I’m so sorry this is so late – life and work have got in the way, I only finished this yesterday morning and here I am, trying to get the review in by the end of the month. I am enjoying the project and I massively welcome and appreciate everyone’s input: sorry if you’ve been waiting, poised with your amazing comments and reviews!
I’m going to start the next one on Friday, and that’s a promise!
Iris Murdoch – “The Black Prince”
(October 2018)
This is really one of those books that changes as you re-read it, I think – and I’ll be interested to hear other people’s experiences if they’re doing a re-read. I must have read it first in 1995, as that’s when my oldest copy is dated, although maybe I’d read my friend Mary’s copy before then. I remember then, at age 23, identifying with Julian and thinking she was great, and feeling it was all a bit Lolita-y. Now of course I’m nearer Bradley’s age than Julian’s and I see that actually it’s a book about menopausal women and the horrors of marriage!
I can see this in the context of a phase of IM’s experimenting with form. This story of eccentric loner retired tax man failed author Bradley and his violent falling in love with his rival, Arnold Baffin’s, daughter, alongside a backdrop of his sister’s arrival fresh from her failed marriage and his ex-wife’s return to London as a widow, with her weird brother. Although the scene moves from London to the coast, it’s quite one of her “closed” novels in that there’s a small group of characters and not much of the outside world – apart from Bradley’s colleague, who himself is pulled into the fold rather amusingly by the end. Where “An Accidental Man” worked through party chatter and chapters of letters, this narrative is nested within layers of editorial and commentary, something IM didn’t return to in the other novels as far as I can think. I will find it interesting to read “The Sacred and Profane Love Machine” in light of these experiments.
I had forgotten about what is pretty much a rape scene, when Bradley falls upon Julian having seen her dressed as a schoolgirl Hamlet. I really don’t understand how I’ve missed this stuff in two books now: I’ve always been a feminist, a domestic violence campaigner, alive to the assaults women experience day in, day out. It’s not like I was awakened by #MeToo and can suddenly see this stuff. I’m not saying IM condones it (although she talks here and there about people wanting to be forced, etc.) but it’s pretty horrible. I’m also not saying Bradley is a nice or attractive character, so he’s even more rapey than almost-forgiveably horrified by himself Garth in the last novel.
This novel is unusual in my mind in not really having a saint or an enchanter. Bradley is obsessed with Arnold and in love with Julian in some way, and induces a slavish secretarial following in Francis Marloe, but not really in an enchanter way. He’s also “a failed person” but “a trouble maker” (p. 43) – although he’s messy and weepy and contingent, being seen as an active stirrer makes him unsaintly, plus he’s into psychoanalysis, not something that’s often a positive in the novels. Bradley achieves some kind of unselfing when he becomes a void on loving Julian (p. 232) but this is soon lost in control and ego. Maybe Shakespeare is Bradley’s enchanter. Various men are described as demonic, but in a sort of more general way, somehow.
It’s really a musing on art, isn’t it – or a musing on musings on art, maybe, which follows the metafictional form of the novel. I had to both smile at this and wonder if it’s IM’s description of her own work in Arnold’s:
“he lives in a sort of rosy haze with Jesus and Mary and Buddha and Shiva and the Fisher King all chasing round and round dressed up as people in Chelsea. (p. 137)
I also liked the aside about critics, which would have been a nice epigraph for my book on IM and the Common Reader:
‘So the critics are just stupid?’
‘It needs no theory to ell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can.’ (p. 240)
We do have our usual themes. The Civil Service is there, with Bradley’s ex-job as a tax inspector. Thinking of siblings, we only have Bradley and Priscilla and Christian and Francis. There’s plenty of hair: Rachel’s is gingery and wiry, while Julian has a weird crest which turns into those familiar flat metallic locks we’ve had before. There’s a heck of a lot of water – lots and lots of women’s ugly crying for a start, and then the sea in the Patara sequence, bringing calm but emphasising Julian and Bradley’s differences, she cavorting in the waves, he unable to swim. And a mist comes over the sea and over them as they try to live in their little bubble of love for a few days. Christian has a face like “a grotesque ancient mask” (p. 93), another small theme we notice again and again. Bradley stares in the windows of the Baffin house and happily we are back chasing a pale thing through the night, except this time it’s a balloon!
