The Message to the Planet

by Iris Murdoch

For years, Alfred Ludens has pursued mathematician and philosopher Marcus Vallar in the belief that he possesses a profound metaphysical formula, a missing link of great significance to mankind.

Luden's friends are more sceptical. Jack Sheerwater, painter, thinks Marcus is crazy. Gildas herne, ex-preist, thinks he is evil. Patrick Fenman, poet, is dying because he thinks Marcus has cursed him. Marcus has disappeared and must be found.

But is he a genius, a hero struggling at the bounds of human knowledge? Is he seeking God, or is he just another victim of the Holocaust, which casts its shadow upon him and upon Ludens, both of them Jewish?

Can human thinking discover the foundations of human consciousness?

Iris Murdoch's endlessly inventive imagination has touched a fundamental question of our time.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, British Literature, Classics, 20th Century, Philosophy

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Dame 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...

Reviews

[Colin Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting to read at least one reviewer cautions against reading this as a ‘first’ Murdoch and another celebrates it as a much-loved satisfying ‘first’ Murdoch.
What do I think? Like typical Murdoch protagonists I’m indecisive and all over the place, constantly questioning what I think about it all, about the fuss, the theatre, coincidences, awkwardness, philosophy, strange happenings and so-called intelligent people doing silly things, all the while thinking this is another amazing, unfathomable Murdoch achievement.
Does such gibberish make you feel like shaking my shoulders and telling me to get a grip, a dose of objectivity and write a logical review?
Well, that’s just how I felt about most of the characters in this novel - shake them, tell them to behave, tell them to stop constantly self-reflecting and moaning. Talk about making mountains out of molehills…
Dame Iris Murdoch, I’ve said it before: You are simply brilliant.

[Dr. Cat in the Brain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I read Iris Murdoch I feel out of my league.

Normally I can waddle through simple philosophy and artistic theory and moderate scientific musings and appear relatively competent. Not entirely moronic. But against Murdoch I am slaughtered at the knees. I am cut down with a hatchet. I am unworthy, repellent, amateur. Her writing makes me feel like the world should open up and swallow me whole. No ketchup. No vinegar. No mayo. I will disappear into the pitiless gullet of time, raw and undigested.

So yes. I love her books.

And Message to the Planet is a personal favourite.

The Message to the Planet deals with Alfred Ludens, a history professor who goes on a quest to seek out his former mentor Marcus Vallar. Marcus was a boy genius turned mathematician, and then painter and now recluse. Ludens is seeking Vallar so that Marcus can somehow help Ludens' other friend Patrick, who is dying of a mysterious wasting illness. Ludens suspects that Patrick's illness may be psychosomatic and connected to some past meeting with Vallar.

Ludens also seeks out Vallar because of a deep, self-aggrandising desire to help ignite Vallar's potential and inspire this reclusive genius to finally create a great work. This obsession brings Ludens into a relationship with Vallar and his daughter Irina where he faces romance, scepticism and jealousy.

Things escalate a bit as Patrick is healed, Vallar is put in a mental hospital and his so-called miracle begins to attract a horde of new age worshippers.

Meanwhile Ludens' best friend, a charismatic painter named Jack is pushing his wife Franca into a poly amorous relationship that heavily focuses on Jack's personal desires and feelings at the expense of everybody around him. Franca acts as the agreeable and loving partner as she secretly grows to loath Jack, while Jack's second girlfriend Alison feels guilt and anger towards Franca's pain and Franca's inability to face it.

All of this is linked together by thought-provoking philosophical discussions of suffering, spirituality, language, evil and existence.

The relationship between Jack, Franca and Alison acts as a mirror reflecting the relationship between Marcus, Ludens and Irina. A circle of emotional abuse. Where our expectations of other people (and of ourselves) can be as harmful as any cruel hand. These two relationships are then used as a way to reflect human suffering itself. As a microcosm for the larger historic acts of horror. A universal language of pain. Where abusive and controlling powers use our consent and our love and our expectations as a weapon to push us to agreeably stay in situations that are obviously harmful. Where great cruelty can be found in the promise of normalcy and retaining a status quo.

This is demonstrated and discussed in the book on a personal, societal and even universal level. Where it is suggested that the more intelligent one becomes (both individually and as a species), the more one realises that thinking itself is a catalyst leading to inevitable harm. That the more you see, the more you will be hurt. That every expectation we create, every probability we prepare for (which is the cornerstone of our survival and evolution), can easily metastasise like a deadly cancer. Important ideas and hopeful ambitions and dreams of love turning malignant into crippling anxiety, guilt and greed. Spreading through us, eating us from the inside out.

It's a jaw-dropping, powerful piece of writing and if this was Murdoch's only success in The Message to the Planet, it would be a phenomenal work.

But. It's barely the tip. It's the window-dressing.

In The Message to the Planet, Iris Murdoch creates a balance between a rich development of colourful characters and thought-provoking high concepts.

Every single character in this book is multiple characters. They exist in how others see them, how they see themselves, who they really are and who they want to be deep down. This is normal for great writers. What isn't normal is how Murdoch shapes this dynamic into multiple layered interpersonal conflicts and chemistry. Each character is as much in conflict with their perspective of themselves (and their expectations of themselves) as they are with others. Irina (who is the best character in the book) draws deliberate attention to this fact when talking to Ludens about his relationship to her father and how her father acts differently around him. She then puts the hammer to the nail on this point in the finale with her own poetic revelation for the protagonist. This defines Murdoch's whole argument about the nature of expectation, intelligence and suffering.

When you read Message to the Planet, it feels simple, dreamy, almost breezy. It's when you sit down to think about the story, that it starts to expand. That's when the labyrinthine choreography in plot and characterisation becomes evident. Add on the colossal ideas floating behind each scene like great dark thunder clouds and the story's dynamics become even more mountainous.

The Message to the Planet is like a huge mathematical equation that also works as a plot. It stretches out in the mind. It is both personal and planetary.

There is also the undeniable mythic imagery in the book that adds a strange universal element. The quest to heal a sick friend, the lady in the lake, talk of fairies and powers and ancient stones that look like they have faces. Forbidden romance. A prophecy of three women, two lovers and one witch. Like the triumvirate goddesses of magic. Like Hecate or The Morrígan. The impossible grail of the "important book" that must be written. Romance and loyalty betrayed. Friends thought gallant and wise exposed. All connected with hidden motivations and plots within plots. It's pure Shakespearean romance. Pure Arthurian mythos dressed in every day clothes. It's one of the greatest fantasies ever written and it has almost no real fantasy in it. I could write an entire book about just this imagery and its connections to the plot.

And then you have the prose.

If Murdoch's broad strokes are impressive, her subtle skill at pacing and wordplay is ingenious. Her playful, almost mischievous writing style invites introspection and laughter. She wants you to linger over turns of phrase. She lets the reader swim in easy, sweet and sometimes hilariously frustrating dialog. Stephen King once said the road to hell is paved in adverbs but Murdoch uses them like poetry. She barrages the reader with redundancy only to suddenly jab the audience with a whip-smart quip that leaves them spinning like a cartoon deer on a lake of ice. She does this until the reader is exhausted. She challenges us. She conditions us. She pushes the reader and wears them out. Like a good coach testing your limits and increasing the difficulty gradually until finally getting you to a more advanced stage. So by the time she takes you into the truly deep waters you can hopefully stay afloat, if not at least dog paddle to shore while swallowing dense gasps about the holocaust, survivor's guilt and the axiomatic dilemma of great thought and great suffering.

