaturescos e hipermegaexagerados en su comportamiento pero no dejan de ser una herramienta necesaria a través de los cuales la autora reflexione sobre sus cuestiones filsóficas de siempre, sobre el arte sobre todo y en este caso concreto, sobre el amor. Al concluir una novela de Iris Murdoch siempre me pregunto si esta mujer, que tantas páginas le dedica al amor en todas sus fases, realmente creía en él o era una gran cínica que abjuraba de él. Sigo sin encontrar la respuesta tras la cuarta de sus novelas leída, pero seguiré leyéndola por si en algún momento Iris Murdoch me lo desvela.
"Es un hecho extraño que las barreras que preservan los grados de intimidad son inmensamente resistentes y, sin embargo, pueden ser vencidas por el más leve roce. El mundo puede cambiar para siempre con solo tomarle a alguien la mano de una determinada manera, con solo mirarle a los ojos de una determinada manera. "
March 25, 2023
Murdock's Black Prince
"The Black Prince" is a thoughtful, difficult novel that explores the ambiguities of human character and the complex relationship between art and passion. Dame Iris Murdoch (1919 --1999) was both a philosopher and a prolific novelist. She wrote "The Black Prince" in 1973. A subsequent novel, "The Sea, The Sea" received the Booker Prize.
The book revolves around several complex characters. The hero is an author, and retired tax inspector, Bradley Pearson, age 58 at the time most of the action of the book takes place. He has published only sparingly but prides himself as a serious author. Most of the story is told by Bradley.
Bradley has long been divorced, but his ex-wife Christian is a major character in the book, as she reenters Bradley's life after the death of her second husband. Christian's brother, Francis Marloe, is a failed physician who offers advice and assistance, of a mixed quality, to Bradley during the story. Bradley is a long-term friend of the Baffin family, which includes Arnold, a highly successful writer of fiction, his wife Rachael, and their 20-year old daughter Julian. The story revolves around the 58-year old Bradley's love and passion for the 20-year old Julian. As the story unfolds Bradley's sister, Pricilla, is leaving her husband and comes to Bradley for emotional support and assistance. Bradley is put to the test about how he will respond to his sister.
The other major character in Murdoch's novel is an editor, "P.A. Loxias', who becomes Bradley's friend and the editor of Bradley's manuscript that Bradley wrote recounting his love affair with young Julian. The manuscript forms the body of the book. Bradley wrote the book after the fact, while in prison for a crime he did not commit. Loxias both introduces and closes the book, while Christian, Rachael, and Julian get brief opportunities to write for themselves and to comment upon Bradley's manuscript. This "Penguin Classics" reprint of the book also includes an introduction by the noted philosopher Martha Nussbaum which is unusually detailed and, perhaps, could be read as yet another editorial comment on Bradley's story that might well have been part of Murdoch's text.
The story is full of ambiguity, vacillation in its characters, and violence and thus is almost a retelling of Hamlet -- Shakespeare's play that figures prominently in this book. Another main influence on the book is Plato, particularly his great dialogue "Phaedrus" which explores the relationship between art, erotic love, and rhetoric, as this novel does as well. It is always good to be reminded of and to think about Plato. A third, less obvious influence, I think is Buddhism. The influence of Buddhist thought on Murdoch is explicit in her novel "The Sea, The Sea" but it is here as well. The book can almost be read as an illustration of the three basic traits of existence as developed in Buddhist thought: suffering (dukka), change, and egolessness. Bradley and the other characters struggle to see the world and other people clearly but are prevented from doing so by their own passions and self-concepts.
Bradley achieves a Buddhist-like detachment near the end as he reflects upon his experiences.
In reading the book, I found it helpful to distinguish clearly between the body of the story that Bradley recounts and the time that he wrote it, some years afterwards, while left alone with himself to reflect. Bradley was swept with passion for a relationship that could not have lasted, that he did not fully understand, and that lead to tragedy for many people. Yet this passion helped him, in the final analysis, attain a degree of peace and understanding. He was able to tell the truth in writing his story and to present himself, terrible warts and all. Love lead to great human sorrow for Bradly, but it also lead to his ability to present his experience in the form of art and to reflect upon it dispassionately.
Portions of this book are rather wordy and inner directed. It needs to be read carefully. But I found it an inspiring treatment of the nature of human erotic passion and its force for life. The book will appeal to readers willing to reflect and to explore themselves.
Robin Friedman
"The Black Prince" is a thoughtful, difficult novel that explores the ambiguities of human character and the complex relationship between art and passion. Dame Iris Murdoch (1919 --1999) was both a philosopher and a prolific novelist. She wrote "The Black Prince" in 1973. A subsequent novel, "The Sea, The Sea" received the Booker Prize.
The book revolves around several complex characters. The hero is an author, and retired tax inspector, Bradley Pearson, age 58 at the time most of the action of the book takes place. He has published only sparingly but prides himself as a serious author. Most of the story is told by Bradley.
Bradley has long been divorced, but his ex-wife Christian is a major character in the book, as she reenters Bradley's life after the death of her second husband. Christian's brother, Francis Marloe, is a failed physician who offers advice and assistance, of a mixed quality, to Bradley during the story. Bradley is a long-term friend of the Baffin family, which includes Arnold, a highly successful writer of fiction, his wife Rachael, and their 20-year old daughter Julian. The story revolves around the 58-year old Bradley's love and passion for the 20-year old Julian. As the story unfolds Bradley's sister, Pricilla, is leaving her husband and comes to Bradley for emotional support and assistance. Bradley is put to the test about how he will respond to his sister.