Doubling: we have two locations, two ended marriages bring people into Bradley’s life, and scenes at the Baffin household of mayhem and violence at both ends of the novel, even before P. Loxias’ intro and outro. Rachel and Priscilla both cry, half-dressed, in bed. Roger and Bradley both have relationships with very much younger women, Roger being successful with his. There are stones on the beach which are brought back to the bungalow and arranged. The buffalo woman is a strange symbol, usually accompanying someone of great wisdom, but broken until Francis mends it …
There is humour – Bradley failing to catch his train over and over again, his identification with the Post Office Tower and his horror at using the simile of a red-hot needle through the liver which he has picked up from Priscilla. Much of the novel is too horrific, though, for a smile to be raised.
Links with the other novels do abound. I’ve always felt this had a lot in common with “The Sea, The Sea” in terms of the unreliable and egocentric narrator, but this time round he also reminded me of Hilary in “A Word Child”, possibly because of the brother-sister relationship and back story. As in “An Accidental Man”, at least Rachel and also to an extent Priscilla are shown to have been diminished by their marriages in what could be brought round to a feminist tone. There’s also a lot about “women of a certain age” becoming hysterical and basically menopausal, which is not something I associated IM for writing about until I remembered all those faded and drying women, from “A Severed Head” through “The Nice and the Good” and onwards. Bradley not wanting to be “a nebulous bit of ectoplasm swaying around in other people’s lives” (p. 49) reminds us of is it Willy Kost who uses the same metaphor? Broken china features, as in “An Accidental Man” and a set of books are torn up, as Rupert’s book is in “A Fairly Honourable Defeat”. Rachel, suddenly naked to the waist, recalls Annette in “Flight from the Enchanter” and “The Italian Girl”. Julian climbs over a suburban fence (and her mother fails to), recalling so many fence climbers, from “Bruno’s Dream” maybe particularly. At the end Julian goes off to Italy in a car with her father – “The Flight from the Enchanter” springs to mind there, and another one? The theme of an ordeal which Bradley mentions he has in relation to Julian is going to come up in “The Green Night” and “A Good Apprentice”.
One last point: I was thrilled to notice a quotation from Njal’s Saga, one of my favourite Icelandic sagas:
There was even a sort of perfection about it. She had taken such a perfect revenge upon the two men in her life. Some women never forgive. ‘I would not give him my hair for a bowstring at the end. I would not raise a finger to save him dying’ (p. 382)
Those last two sentences are said by Gunnar’s wife as she fails to help him survive an attack on their homestead. How lovely to find that cropping up in an IM novel!
So a magnificent work that’s uncomfortable to read. Do we ALL know someone who threw it across a room and refused to finish it?
Please either place your review in the comments, discuss mine or others’, or post a link to your review if you’ve posted it on your own blog, Goodreads, etc. I’d love to know how you’ve got on with this book and if you read it having read others of Murdoch’s novels or this was a reread, I’d love to hear your specific thoughts on those aspects, as well as if it’s your first one!
If you’re catching up or looking at the project as a whole, do take a look at the project page, where I list all the blog posts so far.
Adventures in reading, running and working from home 
Jan 30, 2019 @ 08:44:26
I love this one and find it so annoying and disturbing at the same time. I’d forgotten about the sexual encounter with Bradley and Julian actually but I remember trying to analyse that a few years ago and couldn’t make out what I thought of it. Yes it is kind of rape (could be seen as is what I mean) but then I also think IM was kind of obsessed with the loss of virginity and what that’s like as a basically brutal and frightening experience (or can be) and certainly more commonly was when sex was not a thing to be talked or educated about, so maybe it’s meant from her side more as that from her side. But it is weird, and much more fetishistic in this one with the Hamlet garb. Bradley is just really very screwed up in what he thinks about women though, he seems both fascinated and repulsed by women’s bodies as if he can’t quite decide if he’s reacting in a sexual way or just recoiling in horror. His descriptions of Rachel and Priscilla are downright horrible but at the same time he’s had a good look at them in order to appraise.