Iris Murdoch weaves together myth and romance and philosophy and poetic dialog in a way no other writer has since Shakespeare. She sees romance not just as a means to the "Happily Ever After". Not just the simplistic idea of people meeting and belonging together. She sees relationships as a quest, as a platform for a great philosophical journey. She sees a mosaic of moral, spiritual and societal threads within sex, broken hearts, friendship and jealousy. She writes ideas that are bigger than any novel.

She is wonderfully, frustratingly, out of my league.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't resist going back to Iris Murdoch for my final book of 2020, and I have to admit that finishing a book this long in three days was more of a challenge than I anticipated, largely because of the density of the text and the amount of philosophical discussion.

There is still plenty of Murdoch's characteristic character building. For me the main character Albert Ludens (who prefers to be known by his surname) is the least interesting, but it is his story through the more charismatic characters are introduced. The most significant is Marcus Vallans, whose past include a great discovery as a young mathematician and a painting phase which was well received. Vallans now leads a reclusive life with his daughter Irina. Ludens believes him to be on the verge of a great discovery and feels it is his duty to facilitate its emergence. Some of his friends believe that Marcus is mad, and one of them, Patrick, is on his death bed with a mysterious illness he attributes to Marcus's curse. Ludens uses Patrick as an excuse to track Marcus down to a cottage on the Essex estate of a largely absent lord, and persuades him to see Patrick, who he succeeds in reviving in circumstances that appear miraculous. Irina then arranges for Marcus to move to another rural cottage, which is attached to an expensive mental institution, and the bulk of the book is set there.

Ludens and Patrick's friends include Jack, a painter who wants his wife Franca and mistress Alison to support his idea of living openly in menage a trois, and their machinations are in some ways more interesting than the main story.

This is another fine book, but perhaps not the best place to start for anyone new to Murdoch's writing.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

“Of course we have to deal with two madmen now, not with one.”
“You mean Marcus is mad too?”
“No, he means Patrick is mad too.”

An intriguing beginning to another hefty novel from Iris Murdoch, a novel which although it does contain much that is intriguing and brilliant is one where on a few occasions I could have wished it to be shorter. The story of Alfred Ludens and his obsession with Marcus, a genius whose path is the center of the book is compelling up to a point but the interminable discussions of ‘ideas’ that take place did try my patience, or at least my understanding. At the same time, there are numerous captivating characters who I would have liked to have heard far more from, many of whom are also friends of Ludens and Marcus. Franca in particular and her frustrating relationship with Jack her husband, a famous painter who is a serial adulterer, is a fascinating character.

The novel begins with the group discussing Patrick, a poet who is dying, and Marcus, one of Murdoch’s enigmatic, charismatic figures that people her fiction. Ludens brings Marcus back into their lives and the story goes from there with Ludens attaching himself to Marcus and Irina his daughter in a desperate attempt to extract some kind of global ‘message’ in the form of a new language or idea from Marcus. They have discussions about this language, about goodness and suffering, about Jewishness, about the Holocaust and you can feel Ludens desperation and obsession to the point of wanting to control everything that Marcus and Irina do. Time and again, Irina asks Ludens not to excite Marcus that maybe he isn’t as much of a genius as Ludens thinks and I was right behind her in this desire. There are numerous references to the famous line from Hamlet, ‘There are more things in heaven in earth, Horatio/ than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, as if to accentuate the fact that Ludens is never really going to understand Marcus.

At the same time Franca is struggling with her own obsessive situation, refusing to leave a husband who says he adores her yet treating her almost as a mother figure while he beds who he likes; she simply smiles and adapts and we have another entirely frustrating situation but one where the character has conversely given up all control. Franca meets a wonderful American woman Masie who is completely up front about her perception of the situation and we are left wondering right up to the end of the novel whether she will assert herself and leave Jack, or simply be eclipsed by his desires.

Franca, Irina and Alison, the three main female characters all exhibit a sense of barely repressed violence, all three of them talk about killing themselves or someone else at some point, indeed are far more violent in their language than any of the men and this sense of repression can be understood when you have men like Jack who sees women as an ‘alien race’ needing, ‘a man to calm them’ or Ludens who thinks Franca should just put up with Jack and treats Irina as some kind of servant half the time. The way in Murdoch has Franca in particular show a calm and serene exterior to Jack and Alison while inside her thoughts are of death and revenge is masterful.

Much of what takes place occurs in small English country villages with mansions and pubs –and pub lunches- and nature everywhere, setting is something Iris Murdoch does so well and there are numerous minor characters who provide interest along the way; the doctors, Marzillian and Bland, the Stone seekers, Daniel Most, the mysterious rabbi, and of course Masie. However, unlike the brilliant The Book and the Brotherhood where the narrative follows four or five main characters, several of whom were women, the focus on Ludens voice for me was overwhelming. Perhaps this is exactly what Murdoch intended, to get this sense of this suffocating obsession but ultimately it was a little too much for this reader. Her writing is still brilliant, her ideas still intriguing and the way she paints the human psyche captivating but this won’t go down as one of my favorites of the twenty-six novels she wrote.

Some favorites Lines

‘She was intensely conscious of the physical presence of that long thin restless body, and she felt for it something like desire, as if she would have spread herself softly over it like some huge powdery healing butterfly or indeed like the merciful lethal angel that would so soon put an end to the failing organs and the suffering consciousness.’

‘FREE BICYCLES. Ludens contemplated the notice which was prominently set up inside the gates on the side of the gravel drive. Free bicycles? Unwanted bicycles offered gratis? Bicycles released to wander like free range hens? Or a protest: unjust to bicycles, bicycles lib?’

‘The weird notion that she might be in danger of actually becoming one day as perfect as she seemed added a ghastly charm to her reflections, as she continued to envisage various methods of killing Jack.’

‘Franca and Ludens, smiling at each other and at Miss Tether, found this amiable flowing chatter utterly soothing, cool fragrant, medicinal, like a healing herb, like a soft green leaf pressed to a wound.’

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this was my first Iris Murdoch, and I'm surprised about some peoples negativity around the book. I LOVED it, better than any of her other books I've read (which I admit don't include what would be considered her classics). What I loved was that it was so unpredictable - both the characters and the plot. It drifted without structure - I mean that in a good way - and it brought me as reader to totally unexpected places. A bit like a fantasy novel but set in reality, or a examination of a person who did exactly what they liked all the time (and got away with it). Like others, i think a core theme was possessiveness and it examined this with special reference to relationships (including menage a trois) very effectively. Also maybe it examined the value of solid things (like the stones) that are there no matter what and survive. I think the point was that the everything moves around those solid things, and that's why they are exalted. I thought there was a great sense of humanity in her characters. Much underrated book as far as I'm concerned.

[Persephone Abbott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not going to say that I enjoyed reading this book. I was rather fascinated, however, and I certainly was curious when the kiss of Judas was going to appear. Marcus Vallar, genius, child genius burnt out in adulthood has many people expecting him to formulate the big revelation that would change mankind. Others think he's potty and suffering from any number of mental illnesses. His friend Ludens would like to help Marcus deliver the hoped promise of the unfulfilled genius so he trails Marcus. Like many gifted people, in the pool of educated and intelligent company that they might keep, gifted people can sink into underachievement while others excel without being gifted because they are able to maintain sight on the prize and are keen and diligent in the face of possible failures. Marcus excels at underachievement until someone thinks he just might be the Messiah, and for this he doesn't need to write anything down himself of course, he just needs "to be". Question: Did a real Christ ever exist? If he did, did he finally see the world so black as to die for everyone's sins in the form of suicide? Then there's Franca, the sainted wife. The saint examining sharp and deadly instruments while under torment, reminds me of depictions of saints and pointed objects in paintings.

