As promised, I’ve managed to get this one read a bit earlier than the December and January reads, so there should be plenty of time for discussion before my round-up post. I’ve had some front covers sent to me already but always have room for more for my post at the end of the month!
Note I can’t help but have plot spoilers in this review, so maybe save it to read later if you haven’t read the book yet and intend to!
So this one was of course a re-read, probably my fourth read of it; I’ve always seen this is a bit of a minor work (and only really remembered the shocking act near the end) but I got such a lot out of it this time, and reassessed my feelings on various characters, as I seem to this time round, as a married mid-forties person. It’s so interesting how our views change, isn’t it.
Iris Murdoch – “The Sacred and Profane Love Machine”
(11 January 2019)
We find the Gavender family, Blaise the conman psychotherapist (in his own estimation), placid Harriet, wrapped up in her things and home and family, and tortured David who is, sorry, just being a fastidious teenager; and next door there’s Monty Small, mourning his wife and wondering how to escape from the detective he created. But Blaise has a secret and she has a child and a weird friend, and they’re all about to clash …
What a rich setting for a novel! Two houses and a flat, two families, two sons, a sort of Greek chorus observing things in the shape of two misfit neighbours, and then a drunken truth-teller. Although there’s a small cast, this doesn’t feel as suffocating as some of her novels, maybe because there are voices from outside. And we have lots of pleasing tropes that echo through the other novels – including many people standing in gardens looking in!
The opening of the book is very strong, with three separate characters all gazing at a small figure in the garden of Hood House. We also see Harriet’s “pale form” (p. 14) in the garden early on. We also have Emily running down the street away from Blaise and being chased, and then falling (doesn’t someone else do this?). And hooray – Monty climbs a fence, continuing a long stream of fence-climbing in these middle-class thinking folk that IM likes to write about! I also now feel that people opening their tops to their waists is a trope and not an echo of this book or that book – Pinn does it to Monty here (but he doesn’t act on the temptation). Ectoplasm is one that’s only come in since about “The Nice and the Good,” with Harriet describing herself as it here (p. 238).
Cluttered rooms, that favourite of IM’s, are only really found in Harriet’s domain, where she’s collected all but the “serious family stuff” and gaudy things from holidays. It’s awful when these are disposed of later, isn’t it! Poor old Harriet, I could remember what was going to happen all the way through, the downside to re-reading, although there are some pretty clanging portents, too. Back to the usual themes and we have soldiers – Harriet’s father and brother. Have we had a soldier recently? We have a big important book which Blaise is failing to write. Edgar is a pink man with a fat face and fluffy hair – a real Murdoch type and of course Monty is dry and severe, another type. Just like when Gracie in Accidental Man messes up the bits of London that IM most loves, Blaise is “not interested in pictures” while Harriet has amazing pleasure from them: a sure marker of a dodgy character and a good one. Another indication of goodness and badness is in the reaction of the dogs to people, rolling around happily with Edgar, trying to eat Blaise!
There’s not so much water as there usually is, however the Thames acts as a separator between Blaise’s two households and crossing the river is always “a bad moment” for him. There are plenty of tears – or no tears in Monty’s case. There is some humour, I liked Monty being rather in thrall to his detective but then at the last moment being rescued by the actor who plays him. Also Pinn, when chasing Blaise the first time: “… he heard those sharp accelerating footsteps behind him and turned to see those slinky spectacles glinting in the sun” (p. 83). I also like Monty’s pricking of Blaise’s worry about Harriet finding out about Emily:
‘I feel if Harriet ever knew about Emily the world would simply end in a huge explosion.’
‘Your ordeal is that it won’t. You’ll all go on existing, sleeping and eating and going to the lavatory.’ (p. 112)
There’s some great doubling, too, not only the two families, two households, two sons, two deflowerings but also a severing of the Achilles tendon in the TV detective series and when Blaise gets attacked by the dogs. There are two brothers in some kind of an asylum (as described in the novel).