I’m not sure I do like the women much. Rachel is complex and I can’t decide if she invents/schemes etc to try and make herself the victim and Bradley the “fall guy” or if it really all is as she says. Julian is fickle and a bit of an air-head really to me (that might be harsh) but I guess because she’s so young and overly romantic about things. She doesn’t seem to have a lot of intelligence or really be that interested. Priscilla just gets on my nerves I’m sorry to say. She’s painted as being this sort of blubbering hysterical mess and I should feel sorry for her but somehow she grates on me a bit. All of which is a shame because I would like to be able to stick up for them more.
I find it complex as a book, probably her most complex in terms of form and detail. There’s a lot more I could say probably. It really should have won more prizes, this one, I find it odd that she didn’t get the booker prize for this.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jan 31, 2019 @ 22:26:44
I think it is a very prize-winningy book (though I had completely forgotten that Sacred and Profane Love Machine won the Whitbread Novel Award). I think I quite liked Christian because although she was awful, she was strong and manipulative rather than weak. I’m not sure the “rape” is a deflowering – doesn’t he manage but only briefly a couple of times before being consumed by Hamlet-lust? And I’d assumed Jullan wasn’t a virgin, but I have made that up myself. It is certainly not a book that I would throw against a wall but I had forgotten that it moves along so slowly and almost frustratingly – I’d lost the fact they only get to the seaside 3/4 of the way through.
LikeLike
Feb 01, 2019 @ 08:00:40
No she might not be a virgin I suppose, I’d remembered her as teenage but I think she’s early 20s? But yes you’re right there are a couple of abortive attempts (excuse the phrase). I don’t know what to make of that really there’s lots of horrible interpretations to be made there.
As for Bradley, you can talk about unreliable narrators, he’s extremely egocentric and warped and I think that kind of makes the novel frustrating in a way because you want more scope than his tunnel vision allows. But I remember finding The Sea, The Sea frustrating for similar reasons. That was certainly more of a throw against the wall novel for me than this one I think.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Feb 02, 2019 @ 11:41:55
Oh, that’s interesting, I have in the past been more tolerant of Charles Arrowby than Bradley. But I did begin to feel a bit sorry for him this time round because I saw echoes with Hilary of A Word Child, which has been a favourite of mine (I notice I’m shifting on a few this time round so not making any claims for anything I haven’t yet re-read!).
LikeLike
Jan 30, 2019 @ 13:28:53
I might as well admit from the outset that I’m not a *huge* fan of IM. I’ve read The Bell, The Sea, The Sea ( my favourite by far), The Sandcastle, and A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which I couldn’t even finish and very nearly threw across the room in anger and boredom :-), though I could never do that to a book, of course.
Yet, I keep on trying, telling myself I must be wrong. I’ve bought The Philosopher’s Pupil, I recently put A Severed Head on my wishlist, and I’m going to put this one on it too, but I don’t get my hopes up too high. She’s entertaining to read I suppose, but her philosophy gets in the way (God, those ridiculous characters in AFHD ! Satan against Jesus ?). Yes, she’s a writer of ideas, but when I read, I expect aesthetic pleasure, not a moral lesson, unless the author writes like Dickens or Eliot.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Feb 02, 2019 @ 11:43:13
Thank you for your comments, and well done for trying so hard with IM – I’m not sure I’d have persisted as long as you have! I have to admit I prefer her to Dickens, although Eliot is up there with her – at least there aren’t laboured silly names in Murdoch …
LikeLike
Jan 31, 2019 @ 02:41:34
Just scraped in once again! I had conflicted feelings about this one, despite enjoying it, I kept feeling as though I should despise Bradley but somehow by the end I didn’t. Bradley and Julian’s relationship also felt wrong for so many different reasons and the scene with the Hamlet get up is disturbing but at the same time, I was almost rooting for them to succeed as a couple.
I don’t think there was any character in the novel who I really liked, I agree with Michelle that although I felt I was supposed to feel sorry for Rachel and Priscilla, I didn’t, possibly because we are always seeing them through Bradley’s biased eyes. Obviously a reread will be in order to help with my confusion and it’s always interesting to see how you re-readers experience the novel on repeat visits!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2696304528
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jan 31, 2019 @ 22:27:58
If anyone scraped in it was me in the first place! I was giving the books 2 months by now last time round, I think. But we can do it! As a re-reader, by the way, I’m enjoying seeing the books through your fresh eyes. And I LOVE the quotes you’ve pulled out in your Goodreads review.