I liked the details, for instance Marcus being continuously baptized in his daily dives into the swimming pool when in the mental facilities, and the mothering his exhausted "virgin" daughter must lavish on him. These types of details kept me going so that I was determined to finish the book. On the whole I was a little tired of the heavy slant of male characters, an atmosphere that reminded me of the Bible. Murdoch's interest in dominant male characters as in "The Philsopher's Pupil" is very present here too. Her capacity for weaving a thoroughly thorough version of a modern day savior/madman to cast shadows of doubt on the sanctity of the Christian world's old savior is well done (the message to the planet could be simply that Christ never existed -- you've got it all wrong for centuries), extremely well done and therefore I cannot but give a five star rating.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The central character is Marcus Vallar, a brilliant but seeming unstable mathematician who peaked quite young, had a brief second career as an abstract painter of note and, at the time of our story, enters a high-class mental institution while simultaneously serving as a Messianic healer figure for the local New Age travelers who take time out from a pilgrimage to Stonehenge to cluster around him. The chronological setting is identified as mid-80s by a single fleeting reference to AIDS, but a certain number of plot details would have unfolded differently if a single character had a telephone answering machine ("answerphone" to our UK friends).
The narrator, Alfred Ludens, is a teacher who is failing to write a book while on sabbatical (a notably common situation in Murdoch novels) and an acolyte of Vallar, but one who rejects what he considers the gimcrack spiritual angle and feels that he alone understands the master as a brilliant philosopher who he will help to write a book delivering the titular message. Ludens puts himself through such contortions with regard to everyone else's reactions to Vallar that he often seems much the crazier of the pair.
A subplot describes a quite successful 40-ish painter who informs his long-suffering wife that his younger girlfriend will be moving in. The resulting ménage à trois is as psychologically destructive as you'd expect despite the collective stiff upper lip that is largely maintained. This could be a comment on the hedonistic excesses of the particular time and place, though a certain stripe of artist has conducted him or herself accordingly since at least Shelley.
Several of the characters are Jewish, mostly of an age and origin to be the children of Holocaust survivors which gives Murdoch a lot of leeway for outlining the worldview of that cohort. Throw in a drunken Irish poet, a gay Armenian asylum director, a priest and rabbi who are both quite taken with Vallar's healing power and you have maybe a bit too carefully constructed cast of characters and a very long book.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very difficult book to rate. To say "like it" is both inaccurate and inadequate, but it will have to do. I am exhausted; confounded; conflicted; and depressed. But also stimulated.

Yesterday, at a book luncheon, author Amy Bloom commented that "really good books do more than distract." So, taking in to account the above description of my condition at the conclusion of this book we must agree that The Message to the Planet did much more than distract me.

Murdock is the author of one of my all time favorite novels, A Fairly Honourable Defeat. I can't say why I've never picked up another one of her books until now, but I think that it is likely it will again be a long time before I read another one of her books. It is just so draining. I found as I started this long book with its dense paragraphs that I could only read a limited amount in each sitting. How did the author contrive to pace my reading? I don't know; but she did. Once I'd completed approximately 400 pages I started the sprint to the finish. As someone who enjoys words--and style--I am intrigued by this author's ability to control the reader.

But Murdock is all about control and that is the frightening and depressing aspect of the book. Her characters are master manipulators and I cringe when I consider the cynicism reflected in her writing. This is a very challenging book to read but would be a fascinating book to discuss among friends; in a psychology or literature class; or over a very large cocktail shaker of martinis. If you choose to read it, please share your thoughts.

[Gayathri · Rating 4 out of 5]

My very first Murdoch. At 600-odd pages in fine print, this book is seriously voluminous! Though the book was probably written in 1980's, the writing is very austere for the age; almost Victorian. This book, if narrowed down, has a couple of protagonists, with the story switching between the lives of these two and at times, bringing the two together. The story is about a central event and its effect on all the characters that come in contact with this event. The characters are very real; their obsessions, insane; their thoughts, deplorable; and everyone is portrayed in varying shades of gray.
The book is paced unlike any other. It alternates between brooding, contemplative philosophy to intense, almost gut-wrenching emotional drama. It takes some time getting used to such an unusual style of writing.
I assume this is not her best work of fiction, but it has been a good start.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

560+ pages of densely packed script to describe the doings of as fey a clique of arty farty academics and artists as you could ever hope to meet. Exquisitely written, with some surprisingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world in passing, it delves into the big philosophical questions while at the same time detailing the finer points and pitfalls of managing a menage a trois should you have any ambitions in that direction. Written in her later life, there is sufficient hint of obsession with mental health in the main theme to make me wonder if she could already hear the knock of Alzheimer's at the door of her mind. A book to love or hate, you will either be enthralled or chuck it after a dozen pages.

[Sadie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know many people who read Iris Murdoch and I totally get it. She's smart. Smarter than me. Smarter than you. And she likes to write about philosophy. The trouble is that she explores these philosphical ideas through domestic dramas which means that ordinary readers have difficulty with the text and stop reading and serious readers aren't going to pick up her books because the plots seem so mundane. Now granted, the plot to this book is anything but mundane but it is dense and difficult to finish.

[Jane]

Another theme that insinuates itself into some Murdoch novels is the question of the boundary between genius and madness. Here the genius is, like many of her central characters, struggling for perfection, in this case a union of spiritual and intellectual perfection. His clarity of focus, when turned on another person, can result in joy, healing, or alternatively, devastation - thus the fascination of his character. One way of looking at the mystery in this story is: if we do happen to be one of those with the audacity to seek perfection, what is it exactly that we're seeking?

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this was a bummer. The Message to the Planet is not only the first Iris Murdoch novel I haven't enjoyed, it's the first to get less than five stars from me! This novel has a good start and then gets hopelessly muddled. It's a baggy, interminable story. After reading it for over three weeks, it began to feel like it was enchanted and was never going to end. Finish I did, but it was a slog. The Message to the Planet is boring.

The novel follows a group of friends who live in London. They're analytically, creatively, and philosophically minded people. The book is divided between following two members of this group, Ludens and Franca, in the third-person omniscient. Ludens is a history professor and Franca is a housewife married to the most vibrant member of the group—Jack, a philandering famous painter. One of the friends, Patrick, has a mysterious illness and may be dying. Patrick maintains that their old friend Marcus Vallar cursed him before his last departure, and only he can cure him. The group's habitual roles and cyclical debates and conversations are upset by this curse/illness, the reappearance of Marcus, and Jack disturbing the balance of his marriage with a permanent mistress.

Marcus was a mathematical genius prodigy, was an artist when he was part of the group, and is now striving for the meaning of life, the secret to the world. Both Marcus and Ludens are Jewish but don't practice Judaism. Marcus is obsessed with studying the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people. Ludens idolizes Marcus and puts him on an impossible pedestal, expecting Marcus to offer not only him but the whole world enlightenment. Meanwhile, Franca, who stoically forbore her husbands numerous infidelities with other women because they were passing fancies, cannot stand the permanent ménage à trois he now proposes they live in with his young lover. But Franca, so desperate to keep his love and stuck in her role of passivity, quietly seethes and keeps her rage beneath the surface.

