Word: bradleys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Never has Oxford Philosopher Murdoch staged more perfervid rituals, or composed more coolly brilliant commentaries upon them, than in The Black Prince. As usual, the master spell is love. The book's narrator is a 58-year-old failed writer named Bradley Pearson. Grinding his teeth in silence, Bradley has been waiting for the moment of absolute inspiration. Nothing less will do. His cursed Doppelgdnger, his best friend, is Arnold Baffin, a fluent hack who turns out popular novels with religious overtones while Bradley grubs away in a tax inspector's office. Freedom is the cruel lure...
...minuets: all decorum on the surface, barbaric ecstasies underneath. The magical music starts, and partners, to their own amazement, find themselves in one another's entranced arms. Just as suddenly the music stops, the trance is over. Then, just as suddenly, there are second partners all round. Before Bradley's pen can reach paper, he falls in love with Arnold's wife and, immediately after, with Arnold's 19-year-old daughter Julian...
...here is no command perform ance by author's fiat. The Black Prince is that rarest of novels, one which conveys the texture, the immediacy, the superb improbability of love as it hap pens. The metamorphosis of Bradley from a self-concerned prig into a dancer of the rites of spring does such full justice to the mysteries of the heart, imagination and the groin, as to seem predestined...
...Poor old Bradley's brief, intense affair with Julian brings this novel - and perhaps Miss Murdoch's whole body of writing - to a high point. All the passionate Murdoch questions get passionately asked. What is the connection between love and death? Is "black Eros," as a transfigured Bradley comes to think, the artist's name for truth - the name for all the knowledge he seeks...
...Bill Bradley, L.H.D., basketball star...