This is one of my favourite Murdochs so far. Everyone in it is unbearable one way or another and they all treat each other awfully. It doesn't end especially well for most of them though the somewhat evil Julius seems fairly unscathed. The plot is ridiculous and relies on nobody ever having a sensible conversation, but it doesn't really matter, its wild and funny and outrageous. ( )

An interesting novel with such a small cast of characters that it seems surprising that nobody has turned it into a play. The characters have fairly staid middle-class lives until one of them for his own amusement makes them suspicious of their loved ones. Eventually he reveals all, but too late to avoid a tragedy.

Notable for philosophical musings and for a sympathetic portrayal of a gay couple.

I hate Julius! ( )

This is my third Murdoch of the summer—one of her later books, and one that feels like it's synthesized a lot of her themes. There's a large cast of characters, including a Hilda and Rupert, a bourgeois, slightly smug middle-aged couple; their spoiled Oxford dropout son Peter; the husband's sweet and insecure younger brother Simon and his slightly aloof partner Axel; Morgan, Hilda's extremely neurotic sister just back from the States and her completely hapless ex-husband Tallis; Tallis's bitter, nasty elderly father; Leonard and Julius, a manipulative, vaguely evil-but-charismatic academic who toys with everyone. Literally—he refers to himself often as a "puppet master," and the whole book centers around his attempts to break up the couples and manipulate everyone's lives, with varying degrees of success. There's a lot of philosophy, as with all Murdoch's work, but in this case it serves as more of an underpinning to the storyline and less of a series of thinky interludes—there's a satan and a Christ character, lots of Shakespearean machinations and crossed signals and some intensely evocative (and very deliberately doled out) settings.

I wouldn't exactly call it a feel-good novel, since bad things happen to decent people and the worst characters emerge to go on with their lives, but there's a tiny (two or three sentences, blink and you've missed it) reveal toward the end that completely changes the reader's understanding of one of the central characters. It's also notable for her portrayal of the central gay couple as the most sympathetic and stable (and, in a way, decent) of the lot, coming only three years after the decriminalization of homosexual relations in Britain. Maybe not notable for Murdoch, but I imagine it was a breath of good air for a lot of folks reading it in 1970. Anyway, this was a super entertaining, if often dark, read—a lot of intrigue, some twisty explorations of good and evil, and and as a side note, an interesting testimony to the ephemerality of words on paper. ( )

A staple of many classic comedy plots is the malevolent genius who - usually to prove a point or settle a bet - does the author's work by manipulating other characters into betraying their partners. Eventually it's all resolved and we leave everyone at the end of Act III confused and a little bit disillusioned but otherwise unharmed. Shakespeare uses it all the time, and possibly the most perfect example is in Mozart's Così fan tutte. And we all know it's a stage convention and enjoy it, even if Mozart reminds us that this is dangerous stuff to play with. But what if it wasn't a comedy, and someone started doing that sort of thing to real people like you and me? - Or at least people like the sort Iris Murdoch knew in 1970, the senior civil servants, academics, students and middle-class housewives of contemporary London.

Murdoch explores the nasty things that can happen when you deliberately take people's illusions away from them and play around cynically with their emotions. The mix of psychological realism and farce is full of strange twisted variants on comedy set-pieces, like the stolen letters, the eavesdropping scene, the nude scene, the burnt-dinner scene, and even the falling-in-the-pool scene, and it can't help being funny, but it's funny in a very grim sort of way, and you know this isn't going to end well. It sometimes seems to be taking Adorno's famous dictum a step further and showing where social comedy fails us in a mid-20th century world that has to deal with the Holocaust and the threat of global nuclear destruction. Or maybe it's saying that only (black) comedy can deal with such a world...? ( )