Even when the story fails to gel, Murdoch is stylistically sophisticated. Her way of putting things is on point. There are almost too many brilliant lines! Her way of characterizing people through their relationships with others is superb. She has an ingenious way of describing interactions so you understand these relationship dynamics in an instant. I was impressed that in 17 pages, Murdoch lays out a complex premise and this social set's personal & shared histories. My initial impression was that this was a big juicy story of interpersonal connections. Unfortunately, for a book about curses and the meaning of life, it sure isn't exciting.

Franca's characterization is a standout. She's empathetic. Through Franca, Murdoch visits a recurring theme of her oeuvre: the limits of mental suffering and what a person can endure. Franca is a woman at the end of her rope. Murdoch paints an affecting portrait through details of Franca's intrusive thoughts and her sad family history. I also really liked the character of Maisie, one I haven't encountered in an Iris Murdoch novel before: the old woman sage, a free-spirited feminist artist. And she's American to boot! She offers an outside perspective on the goings-on and on the insularity of the central group. I appreciated her voice of reason, words of wisdom, and uncensored advice. I really enjoyed Gildas as the cynical voice of reason; he's an ex-priest on the fringe of the social set. He stays a bit apart from the action; he's skeptical, a loner. These two level-headed supporting characters are juxtaposed against Franca and Ludens's crazed thoughts while in crisis—of kidnap, of murder, of suicide.

Since it just follows the inner lives of two characters, it's much too weighted towards Ludens with not enough Franca. It feels uneven when this book ostensibly has two main characters. Franca is the more interesting, sympathetic protagonist with more internal conflict and changes going on. Yet she gets considerably less time on the page. While Ludens is a dog with a bone he won't let go of throughout the entire novel. I think TMTTP would have been much better served by following several characters involved in the drama of Marcus—let's get their perspectives on how they were impacted by him. The Franca love triangle and the Marcus mysticism plots never really join. It feels like two novels with disparate plots pasted together, unlike Henry and Cato, Murdoch's novel with two protagonists who are well-balanced and whose plotlines successfully merge by the end.

We need to talk about Ludens. Unlike in other works where Murdoch shows us the humanity of her antiheroes or reveals the rotten underbellies of supposed "nice guys," here she appears to be playing it straight and forcing us into the headspace and company of an irredeemable weasel. Ludens is an infuriating control freak, yet everyone thinks he's such a great guy, and it seems that we're supposed to think of him as such without a trace of irony! Murdoch seems to be saying, sure he makes mistakes, but deep down he's a good guy. Whereas I see him as willfully wrongheaded, insanely jealous, and predatory. Why so many women fall in love with him over the course of the novel and why everyone sticks by him even though he's a shit friend is beyond me. Instead of listening to what people say or what they want, he tries to force them into performing roles for his benefit. He thinks people don't mean what they say and that only he knows what they really want or what's good for them. He persists in horrible patterns of coercion and guilting people into staying in bad situations.

Speaking of, I HATE how everyone expects and advises Franca to stay with Jack. (Of course Ludens is the most guilty of this.) She has everyone telling her to stay with her cheating husband in a miserable situation that is driving her crazy. They act as if the only course of action is for her to grin and bear it. It feels remarkably old fashioned and reeks of toxic patriarchy for a novel that was released in 1989. Her 1961 novel A Severed Head feels much more modern in its approach to divorce, infidelity, and changing affections. And her next novel after TMTTP, published in 1993—The Green Knight—is also much more modern when it comes to relationships. I didn't care for this novel's treatment of female characters. Rather than commenting on women's awful fates under patriarchy (as she usually does) it felt like the women were just stuck in their confined roles.

About a third of the way through there's a good twist, though that's one of the last interesting things to occur in the novel. This twist really took me by surprise. Murdoch laid out the breadcrumbs among countless other matters so that the trail is there but you'll have forgotten the signs before they all add up. This is an effective strategy for the twist to land with maximum impact. Murdoch's presence as a chronicler is felt keenly on many pages. This effect is achieved by lines like: "This conversation, occurring shortly after the conversation with Patrick recorded above, was taking place at Ludens's flat . . . " She's the ever-present omniscient figure, which is very fitting in a book concerned with immanence (as so many of her novels are).

TMTTP is annoyingly repetitive. It's just too long. It stagnates. By the time anything happened I no longer cared and was ready for it to be over. Yet I was still disappointed by the ending. The story leaves you thinking, what was the point? This might be a necessary read for die-hard Murdoch fans (like me) but FYI, The Green Knight is a similar novel and it's much more successful and entertaining. There is great writing throughout and some virtuosic passages depicting suffering. But for me this was a major disappointment.

[BrokenTune · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried for almost half the book, but just couldn't get into it. I couldn't figure out when the story was set, didn't warm to any of the characters, and the plot just left me cold. So, I gave up. It's a little disappointing because I loved the other books I read by Iris Murdoch, all of which either had a gripping plot or, as The Bell, were littered with quite humourous scenes.

[Christina Stind · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you saw someone perform something that seemed to be a miracle, would you believe it to be a miracle or would you try to find some rational way of explaining it? When days, weeks, months had passed, would you still be convinced you had seen a miracle or would you instead think that you must have been mistaken?

Patrick is dying. He has been sick for a very long time and now, the doctors have given up on him. He is lying in Jack and Franca’s house and Franca is taking care of him while trying to come to terms with the new woman in her and Jack’s life. But more on that later. Patrick is sick because he has been cursed. By Marcus, an old … friend.

Ludens, another one of this group of friends, have taken it upon himself to find Marcus. He was always very impressed with Marcus and luckily, he’s able to locate him. When he visits him, Marcus and his daughter Irina are living in a small cottage and Irina is more than willing to leave the place. Marcus comes, sees – and he brings Patrick back from the (almost) dead.

Or does he? Even though a lot of this group of friend saw him do it, they are not all sure about what they really saw – or what he did. Did he cure a physical disease? Or did Patrick so firmly believe that Marcus had cursed him, that he almost died from this belief and did Marcus lift the curse and thereby bring Patrick back to life?

Afterwards, Ludens goes to live with Marcus and Irina and desperately tries to grasp what Marcus thinks because he is convinced that Marcus has found a great truth. He begins a relationship with Irina but is constantly struggling with finding his place. The other main storyline is focusing on Franca’s marriage to Jack and his insistence on having affairs with other women – and finally, on actually marrying one of these other women while stile retaining his relationship with Franca.

It feels strange trying to sum up this book by talking about what happens. Because that’s not really what’s important. At least not for the most part. Towards the end, it does become somewhat important but for most of the book, the talks and discussions between the characters are what matters. How they react to events, what they think and feel, why they feel compelled to do certain things – not what really happens.
And then again. This is a strange book, hard to come quite to terms with. It’s definitely not a book where everything is tied up neatly with a pretty bow. You are somewhat left to decide what really happened – and what will happen. Did Marcus really bring back Patrick from the dead? What will happen with Jack and Franca? How will Ludens go on?
And what about Irina? Irina is a character who I never really got a hold on. The entire novel through, she confused me. I never really knew what she really felt and wanted. After finishing the novel, I’m still a bit confused about her. And that fascinates me. I’m still pondering why she made the choices she did – and that’s a big compliment to Murdoch’s writing. She lets her characters live on even after the book is closed, by not concluding their lives but by leaving it open-ended.