The other major character in Murdoch's novel is an editor, "P.A. Loxias', who becomes Bradley's friend and the editor of Bradley's manuscript that Bradley wrote recounting his love affair with young Julian. The manuscript forms the body of the book. Bradley wrote the book after the fact, while in prison for a crime he did not commit. Loxias both introduces and closes the book, while Christian, Rachael, and Julian get brief opportunities to write for themselves and to comment upon Bradley's manuscript. This "Penguin Classics" reprint of the book also includes an introduction by the noted philosopher Martha Nussbaum which is unusually detailed and, perhaps, could be read as yet another editorial comment on Bradley's story that might well have been part of Murdoch's text.
The story is full of ambiguity, vacillation in its characters, and violence and thus is almost a retelling of Hamlet -- Shakespeare's play that figures prominently in this book. Another main influence on the book is Plato, particularly his great dialogue "Phaedrus" which explores the relationship between art, erotic love, and rhetoric, as this novel does as well. It is always good to be reminded of and to think about Plato. A third, less obvious influence, I think is Buddhism. The influence of Buddhist thought on Murdoch is explicit in her novel "The Sea, The Sea" but it is here as well. The book can almost be read as an illustration of the three basic traits of existence as developed in Buddhist thought: suffering (dukka), change, and egolessness. Bradley and the other characters struggle to see the world and other people clearly but are prevented from doing so by their own passions and self-concepts.
Bradley achieves a Buddhist-like detachment near the end as he reflects upon his experiences.
In reading the book, I found it helpful to distinguish clearly between the body of the story that Bradley recounts and the time that he wrote it, some years afterwards, while left alone with himself to reflect. Bradley was swept with passion for a relationship that could not have lasted, that he did not fully understand, and that lead to tragedy for many people. Yet this passion helped him, in the final analysis, attain a degree of peace and understanding. He was able to tell the truth in writing his story and to present himself, terrible warts and all. Love lead to great human sorrow for Bradly, but it also lead to his ability to present his experience in the form of art and to reflect upon it dispassionately.
Portions of this book are rather wordy and inner directed. It needs to be read carefully. But I found it an inspiring treatment of the nature of human erotic passion and its force for life. The book will appeal to readers willing to reflect and to explore themselves.
Robin Friedman
April 11, 2025
Высококлассная ебанина (в хорошем смысле), Миранда Джулай пятьдесят лет назад — для дядечек, интеллектуалов и сочувствующих. Отлично на многих уровнях, а также такой кринж, что аж завидно, как у Мердок так получилось.
June 15, 2025
Have you ever kicked a boiled egg off its cup? When I saw that egg flying through the air I felt somehow that's exactly how things are at the moment, only it wasn't funny at all.
That image sums up The Black Prince, which, like all of Murdoch's novels, features an interconnected web of people making a mess of things. The novel's narrator, Bradley Pearson, is a 58-year-old man who becomes infatuated with a 20-year-old woman, makes a lot of truly terrible decisions, then writes a book about the whole thing. It's obvious from the start that Bradley's narrative is not to be trusted, his high-flown prose at odds with his behavior, which is an unpleasant mix of passivity and selfishness. The experience of the book is basically like watching that egg fly through the air in slow motion, waiting for the disaster when it lands.
(Only it is a little bit funny, and Murdoch has a way with a good comic sentence: "Selection of a place to be sick is always a matter of great personal importance and can add an extra tormenting dimension to the graceless horror of vomiting.")
This is also Murdoch's most metafictional novel that I've read so far. It's explicitly constructed as a narrative written by the main character, with a foreword by the editor, and four postscript responses to the text written by other characters. It's also kind of a collage of elements from Hamlet, about which Bradley spouts off a bunch of pseudo-academic nonsense. Later on, he takes it back and makes a better statement: "No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he's so divine, but because he's so human. Even great art is a jumble in the end."
January 14, 2025
1,5 'Thank God it's the end' stars
Maybe this is a little harsh rating considering that the writing style of this book is rather good. Actually, the last two pages almost convinced me to round it up but then I remembered the other 500 pages and stuck with my first decision.
The Black Prince is my first (and probably only) book by this author but I can clearly say that Iris Murdoch was a phenomenal writer. Sadly, all the characters in the story were so repulsive that the whole time I was reading the book my only thought was "Can you all please just die already so that this will be over."
I'm sure there is some unwritten rule which prohibits literary comparativists to hate classic literature but I'm gonna break this rule now. I hated the book. Simple as that.
Maybe this is a little harsh rating considering that the writing style of this book is rather good. Actually, the last two pages almost convinced me to round it up but then I remembered the other 500 pages and stuck with my first decision.
The Black Prince is my first (and probably only) book by this author but I can clearly say that Iris Murdoch was a phenomenal writer. Sadly, all the characters in the story were so repulsive that the whole time I was reading the book my only thought was "Can you all please just die already so that this will be over."
I'm sure there is some unwritten rule which prohibits literary comparativists to hate classic literature but I'm gonna break this rule now. I hated the book. Simple as that.
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