29/08/18: Iris Murdoch – The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974)

As I read it, the spine on this old paperback copy soon disintegrated and the pages started falling out. I found myself picking off what was left of the glue until I simply had a pile of loose pages that could not be salvaged. I then recycled these as I went along – a messy and unappealing way to read.

This saga of a man who flits between two women isn’t one of my favourite Murdoch novels. Here’s one typically overwrought speech: “Your youth and your beauty are holy to me. I worship your innocence. Trust me and give it to me. It is the right time. And love me just a little in your heart without fear. I have no will to entangle you or to hold you. I will be kind to you and will set you free and even send you from me. How could I presume to speak about your mother if this were not so? I want you now and I need you now and this is something which your destiny and not mine has ordained. But I need your affection too. I have never begged for anyone’s affection before, but I beg for yours now. If you can give it to me as you love me the world will be made anew in which your manhood begins.”

People simply do not speak like this and I’m pretty sure they didn’t in 1974, either. Also, while her entangled human relationships always make for engaging material, her presentation of children is oddly unbelievable. But what the novel lacks in credibility, it more than makes up for in depth: her situations and moral dilemmas really make you think.

19/08/18: John Bayley – Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998)

A moving account of their life together. Bayley flits between a history of their relationship (meeting in Oxford, low-key marriage, studious if messy cohabitation) and present-day observations about Iris living with Alzheimer’s. (She would die in 1999 and he in 2015.)

Although his account is written with obvious love and tenderness, it’s uncomfortable to read about him caring for his ailing wife. Details of how he washes her, for example, feel too private and intimate to be shared with the general reader, who knows Murdoch only through the great intellect displayed in her writing. Sometimes her condition seems so pitiful, such as when he describes he repeatedly asking the same question or watching children’s television:

“At the same time she will watch the animated cartoons on children’s TV with something approaching glee. They can be a great stand-by at ten or so – the trickiest time – till eleven in the morning. I usually watch the Teletubbies with her, and become absorbed myself in their odd little sunlit world, peopled with real rabbits, real sky, real grass. Or so it seems. Is some human agency inside the creatures, some actual and cunning little mannikin? It certainly looks like it, and the illusion, if such it is, continues to hold both our attentions.”

You feel voyeuristic reading this stuff, even if he did choose to share it with the public – for example, when he describes how she “stoops like an old tramp to pick up scraps of candy paper or cigarette ends from the pavement”. With Iris clearly having no say in the matter, you are left with no choice but to accept the wish of a husband to write about the woman he loves.

There are moving passages and also anecdotes of their friends and travels. There’s not much about her books or her writing processes, frustratingly, although he does sometimes reveal the people and places behind certain stories. If nothing else, it sends you straight back to the novels where her fierce intelligence remains alive and undimmed.

13/08/18: Doc Pasquale – Back in the Rain: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (2015)

This is a very short book – I read it on a couple of tube journeys – without any page numbers. Frustratingly, roughly half of it is backstory detailing how Dylan came to be in the position to write and record this masterpiece. The basic facts of his 1967–1974 life and career are conveyed concisely and with empathy, but if you have read other Dylan books you will find no remarkable new insights here. The analysis of the album itself – a record famously made and then re-made before it was released – forms the all-too-brief core of the book. A few typos slightly spoil Back in the Rain, but it works well as a useful companion to the album. I just wish the author had dug deeper into the topic.

12/08/18: Patrick Süskind – The Pigeon (1988)

My third novel in a row from the Holborn Library 20p shelf. This is a brilliantly written account of one day in the life of a man whose world is turned upside down by a simple event. Translated from German by John E. Woods, the writing perfectly captures the sense of balance and control that is threatened by the bird of the title. Jonathan Noel is brought to the brink of total despair by the sudden appearance of a pigeon in the hallway of his apartment. This unexpected arrival is a symbol of randomness in a life that is otherwise completely regimented. The author expertly conveys how this one breach of order begins a chain reaction of existential torment. It’s a mark of the strong premise and its execution that you simultaneously sympathise with Noel’s plight while realising just how ridiculous he is being.

11/08/18: Muriel Spark – The Driver’s Seat (1970)

This made the shortlist of the “lost Booker Prize” of 1970, which was retrospectively announced in 2010 and won by J.G. Farrell’s Troubles.

It’s a disturbing short novel about a woman who travels to another country and arranges her own murder – a study of mental illness and alienation. There are flashes of wit and social insight, but the knowledge that it will end in a violent death – and the cold, clinical way that the protagonist seems to engineer this – makes for a rather nasty read.

It also has some of the strangest jacket copy I have ever encountered:

11/08/18: Iris Murdoch – The Italian Girl (1964)

“The extreme beauty of the scene put me into an instant trance. It was always a trick of my nature to be subject to these sudden enchantments of the visible world, when a particular scene would become so radiant with form and reality as to snatch me out of myself and make me oblivious of all my purposes. Beauty is such self-forgetting.” (p.59)

This was 20p from Holborn library – astonishing value for money.

Plot: engraver Edmund Narraway learns that his mother has died and returns to his large family home to pay his respects. There, he finds his family in a state of extreme disarray. His brother is having an affair, as is his brother’s wife. Meanwhile, his niece is pregnant. Edmund soon becomes tangled up in their relationships, with his presence only complicating matters further.

As always with Iris Murdoch, there’s real intensity in these situations: every conversation seems highly charged. Every meeting has consequences. Every action has dramatic implications. It’s a short but thrilling novel that’s sadly not regarded as one of Murdoch’s best.

From the book jacket: “Against a hallucinatory background of water garden and camellia trees, real emotional violence keeps breaking out. Once again Miss Murdoch shows her extraordinary talent for keeping the story going and the reader guessing through a series of events which peel off layer after layer of delusion till the core is revealed.” I can only agree as regards the “hallucinatory background” but “keeping the story going” is damning this great writer with faint praise.

06/08/18: Iris Murdoch – The Sea, The Sea (1978)

A dazzling novel that understandably won the Booker Prize in 1978. Charles Arrowby is a successful theatre director and playwright who retires to the sea and begins writing his memoirs. People from his past keep showing up and he is witness to strange, possibly supernatural events (I especially liked the haunted-house motifs). He discovers that his childhood sweetheart, Mary “Hartley” Fitch, is living nearby and embarks on an obsessive quest to claim her from her husband – even though it is made clear that she has not aged well.

In fact, we soon question Charles’ recollections altogether: was the couple’s entire youthful relationship something he had idealised and embellished over time? Is he truly infatuated or having some kind of delusional breakdown? Just how reliable is this narrator, who we often see more “objectively” through the eyes of his various visitors? As Charles’ obsession grows, the situation begins to spiral out of anyone’s control.

The sea is described wonderfully: almost a character in its own right. There’s also a lot about food (“Only a fool despises tomato ketchup,” he notes at one point). Iris Murdoch’s fiction often seems emotionally overwrought, but it’s actually that quality that I admire about her writing. Situations and relationships are examined in microscopic detail and with a spiritual, philosophical depth that other authors simply do not attempt. You know from the start that someone is going to drown in the sea, but it’s a mark of the tangled threads she weaves that you can never guess who.

As the book progresses, the plot takes increasingly surreal twists. Murdoch plays with elements of mysticism, melodrama and even farce as she works through to a resolution (of sorts). Like all great art, it works on multiple levels and leaves you thinking.