Overall, this is a book about relations. Relationships not only between lovers or married couples but also between friends. How far do you wish to let yourself be pushed by the one you love? How much will you accept? All the characters in the book are searching for some king of meaning, for love, for faith – and they are all unsure about what to do. And the book is like this too. There’s no easy answers and even though it does come to a very satisfactory, you are still left with questions. As you are in life.

Iris Murdoch was a British author and philosopher. She wrote her novels in longhand – and they are printed as is, without being edited! She wrote both non-fiction and fiction but her fiction is heavily influenced by her philosophical thinking – which for me makes it even more interesting. With her focus on the importance of inner life on moral action, it is clear why she – at least in this novel – chooses to focus so intensely on the thoughts and feelings and not so much on the actions. As she does in this novel, she apparently often writes about intellectual men caught in moral dilemmas and about enigmatic male characters, who swipes other people along with them and convinces them of the truth of things – even though this might not actually be true. Jack is such a person. Charismatic, artist, persuasive. Marcus, although powerful, seems to be more just swept along of events, searching so after some kind of meaning that everything else fades – with Ludens at his side as a eager puppy, desperately trying to grasp the meaning of what Marcus says and does, and through that get a sense of meaning in the world and his life.

Although I really felt for Franca and her attempts to continue to love her husband no matter what, even when he wants to live in a committed menage a trois relationship with her and another woman, Ludens and his struggle to find meaning in the world by both listening to Marcus and persuading Marcus to think and talk and by his relationship with Irina, is the tragic hero of the novel. A man lost without past, a confusing present that constantly leaves him frustrated and without a sense of direction for his future. And yet, he has to go on.

I guess that’s how it is for all of us. That we each have to find our own meaning in life, our own purpose. And just go on.

[Yiorgos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The plot structure of this late masterpiece of hers resembles that of Anna Karenina and the Mandarins: basically a split narrative between a man and a woman, not always but surely in many ways intertwining. I am not trying to say that it has equal significance in world literature. I suppose what I could say is that when assessing her body of work, its place among her other novels has the same place the Dreaming has among the other albums of Kate Bush (that other mystical Briton): an alternative, bizarre magnum opus, not original in its content but vociferous and shocking in its execution. As one of the characters aptly puts it near the end: perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in January 2004.

Towards the end of her career, Murdoch's novels got longer, following the general trend in fiction over the last couple of decades. Both The Message to the Planet and The Book and the Brotherhood are about twice as long as Under the Net or The Bell. The problem with the extra length is that Murdoch did not really seem to have more to say, and with The Message to the Planet I felt that a fair amount of the book seemed tedious, not an accusation which could be made about her early work.

The theme of The Message to the Planet is religious revelation; some aspect of religious feeling and thought is important in every one of her novels. The central character is Marcus Vallar, a strange man who performs a miracle: a former friend on his deathbed - possibly already dead - is cured when Marcus speaks a few words to him. The rest of the novel flows out of this event, as the other characters react in various ways and as Marcus tries to come to terms with its consequences. Since the principal viewpoint in the novel is that of his friend and sceptical disciple Alfred Ludens, Marcus remains an enigmatic figure defined more by the ideas others have about his character than by his own internal life, as he retreats to a private nursing home.

The parallels with the gospels are clear, even if Ludens - the equivalent of the evangelist - is not himself a believer. It is a little heavy-handed, and this is really what makes the novel fall flat. The implications of Murdoch's portrayal - that we might not get a completely accurate portrayal of the character of Jesus from the gospel writers - might disturb some devout Christians; but to most of the rest of us it isn't particularly profound. The way in which religion is portrayed contrasts with the depiction of the religious experience in The Bell, which must be one of the best novels ever written in this respect.

The Message to the Planet suddenly improves about a hundred pages from the end (that is, after the reader has got through 450). This is partly because the plot begins to move, after a lengthy stasis; with the gospel parallels in mind, this part could be considered to be Marcus' Passion story. The novel remains inconclusive; we never find out whether there actually was a message to the planet, and if so, what it said or who sent it. It is questionable even whether it is Marcus or Ludens who is the messenger, as Marcus hails Ludens by the title (the only time it appears in the text) and has immense difficulty in putting what he wants to say in words; the insights he wants to develop would become trivial if turned into English, hence his interest in universal and original languages.

There are interesting things in The Message to the Planet, but it is not a novel where the reader is absorbed by every page, which was my reaction to some of Murdoch's early works. I'm fairy sure that if it had been the first one of her books that I'd read, I would never have bothered to read any others.

A comment on the original blog post from 2011 pointed out: "But we do finally get the message. Gildas provides it in the closing pages. We are all accidental beings, we have no meaning, and all we can do is be good to each other.", to which I responded "In which case, it's interesting that I didn't pick it up. I probably never became sufficiently engaged with the novel - I can now hardly remember it."

[Martin Ramsay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shakespeare is never far away in the novels of Iris Murdoch. There are familiar echoes in the names of her characters, direct references to the plays and reflections on the man himself and the legacy of his work. In 'Message to the Planet' Gildas an ex-priest argues:

""Absolute" as in absolute value is mystical, we know that. But empiricism, decent Western empiricism, honest, truth-bearing ordinary language, that's what we've got to save. There's no cosmic shamanistic nonsense in Shakespeare, no Arthurian mysteries, no Grail - just the beauty and the horror of the world, and love - love - love." (47)

At key points in the novel, Shakespeare appears as a touchstone to contextualize experience. When the doctor and owner of Bellmain, discusses an article in the press about Marcus, who becomes his patient, he draws Ludens attention to a quote from Hamlet saying, "It goes, does it not, 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Goes too, then are dreamt of in your philosophy.' Now perhaps you can tell me, I believe it is a disputed point, is 'your philosophy' simply an idiomatic way of saying 'philosophy', or is Hamlet referring to Hamlet's own philosophy?" (337) Later, reflecting on his own sexual frustration, Ludens observes, "He felt he was being, by the situation, perhaps by Marcus, required to wait, like Ferdinand until, by an ordeal of chastity, courage and pure love he should deserve his Miranda" (361).

The battleground for understanding is the psyche. Marzillian, the psychiatrist explains to Ludens, "The psyche is a vast space within which we seek for God - you understand my use of that word - a space of which most people are unaware, crouching as they are in some tiny corner of it, living the life of a beetle in a hole" (431).

In the search for an "answer" Marcus seeks to move beyond language. Maths and art have already failed him in his quest. Ludens believes that Marcus stands at some kind of a threshold. Marcus tells him, "It as not anything to do with biology or science or the old philosophies - Its something so deep that even the most dicately poised approach almost inevitably includes it. It is a place covered by a cloud" (163). He explains further, "At a certain point one is compelled to develop a conception of insight, or pure thinking, which is not recognizably "moral", something which simulates, or is, the rising of the man into the divide, as if one were being driven into the godhead" (164). The discussion between Marcus and Ludens breaks down after this...

The connections Mudoch makes between beasts and creatures and human beings are a constant. Franca tells Irina that she and her father "sit like a pair of toads" (144). Later she describes the Irishman Pat as, "A wild man, a fox, a seal, a sort of sprite - such a sweet man - I'm glad he spoke to me I didn't think he remembered." (174). When she brings Jack's request for a divorce in the form of a letter for Ludens to read she describes Ludens as having a "narrow face which resembled the face of a fox, a dear good wise fox" (405). After Marcus speaks with a rabbi, Ludens pictured Marcus thoughts "As huge looming animal-like forms slowly performing mysterious gyrations in a mist" (416). Pat speculates to Ludens after Marcus death, "It's all accidental after all, we're accidental, perhaps there is nothing higher, and no difference in the end between his death and that of a fox" (476). Pat feels like a "... poor lost animal, everything's weird to me."