On the portents, crikey! When Emily is having one of her moans about her second-best status in the arrangement, first of all she claims “I’m the flesh and she’s the spirit, don’t tell me, I know!” and then, chillingly, “God, sometimes I feel like people who go to an airport with a machine gun and just shoot everyone within sight. You simply have no idea how much I suffer” (p. 79). In addition, when Harriet is dealing with finding out about Emily, she brings to mind her soldiering family and then, “Harriet was determined to stay upright now in the gunfire” (p. 131). Did first-readers notice or go back to this?
Who is the saint and who the enchanter? I’m not sure there’s an enchanter as such, is there? Blaise likes to think he is and it’s interesting that all his patients do so much better when he withdraws from their lives, but he’s imposed himself on them more than being created as an enchanter. Harriet doesn’t think she’s a saint, finding her charity work and interests easy and boring, and feeling she’s selfish. But her last act is a selfless one, of course. Blaise thinks (or thought) of her as “not an intellectual but – what? – a sort of saint? Well, not a saint so much as a noble lady” (p. 58), also saying that she’s completely normal and absolutely open (as contrasted with his peculiar desires (unspecified) that he shares with Emily. Monty sees her as “a gentle utterly harmless person who could make no one her victim” (p. 179) however, these are both men seeing her through their eyes. There’s an indication of the nature of goodness when Monty remembers Sophie’s dying: “He ought to have accepted that suffering from her with profound gratitude as a proof of her love” (p. 22) but he didn’t.
Is Edgar the saint? He loves selflessly, he keeps his odd desires to himself, and strives to help others. He tells Monty to let Sophie go, with a short piece on death (p. 263), counsels David wonderfully:
One’s mind is such an old rubbish heap. All sorts of little bits of machinery start up. Don’t bother about them. Watch them a while, then make a change. (p. 315)
which is the complete opposite of Blaine’s analysis and meddling or Monty’s avoidance, and accepts his loss at the end in the same frame of mind. IM seems to make a clear statement about him at the very end:
He might resemble a huge pink baby and spend his time in libraries reading very obscure texts, but he had had his share of soldiering through nightmares, and things had happened to him of which he could not speak even to Monty. (p. 317)
and in the last words:
Three good-looking women, he thought, and all of them after me! And he could not help being a little bit cheered up and consoled as he got into the Bentley and set off alone for Oxford.
I thought a lot more of Edgar this time around. Whoever the saint is, Harriet has learned and changed by the end of the book, realising she’d not been prepared for the battle she had to fight – “for a situation where she was not needed she had no heroism” (p. 235). She tells Monty she has become her own person and hard in the middle, although he’s not hugely impressed and seemed to prefer her vague married form.
So a deep and satisfying and complicated book (though the inter-relationships are not too hard to understand this time round). And a new favourite character in Edgar.
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 
Feb 18, 2019 @ 17:06:12
Well I couldn’t remember anything about this one at all. I had to look back at my own old review, 9 years ago, so utterly useless, but apparently I really enjoyed it. I suppose I have read getting on for a 1000 books since then and it’s impossible to remember them all. I remembered the name Blaise, but everything else is blank. Definitely a very rich Murdoch like setting.
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Feb 28, 2019 @ 19:12:57
I’m not going to blame you for forgetting it, and I’d forgotten loads of the story and the pivotal scenes, to be honest!
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Feb 21, 2019 @ 01:26:11
Well, it wasn’t one of my favorites but, as always, I feel like there are things I miss on a first read. There did seem to be lots of things in this one that reminded me of other novels including the non existent Septimus Leech from The Black Prince and Harriet staring at pictures in The National Gallery like Dora in The Bell. Monty reminded me of Willy in The Nice and the Good, hiding away from others because of tragedy while Harriet reminded me of Hilda in A Fairly Honourable Defeat in that initial confident happiness that is destroyed.
