Word: murdochs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...IRIS MURDOCH 366 pages. Viking...
...whirl in Iris Murdoch's latest witch dance, one of her characters stammers: "I didn't know ordinary educated middle-class English people could behave the way we behaved...
With a perversity hardly matched since Shakespeare put an ass's head on Bottom, Miss Murdoch has made a career out of bewitching into beastliness the discreetly charming British bourgeoisie. In her neo-Gothic tales, subtle spells fill the air until respectable Londoners seem to sprout horns under their bowlers, rolled umbrellas (one would swear) resemble snakes, and good gray Anglican church towers turn primitive, not to say phallic...
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...
...Murdoch love stories are like wild 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...