After her 'descent, Franca feels smaller than the jar of marmalade, "small as a mouse, or as an electric spark, which was impelled to run very fast, invisibly fast, round and round the house, altering it in some way which was now imperative" (181). Clearing her things out of the bedroom she shared with Jack, to make way for Alison, "This operation took most of the morning. In the afrernoon, with continued mouse-like haste, she sorted out the clothes and objects, some to be kept, some to be thrown away, some to be given away" (182). Her behaviour demonstrates what Marcus is trying to discover when he says to Ludens, "Wait. I think the sort of answer you want is this. What is sought is a device. Something like an electrical circuit. Something present in a flash, intuitively seen to be necessary, which cannot be otherwise" (163). Waiting for Jack and Alison's trip to Amsterdam, Franca, "recalled with surprise the energy which had yesterday enabled her to race about the house. The little mouse that had run so fast and so far would now sit still in its corner" (182).

Sparks and flames illuminate the darkness in which many of these characters are marooned. Ludens wants to stop Marcus thinking about the holocaust. He fears the temptation for Jews to see it as a 'cosmic event' which leads to a view which was
'superstitious'. Ludens wants to keep Marcus away from this kind of 'high- temperature religiosity'. But, writes Murdoch, "As he thought this he felt in his heart a voiceless nameless twinge, like a tiny spark, which he chose to identify as a signal, which very rarely came through, from his ancestors who had lived in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw" (195).

Dogs are again elevated beyond their fellow creatures. After rising from his death bed after some kind of a ritual performed by Marcus, Patrick declares " Henceforth I shall be his dog." Gildas observes "Dogs are enlightened beings... they are saved. Perhaps a dog could save his master. Remember Judas's dog sitting under his chair in The Last Supper by Rubens in Brera." Pat replies "I was and have always been his dog. When he was is sad because the world rejects him I shall place my paw upon his knee, and to he will be moved and the heartened and the his strength shall be renewed. Every great philosopher needs his poet."  (131)

Later Ludens describes himself on his knees before Marcus shaking himself "Like a dog emerging from water" (167). And then Irons tells Ludens that Pat "obeys me like a dog" (270).

Pondering Irina's first sexual experience which Ludens suspects was 'disastrous' and had left her 'wounded' Irina suddenly said "I'd like a dog." Ludens replies, "'We shall have a dog.' The idea of the dog they would have came to him as a healing dart sent from the future. Ludens loved dogs..." (370 - 370). When he finally realises Irons is in live with somebody else Ludens recalls "They had been happy and unhappy together, they had suffered together like animals together in a pit..." (555). After he sees Irina for the last time Ludens is led to her and her lover by a yellow dog. He tells Gildas, "I think I communicated better with that yellow dog than any being I've ever known except you" (562).

Finally, the significance of stones. The first reference to  the Axle Stone (216). It is described as being "a very ancient stone and there was some 'charming legend about it." Murdoch later writes "The sunlight constantly altered the appearance of the Stone, slanting to enliven the smooth face with little shadows and to endow the cracked face with its variety of dark significant" (240). The stone is rumoured to have walked to Bellmain from Avebury. It is said to have a secret name "which would bring either magic power or instant death to anyone who knew it" (241)

Enter the Stone people, people are of the the New Age who "reverence the simple things of the earth, trees, and flowers, and stones..." (309). Marcus tells him is the magnet and in this situation he realises that the 'thing itself ' is more important than the 'thought of it' (341). Ludens is desperate to rescue Marcus from becoming 's one sort of divine being'. He wants Marcus to express himself through thought not being. Marcus says "... it's no good, we can't get there, you can't leap over your own shadow" (340).

Despite his 'superstitious scruples' about taking any of the stones that had been left as votive offerings Ludens "did succeed in selecting one to give to Gildas but it felt somehow improper to take one for himself. After all, he had already had a stone given to him by Fanny and, this stone might resent the appearance of another one" (370).

[Chrissie]

************************

*The Black Prince 4 stars
*A Fairly Honourable Defeat 4 stars
*The Sandcastle 4 stars
*The Good Apprentice 3 stars
*The Sea, The Sea 2 stars
*Jackson's Dilemma 2 stars

*The Unicorn wishlist
*The Time of the Angels wishlist
*The Bell wishlist
*The Flight from the Enchanter wishlist

*An Unofficial Rose TBR
*The Italian Girl TBR
*A Word Child TBR
*A Severed Head TBR

*Under the Net maybe
*The Message to the Planet maybe

[Stephen Brody · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Christ’s death has probably collected more kitsch than any other happening in history.”

“Somehow he acted out the whole pilgrimage of modern man – to know almost everything, and then to want to change that one thing more, and to perish trying to find it.”

* * * *

The Message turns out, apparently, to be this: “Nothing could be more important to this planet than preserving the name of God, we must not abandon it, it is entrusted to us at this age, to carry it onward through the darkness.” An uneasy mixture of Jewish mysticism and adolescent ‘hippyism’ and hardly very original unfortunately there are no precise instructions and anyway the Messenger is dead, leaving a highly-bemused following. “Of course it is unusual in England, but it would be an everyday sight in India. In that country there are gods everywhere – a saying of Heraclitus incidentally – they live with a concept of holiness which has vanished from the West. They can smell and taste it. They seek out holy things and holy places and holy men and venerate them whole-heartedly. Here we find such excesses embarrassing.”
“One must distinguish of course between a genuine sense of the holy, which promotes unselfishness and virtue, and an intoxicated hysteria which is a holiday for egoism.”
“I don’t think they bother with those distinctions in India.”

(The only funny dialogue in the whole book, between a resident lunatic and the local vicar.)

It starts off with a debate between three oddly-matched former friends of Marcus Vallars, once allegedly a mathematical and linguistic genius, subsequently a painter and now vanished. Is he a saintly visionary, a madman or just plain wicked? A fourth, a sort of pantomime Irishman, is on the point of death from un-diagnosable causes but under the belief that Marcus Vallars has laid a curse on him. ‘The Professor’ is tracked down to a remote cottage and persuaded to return to lift the curse. The Irishman is revived as if like Lazarus, an event which further increases both scepticism and adoration according to taste, but the resurrectionist seemingly voluntary puts himself in a very expensive lunatic asylum in order to be spared the irritations of having to do anything more at all except receive the tributes of a growing number of would-be disciples, some of whom turn nasty when their aspirations are not fulfilled.