I found what happened to Hilda very sad as was the burning of her things and the fate of the poor dogs. I didn’t notice the portents I’m afraid and was completely taken by surprise at Harriet’s violent end. Luka too broke my heart and I think this is why I seem to have focused on the evil of Blaise and Emily in my review!
I agree with Liz that I couldn’t really see an enchanter figure, Pinn tries to enchant David and Monty but both are far more enchanted by Kiki St Loy although Monty seems to be able to rebuff the charms of them all as he is still enchanted by the specter of Sophie. Blaise calls him ‘our local divinity’ but I think that’s a role he rejects and that Harriet is the closest to saintly as Edgar seems to have a dark past of his own.
A satisfying read but just one that didn’t shine for me I’m afraid.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2723520967
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Feb 28, 2019 @ 19:16:25
I love the details you picked out in your review, esp of people’s clothes and decor. There’s a huge contrast between the two households there, isn’t there! I don’t suppose I picked out the portents first time round (oh, so long ago so I don’t remember) so it was interesting to see if they leapt out at new readers, so thank you for commenting on that point!
I have taken four goes for it to rise quite high inmy estimation: I don’t remember it really standing out before, tho I fear I identified with picky old David, reading it as a teen myself!
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Feb 23, 2019 @ 23:24:00
Never read Iris Murdoch but your review has inspired me to add her to my tbr list.
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Feb 28, 2019 @ 19:16:51
Oh great- do pop back to the relevant review and let us know what you think of whichever one you choose to read!
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Feb 24, 2019 @ 08:33:42
Mostly with this one (and probably as usual for me) I focused on the two women. What I always found fascinating about this one is this binary opposition between the “good” wife and the “evil” other woman, both of which are societal viewpoints as much as anything else (the title doesn’t help I think just because on a surface level you go looking for the sacred and the profane in characteral form and end up assigning it accordingly) but situationally I think both women are more complex and their motivations are not as simple.
Take Emily for example, who you can say is the other woman/depraved/overtly sexual/money grabbing etc. But why is she? If you consider the position she’s placed in, having met and begun a relationship with a married man and essentially having become dependent, emotionally and financially on him, what else is she going to be? Survival is key to most people and Emily’s status as the mistress is precarious as Blaise can just leave her if he chooses to. I suppose what I’m saying is this societal idea of other women/mistresses as home-wreckers or evil or whatever is unfair when you consider the minutae of that role. To me Emily looks like someone struggling to cope and hanging on by her fingernails. It’s Blaise really that I don’t like just for creating that situation and being too weak to do anything helpful about it. Rather like Martin Lynch-Gibbon and his treatment of Georgie in A Severed Head.
Harriet I struggle with, as I do with a few of her saintly virtuous wife characters (I had similar issues with Hilda in A Fairly Honourable Defeat) because you can say she’s servile, self-effacing, walked all over maybe, but she’s also dependent on her marriage and status as wife, and being the supportive understanding one has sort of been given to her as her “place”. For some women in that situation it might be a case of “what else can I do?” Less so now maybe, I think it’s as much a comment on a time when marriages were still supposed to be worked at and preserved even when things like that happened.
But that dynamic, anyhow, is so rich and complex and quite unlike anything in any of her other novels. Even A Severed Head or Message to the Planet, where you have similar scenarios, don’t enter into these questions and ideas in quite the same way. So it was a startling read for me in many ways, even on re-reading, and brilliant as well of course.
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Feb 28, 2019 @ 19:17:56
Yes, I found it startling, too, and I’m loving your woman-centred approaches to the books, thank you. You’re right about the opposition they’re cast into, although I’m more sympathetic to poor old Harriet – maybe because I’m effectively a middle-aged housewife myself!
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Feb 25, 2019 @ 12:01:34
When I first read this novel, shortly after the initial paperback was released, I found it disappointing because it seemed to contain less incident than the Murdoch novels I’d read before. There were lots of domestic scenes and some wonderful descriptions but without the kind of heightened images I’d grown used to – no balloons trailing through the evening sky (BP), no pigeons flying through the underground (AFHD), no bats crawling across the floor (Unicorn). But a lot of thinking and lots of conversation. On this read I found these “lacks” to be virtues. This is, on the face of it, a very common domestic tale; it’s the depth with which she delves into these characters that makes it uncommon. I agree with Liz that, although this is another book with a small cast of inter-related characters, it has a more open feel.
