"Some while later Marian began to walk back through the wrecked gardens. The moon had been quenched in cloud. She had not been outside. She had had to detach herself from the archway almost by pulling her hands off the stone, so alarming did everything seem both in front of her and behind her. She had never felt quite like this before, alone in her own mind; and yet not quite alone, for somewhere in the big darkness something was haunting her. She said to herself, I can't go on like this, I must talk to somebody. Yet to whom and about what? What had she to complain of, other than the loneliness and boredom which was perfectly to be expected? Why was she suddenly now so frightened and sickened?”
Primal landscape meets primal emotions as a young woman called Marian Taylor goes to work as governess at the remote coastal location of Gaze Castle on the west coast of Ireland.
Iris Murdoch writes in an extraordinarily vivid style. This novel is a sort of multi-dimensional love triangle: a group of characters isolated from the rest of the world have developed strange interconnected lives. Each of them is obsessively connected to Hannah Crean-Smith, an almost supernatural enchantress who exerts some kind of hold over every character. Murdoch explores the tangled threads that tie them together, then lets them steadily unravel while ramping up the drama with huge skill. In the hands of a lesser novelist, this sort of subject matter could easily become a mere soap opera. But Murdoch really gets inside her characters, their motivations and their inner conflicts.
At some point every person seems to love/hate/fear/desire every other person. You could argue that it's overwrought, or just allow yourself to be swept away by the intensity and enjoy sentences such as these: "It's odd, she thought, there is no one to appeal to any more, not even Peter. There is no outside any more. Everything is inside, the sphere is closed upon itself, and we can't get out. Pip had gone, he would wait and watch no longer. Effingham had deserted to the world of ordinary life and reason. She and Denis were ruined servants. The human world was at an end. Now they could only wait for Gerald to come down and whip them to the stables and turn them into swine."
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