LikeLike
Jan 31, 2019 @ 13:19:15
Yes, we may all know someone who has thrown this book across the room! My British Lit teacher, to whom I had lent the paperback shortly after its initial release, told me he did so after he was half way through, and returned it unfinished (and tea-stained). He said the characters were cold. At the time, I didn’t understand why he felt that way because my 20-year-old self found Bradley to be so passionate and because he wrote so beautifully about love. Reading it this time, I think I understand his reaction better. It’s partly that, as has been mentioned, these characters, as filtered through Bradley’s consciousness, at least, are not especially sympathetic and can even seem annoying.
But I think his reaction may also have been because he didn’t know what to make of a character who is at once so self-involved and so seemingly transformed by love. The language of the book is beautiful and insightful. It is almost as if he has come across a city corollary to Effingham’s experience in the bog, that sort of un-selfing that allows him a more generous vision, a vision which, like Effingham’s, may be short-lived as the ego intrudes again. But I do think in some ways he tries to bring that larger vision into his “book.” He doesn’t go easy on himself as he tries to explain his state of mind, and in that sex scene with Julian he lets us see how frightening and painful it is for Julian. His narrative is unreliable and self-serving but in comparison to the relatively superficial and equally self-serving postscript narratives claiming their various theories for Bradley’s actions, it seems more thoughtful and open-hearted, and therefore, for me, more winning. That may be why I always end up liking Bradley despite his terrible actions.
For me this time the turning point was his decision not to tell Julian about Priscilla’s death. Up until that moment I was rooting for him, even on my fourth read through, knowing how it would turn out. I must say I found reading it this time just as compelling as the first time I read it. And, possibly thanks to the insights I’ve gotten from this group, I found it quite funny. The comings and goings of the characters, the way they pop up in Bradley’s life, knocking on his door, just as the right crisis moment, are really quite farcical. The pacing of the book is extraordinary, moving from brilliant thoughts about love to farce to dramatic action, never a dull moment. I find in some ways I don’t want to over-analyze it because it contains so much. Just like the first time, it bowled me over.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jan 31, 2019 @ 22:29:30
I agree, I find it just as compelling each time round, and I had also forgotten quite a lot, for example that the seaside episode starts so late through the book. I also agree that not telling about Priscilla is his moment of weakness and almost evil.
LikeLike
Jan 31, 2019 @ 20:52:18
Sorry my offering this month is at the last minute and I must confess that I have not re-read this one this month – so my thoughts relate to a reading a few months ago. But thanks for the reviews so far – they have made me think and go scuttling back the book and wishing I had made more effort to re-read it afresh, for the Readalong. I must try harder next month with The Sacred and Profane Love Machine which I am not sure I have read before.
The Black Prince is an amazing complex book and there are layers and layers of things to comment. One of the main features is the Bradley is even more unreliable than most first-person narrators, especially when one goes back to the beginning and realises the significance of the Editor’s forward and when we get the end and read the postscripts and one has to mentally revise everything, and feeling unsettled by the uncertainty.
It is certainly a bleak but brilliant read. As Liz points out there are not many laughs, although there are some amusing observations of human behaviour and absurd incidents – such as the ladder scene in the night-time garden. There is as Peter points out this thread of farce throughout the whole novel which mirrors life.
As present-day readers we do have a different view of the sex scene between Julian and Bradley and I also found it shocking. One possible view is that one of the things that makes Murdoch such a good writer is that she can create scenes like this where she writes about sex as a powerful force. In this episode she does not romanticise or sensationalise but tells it as it is for both parties – Bradley’s anxiety and Julian’s fear and the pain and the awkwardness and the general confusion of it all. She does not offer the scene for the reader’s judgement but I think because of recent awareness of sexual abuse and non -consensual sex we are more sensitive and feel we have to make a judgement. Julian is manipulative (I agree, Michelle, for me also she comes across as a self-centred air-head) and we do not see her as an obvious victim, but she has clearly been groomed and molested, and as Michelle also points out – the whole relationship is all wrong. As Peter points out Bradley is more to be despised for not telling Julian that Priscilla had died. Murdoch shows what human beings do when in the grip of obsession, and how destructive the ego can be.