At this stage one begins to wonder if it’s not Murdoch herself who’s gone a bit dippy. There are some brilliant aphorisms and the undimmed talent for contriving highly-readable stories, but as a novel it rambles on with a large cast of sometimes barely-plausible characters, the most distasteful of them to my mind being Alfred Ludens, a self-tortured soul forever suffering agonies of guilt over things that have nothing to do with him, ‘converted’ to Marcus Vallar’s feet by the delusion that his idol, with his help, is going to write the ultimate message to the world, if he can be bullied into it. The potential author shows no inclination to do so, whereupon the acolyte suffers flurries of wild emotionalism made up largely of jealousy that someone else may be favoured with the mission, by turns sulking and harassing and trying to seduce the master’s ‘wild’ daughter who quite rightly dismisses him as “hopeless”. Murdoch excels at conjuring up unpleasing male characters, but that this one, surely about the worst husband material available, should on the side receive marriage proposals from two other women who secretly loathe each other and regard the ‘fiancée’ with contempt is frankly incredible. The trouble is that most of them haven’t got anything to do except introspection and messing about with each other. Marcus Vallars, for all his prestigious reputation, merely sits and ‘meditates’ for hours on end while relying on others to provide everything for him on order. Jack Shearwater appears to have made a great deal of money from his paintings without any substantial evidence of much artistic talent or application. His wife has been just that, a devoted servant who secretly considers murdering him; his ‘mistress’ is an ex-ballerina who didn’t even make the corps de ballet but dabbles in writing television plays. The resurrected Irishman is a bad ‘poet’ for whom large quantities of alcohol arrive as if from heaven. Ludens is ‘on sabbatical’, apparently permanently, vaguely contemplating writing a ‘paper’ which he never gets around to. The only ‘active’ characters are the mysterious Armenian psychiatrist who runs the ‘place of healing’ - barely credible either, he’s far too clever for his profession – but at least he exerts a genuine fascination, his ‘speeches’ are about the best in the book, and he’s “too busy to get fond of people”, along with an incidental character, Maisie Tether, a plain-speaking American Quaker-ess amateur painter and no-nonsense feminist, though not above trying to lure away with her the discontented wife. The puzzling paradox is that one might suspect Iris Murdoch – herself very heavily occupied writing all those award-winning books, teaching at Oxford, scribbling hundreds of letters and conducting numerous love affairs in what time was left over – of being a very subtle satirist, were she not really always and sincerely still at heart an innocent English school-girl whose awareness of ‘evil’ extended at second-hand no further than the ‘Holocaust’ while completely overlooking, for example and in spite of her fulsome praise for Hindu philosophy, her school-mate Indira Gandhi’s gruesome end and the deaths of millions that preceded it in her own time, let alone the other horrors of the last War or of the whole history of the human race.

There are too many stories going on at once in this book, artfully-seamed, psychologically highly astute, but also surely highly improbable, niceness is all so long as it’s appropriately intricate and ‘civilised’ whatever the violent and unstable passions surging underneath. And her view-point is, naturally, always a fundamentally feminine one; marriage is increasingly the ideal, here Jack and his long-suffering wife are blissfully re-united, his mistress and the Irishman abscond somewhere on goodness knows what and the ‘wild’ Irena snares of all people an English Lord presumably to live happily ever after, while the others are left resignedly on the shelf to make the best of it they can. In her earlier novels this is all rather amusing, in her later ones it is not. The whole thing ends in a sort of fireworks display of lyrical metaphysical theology which I think would discourage all but convinced Murdoch admirers; she has a kitsch side herself when it comes down to it, the intellectual and verbal glitter, the flashes of razor-sharp wit and undoubted sagacity and perceptiveness notwithstanding.

[Mary March · Rating 4 out of 5]

What impressed me about this book was Iris's management of so many characters, their idiosyncrasies, and relationships with each other. She was able to maintain their characters as they moved through the book in their "each so" individual ways. In spite of the predictability of each character, Iris did manage a spoiler (no need for a spoiler alert as I don't read and tell) though the frustrating lives of everyone in the book had me hoping (for the characters' sakes)
that they would each have a spoiler alert for themselves.

In spite of the fact that I was impressed with the complexity of the book, and many characters, I found myself sighing with frustration as each person did what was so depressingly predictable, often after making a small change that had me hoping they would break out and shock everyone.

My favourite, yet most hated character for me was Jack who got away with murder (literally, not actually) time and time again and no-one seemed to see through him. The feminist in me wanted to shake the women he got involved with and I became quite excited at one point that Jack was about to get everything he deserved. At last, they have caught on to Jacks game. And did they? You will have to read it to find out.

[Kalle · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a nutshell, I liked this book. However, there are some problems.

First of all, it is a rather multi-layered one, with nice dialogue and deep philosophical thoughts, and while each section works, nothing really shines. The combination is good, but somehow I felt it lacked that last push, that last something that makes a great read.

It is also a really long novel. I'm not sure if I just read it too slowly (which I did), but it simply took too long for me to finish. It was not boring; it just progressed very slowly.

The characters were excellent. They felt very realistic and some of the scenes hit almost too close to home for me.

A very small gripe is I have no idea about the exact time period of the book (I'm guessing it's the 70s or thereabouts). In parts it reads like it is happening in the 19th century, then there are mentions of the Holocaust, and computers, and cars are everywhere, and people still write letters, and so on. It's a mess which felt rather awkward for a modern person.

[Betty · Rating 5 out of 5]

A phenomenal look into the many lives (friends, disciples, worshipers) affected by a brilliant and misunderstood mathmetician-turned-spiritual mentor who abandons everything in a quest for the ultimate truth and foundation of human consciousness. Murdoch possesses an amazing gift of character development through amorous suffering and philosophical dialogue. She believes that all philosophy is shipwrecked on morality. "Large in scope and powerful in thrust" according to one review, there is much to ponder and it is difficult reading but worth sticking it through to the end. The last book of this ilk I read (The Goldfinch) won a Pulitzer and I wonder why this one has not garnered more recognition.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. What a tome! I won't say I enjoyed it, but I will likely never forget it, which is saying a lot. The character development is superb and Murdoch's treatment of the questions of spirituality, good versus evil, reality versus fantasy, love versus obsession, madness versus genius is deep and wide-ranging. This must have been a bear to write!
I thought about giving up half-way through because it isn't exactly easy reading. Often her paragraphs are a page long or more and the dialogue can be pretty dense. But if you're philosophically inclined, it's worth a try.

[Nathanial]

Murdoch does it again! Richly seasoned spread of characters in a group portrait covering three distinct, varied and multifaceted settings (landed estate, city flat, at village sanitorium). Plays with us just long enough to let us figure out we don't need to know who the protagonist is when her central subject is interior action: how do moral acts play out in real life?

[Sue Bird · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think her alzheimers was setting in at this point.

[Heidi Burkhart · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to read a book by Murdoch and now I have. I struggled through about 85% of the book. Finally in the last 15% I felt it all came together, but felt that it was rather an exhausting read.

[Glass River]

