Word: murdoch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Complete Stories, Nahum N. Glatzer, editor •The Name of the Rose, Umber to Eco •The Philosopher's Pupil, Iris Murdoch Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, Peter De Vries
...PHILOSOPHER'S PUPIL by Iris Murdoch; Viking; 576 pages...
This is Iris Murdoch's 21st novel. Her fecundity is remarkable, but even more so is the manner in which she has written her books. Allegory, that stately, illustrated progress toward foregone conclusions, worked best in ages of faith, when author and readers agreed on the subjects of good and evil. Such has not been the case since roughly the time of Edmund Spenser and his Faerie Queene, yet Murdoch, a philosophy don at Oxford, has successfully built a career on this outdated literary genre. Her characters manifestly stand for abstract values; they are figures in a pattern...
...Philosopher's Pupil shows Murdoch at the top of her form. At issue is the salvation of George McCaffrey, an apparently deranged man in his middle 40s who is first seen trying to push a car containing his wife into a canal. What, or who, could have got into George? In addition, how does the reappearance of George's old philosophy teacher, John Robert Rozanov, figure in what appears to be an attempted murder...
...Murdoch surrounds these stark questions with an abundance of local color. She provides a narrator (called N) and the English village of Ennistone (N's town), the site of an ancient hot spring where residents and tourists gather daily to bathe and socialize. Legend maintains that this spa has aphrodisiacal powers and was once associated with pagan rites of Venus. Vigilant congregations of Anglicans, Methodists, Catholics and Quakers keep watch on the "unholy restlessness" that periodically seizes Ennistone, a madness lately exemplified by reported sightings of flying saucers and the peculiar behavior of George McCaffrey. The town does...