It is a great book and stands on its own in Iris Murdoch’s work and it is certainly challenging for the reader.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jan 31, 2019 @ 22:32:09
I was certainly very last minute here so don’t worry: and even if people are late I don’t mind. I think it does stand alone, you’re right, and you can see why it won the prize. I can also see that our attitudes to the rape are filtered through current events and mores, although I’ve always been very aware of such issues and surprised myself by not remembering it. I remembered more dressing up, though, so it obviously loomed large in my experience in some way. Oh and if you read it a few months ago, I wouldn’t expect you to work through it again so soon – you’ve been able to pull together good thoughts on it, thank you.
LikeLike
“The Black Prince” roundup and “The Sacred and Profane Love Machine” preview #IMReadalong @IrisMurdoch | Adventures in reading, running and working from home
Jan 31, 2019 @ 22:48:18
Feb 01, 2019 @ 07:38:10
I wonder why it was this book made me go pop at about page 200. Perhaps I was all Murdoched out, wrong time and all that. 😊
LikeLiked by 1 person
Feb 02, 2019 @ 11:44:02
See Peter’s comment above: his TUTOR threw it and got tea on it!!! I don’t know, you were fine with most of her others but you really didn’t like this. If I could access the Yahoo group I’d have a look to see what you said!
LikeLike
Feb 04, 2019 @ 11:24:10
Yes, it was probably around page 200 that he threw it. Even so, he was one of my favorite professors, and it just struck me that his last name was, coincidentally. Bradley.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Feb 04, 2019 @ 11:41:02
Oh that’s quite amusing, isn’t it! On p.200 we’re half-way through and Bradley and Julian are discussing Hamlet.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jun 22, 2019 @ 11:07:20
This was my first encounter with The Black Prince.
As Liz puts it, this is one of Murdoch’s ‘closed’ novels, featuring a first-person narrator, a small cast, and a limited number of settings. I find this variety of Murdoch’s novels so much more rewarding than her more sprawling works. They allow for a deeper exploration of a small number of relationships and dynamics.
I was moved at several points during The Black Prince. I had to remind myself that I was being moved by Bradley’s swooning descriptions of love. Was he really in love with Julian? Or was he acting out, in a rather adolescent fashion, a performance of being ‘in love’, to enliven an otherwise redundant and unfulfilled life? Even more darkly, is he issuing these verbose proclamations to lend an undeserved dignity to his base lust for a much younger woman?
As often as being moved I laughed aloud. Both at the farcical situations that Murdoch engineers – such as repeated appearance of the Post Office Tower when Bradley is (hoping to be) in a priapic mood – and his gimlet-eyed observations of his supposed friends and family. The humour and tone of Bradley’s narration, replete with classical references and literary allusions, reminded me of Tarquin Winot in John Lanchester’s ‘The Debt to Pleasure’.
As I read on, however, I started to feel the same as Michelle describes in her comment. I was taken in at the start of the novel by Bradley’s pomposity and wickedness. Only semi self-aware, he is a character one can laugh with for one page, and then laugh at the for the next. However, his lack of moral progress or character development also left me rather bored of his voice and hungry for a perspective outside his egotistical “tunnel vision”.
Of course, we do then get a multiplicity of these perspectives at the end in the form of five post-scripts, not including our protagonist’s own final words. There is some great humour in these sections, especially Francis’ crude Freudianism (“paper: Papa”). By the very end, however, I was left rather bombarded and bamboozled by such a rapid hail of alternative viewpoints and diagnoses of Bradley’s mind.
More than any other novel so far, I wasn’t sure how I felt about getting to the end and saying goodbye to The Black Prince.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Jun 25, 2019 @ 10:15:30
Thank you for your comment John, and lots of good points there. It is an odd one and it bears a re-reading when you know what he does through to the end and can (maybe) assess him more clearly. It does divide people, too – I know people for whom it’s their least favourite of the novels and those who love it! I thikn you’re right in that BP doesn’t have moral progress or character development, the only changes in his character being those seen in the shifting viewpoint of the chorus around him.
LikeLike