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.
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