This is a terrible novel. Terrible, that is, in the sense that it will terrify any thinking person who reads it. Put another way, it will terrify any person still (thank God) capable of thinking.
Murdoch published her first novel Under the Net in 1954. Her last, Jackson’s Dilemma, was published in 1995. She was seventy-five and shortly afterward was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It progressed thereafter blessedly fast and she died in 1999. Dr Peter Garrard, of UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, analysed syntactic complexity and vocabulary ranges in the last novel and saw clear indicators of the disease at work. ‘Alzheimer’s’, Garrard noted, ‘is known to disrupt the brain’s semantic system, but this can happen subtly before anyone has the remotest suspicion of intellectual decline.’ Given this cue one looked, with gloomy suspicion, at other late-life works by Murdoch. Were any even subtler precursor signs discernible?
The Message to the Planet, published six years before the disease had progressed to a catastrophic state, is (to my un-clinical eye) the work of a writer in full possession of her abilities, although the novel has a palpably more confusing narrative line than one finds in the precise narrative geometries of A Severed Head (1961) or The Bell (1958). But, with the poignant knowledge of what was imminently to come for the author, The Message to the Planet is intensely interesting in terms of what it’s about. It poses the question commonly confronted by thinking people as they come to the end of their life, when it’s a toss-up whether brain-death comes before the grim reaper: what did it all mean?
Losing one’s mind, one’s hold over knowledge, was traditionally called ‘madness’. It is now called dementia, which is Latin for the same thing but softer on the ear. Being ‘medical’ it also hints at possible cure, which, for Alzheimer’s, there isn’t. Dementia is most commonly a disease of the old. It would be more honest to call it an epidemic of the old. Statistically it affects one in fourteen people over the age of sixty-five, one in six over the age of eighty. ‘Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven. Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!’ pleads eighty-something King Lear. The sweet heavens take no notice of his prayer, any more than of those one-in-six afflicted.
The Message to the Planet opens:
‘Of course we have to do with two madmen now, not with one.’
‘You mean Marcus is mad too?’
‘No, he means Patrick is mad too.’
‘What do you mean?’
It takes a moment to work out that three people are talking about two other people. They are, it emerges, the novel’s five principals; all men, and each representative of some mode of knowledge or creative discourse. They are ‘minds’ of a different kind. The central character – through whose viewpoint the narrative unfolds – is Alfred Ludens, a reader in history on sabbatical from London University. Gildas Herne (the first speaker) is a musician and ex-priest. He represents the weak magnetic force which holds the group together; the novel begins and ends with the main characters joining to sing as an amateur choir under his direction. Patrick Fenman is an Irish poet; Jack Sheerwater an artist. This quartet revolves around the pivotal figure of Marcus Vallar, a philosopher and mathematician who has travelled beyond knowledge as it is partitioned in academic departments and books. Marcus may be mad, or he may be a new Leonardo on the brink of devising a universal language, a kind of grand unified theory which will deliver a message to the planet. As the novel opens, he is a recluse living no one knows where.
From four of its five points of ‘mentation’ (Gildas serves mainly as a choric figure in both senses) the novel branches out. The main track is Ludens’ hunt for Marcus in order to discover his messianic ‘message’. He ‘knows’ something. When Marcus is finally located and persuaded to return and raise Patrick from the dead (as it is given out by the tabloids), the reclusive philosopher becomes the object of a hysterical cult. What he ‘knows’ remains a message in a cloud, depicted in a suspiciously cloudy novel.

[Christine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Over 500 pages of anxiety and frustration with the mind-meltingly toxic relationships did not leave me in love with this book. There's a message to the planet here and it is a detailed account of how not to have a relationship of any sort; friendship, romance, parental, you name it and this book portrays it as a twisted mockery of what it could be. I'm getting angry just thinking about it. We've got the standard Murdoch character cluster of well-off middle-class educated white Brits with a selection of emotional issues, one of whom is the asshole-genius (the rest tend to garden-variety assholery). Their emotional issues and inability to communicate ricochet off each other until the end of the novel. In The Message to the Planet, our genius is Marcus Vallar, a mathematical and painting savant who curses a couple of his friends and disappears for years, to be rediscovered by devotee Alfred Ludens, who drags him and his adult daughter Irina back to London in the hopes that Marcus can lift the curse he put on Patrick Fenman. Patrick is dying. The medical community is baffled as to the cause and opinions vary about whether his illness is related to the curse Marcus put on him and whether Marcus lifting the curse will cure him or not. Patrick is being cared for by Franca Sheerwater, wife of famous lapsed painter Jack Sheerwater, another ex-follower of Marcus and an actual pile of mold in painter's overalls. You see, Jack has politely informed his wife that he loves and adores her and can't live without her and will never leave her so the fact that he's taken a mistress shouldn't worry her at all. Franca swallows her agony and rage instead of dumping a pan of spaghetti sauce over his head (it's because she's an older woman, that massive three year age difference means Jack has to chase after younger women. Or something, I don't speak mold) and talks about the situation with their mutual friends until Jack puts a stop to that too, because isolating your partner from other perspectives is definitely normal and not a sign that you're jealous and controlling. I'm gonna change topics now because I'm afraid the sarcasm will melt my computer but you better believe that their relationship made me want to throw this book across the room for all 500 pages. Alfred, Irina, and Marcus form the core of the story that spirals out across apartments and mental hospitals dotted across Europe. Some of the characters do grow as people, becoming aware of their flaws and shortcomings and working to improve instead of expecting the world to contort itself to their demands. I even liked that different characters make different amounts of progress on different problems, it felt very realistic and compassionate to see people struggle and fail and try again. Every book Murdoch writes tends to have a lot of deep philosophical concepts and The Message to the Planet is no exception; in fact she's smooshed in some mysticism and a new religious movement. There's a lot of philosophical meandering between characters, which can really drag if you aren't very interested in deep esoteric questions. Honestly what wrecked the book for me was the way Murdoch presents some of these terrible relationships (I'M LOOKING AT YOU JACK SHEERWATER) as acceptable when they are not and should not be considered acceptable. It's gross and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to have a good mad. Everyone else should probably avoid it though. As should anyone who will be seriously troubled by: drowning babies, spousal abuse and murder, infidelity, rape, or suicide. The first three are only discussed, but the last ones are events in the novel and could certainly be distressing.

[John Cairns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought at first the ill character was dying of Aids, that he is immediately denied by another character, but by the reference placing the setting of the novel’s present in the eighties. A mention of word processor helps confirm that. Another character says “Sex ...joins flesh and spirit, it’s the only spiritual thing that is available everywhere,” a view the author would seem to share, as would I. The quotation on page 22 about the continuance of metaphysical wisdom I can’t find. I don’t like the painter character. You'll find out why yourself.

The author gives the back story. The motherless hero was brought up by his father. He tracked down his idol, who has a motherless daughter he must’ve had when very young, and is savaged by him. His idol is interested in the true nature of consciousness to be found by a deeper thinking than that of philosophers who haven’t found it. Isn’t the inference that the true nature of consciousness can only be found through unconscious thinking? Why would the unconscious bother itself with that! a concern only of consciousness and unattainable by it.

Back in the present the hero is given an address for the idol by another friend who recollected something and phoned on the basis of it only to be given the address, by a pleasant voice, which he hands over. This will prove to be significant as demonstrating how fortuitous life is though of course carefully plotted by the author to do just that. Since god is roundly denied, such plotting in life could only be done by an unconscious, presumably that of the hero, with the consent of those of the other characters and there’s not the slightest indication of that, thus his eventual surmise of the accidental. It could just as well have been fate if he were so inclined, or the author knew how to get beyond the constriction of her consciousness. Despite this she does give a convincing depiction of the deeply thinking idol’s having a power beyond the reach of any consciousness, possibly supernatural. She avoids monitoring his deep thoughts and feelings to add to the mystery and avoid conveying what she can’t and wouldn’t want definitive though she does monitor the less deep thoughts of other characters and gives a brilliant sketch of a female character who maintains the appearance of loving while turned to hate and who is mirrored by another female character. The fortuitousness of life will again be shown by the change of mind of the hero about a letter by the former female on seeing a second from the latter, badly sealed. Morality is eschewed or a deeper, more intuitive morality holds sway I’d put down to the unconscious the author is suggesting exists if only in the spontaneous action of her hero, who’s, I have remarked in the margin, a dreadful liar.
There are two instances where the author makes an awkward transition of her usual kind from a present to a past and back again so that I thought she’d lost the plot. I also got quite confused over when the novel was set, especially when hippies make an appearance after what I’d taken to be the eighties. Didn’t they die out in the early seventies?