This time it also felt particularly merciless to me. Characters leave the novel at their most despairing (reminiscent of Dorina in Accidental Man); Blaise, who wants to be “let off the hook,” is given a sudden reprieve at Harriet’s expense and then blames Monty for everything; Monty also benefits from a kind of deus ex machina that whisks him off to Italy after he makes a disturbing confession; Luca’s fate is not particularly hopeful, and one wonders how much Emily and Blaise really care or think about him at the end of the novel; similarly, the dogs’ fate seems terribly cruel but appears to have little impact on any of the characters. These characters do not pay as they earn (to paraphrase Honor Klein). And perhaps some characters pay too much. Thankfully there is Edgar, who seems to be able to “welcome defeat” but also looks forward to the future with hope.
I agree that the enchanter figure becomes more diffuse in this book; I think some elements of the magician figure from previous novels are picked up by the character of Monty. As an author he exercises control over the characters in his detective novels as well as the character of Magnus Bowles who he has created to help Blaise hide his affair with Emily. At times he even seems to treat his neighbors like characters. At Harriet’s lowest moment, he counsels her with a passive fatalism that could have come from the lips of Julius King: “You are not capable of suddenly ‘living free’ . . . You have got to act the humble, powerless part. You cannot and ought not to claim the dignity of will and action. In other words, you’ve got to behave like a saint. . .” Although he later softens his statement, that impulse to deny her freedom is typical of Murdochian manipulators.
There is a point in the novel where Monty expediently “kills off” his fictional Magnus, leaving Harriet adrift. Shortly thereafter, Murdoch pulls the rug out from under the reader by doing something very similar. I can’t help thinking that Murdoch, who expressed concern that the crystalline structures of her early novels impeded her characters’ freedom, is using Monty to play with the idea of her own authorial control. That gives me more to ponder in this incredibly rich novel, which I found to be a very good read on my third or fourth go-round.
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Feb 28, 2019 @ 19:19:39
This is definitely one that gets better with re-reads, isn’t it, perhaps ignored for the wonderful run that we’re about to start (I can’t WAIT to read “A Word Child” again! I love your point about Monty / Murdoch – very interesting stuff. And you’re right about those Julius King-like comments he makes to Harriet – a softened Julius living in disguise, maybe!
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Iris Murdoch Readalong: The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) – Bookish Beck
Feb 28, 2019 @ 08:00:19
Mar 01, 2019 @ 14:49:17
Sorry, I have missed the deadline again but here are my belated thoughts.
I do not remember reading this before, and so I came to it fresh, and I found it rich and powerful despite its bleakness. I agree with Peter that it feels merciless and there is a lack of hope at the end. Despite the promise of Emily’s pregnancy , one feels there is little hope for the future – neither she nor Blaise have really learnt anything, despite the most dreadful Blaise’s two sons are damaged and have been despatched – Emily is looking forward to the day when David will be independent and Luca is so damaged he cannot relate to his parents and effectively he has been ‘put away’. Yet Emily just rejoices in being a wife with a modernised bright kitchen.
I have just started The Word Child and it strikes me that Hilary Burde is a grown-up Luca.
Yes, at first glance, it is a domestic novel of middle-class adultery of a type which was popular at that time, but yet so many layers. First of all it reflects the time in which it was written which was after the first flush of sexual liberation of the 1960s and the Women’s Liberation Movement. But it was a pretty bleak for women and they were still very much subjugated by the male hegemony.
Emily enjoys the sexual freedom of the time when she had an affair with a married man but she is dependent on him economically and she longs for married respectability. As Michelle points out she is struggling and desperately trying to hang on while deceiving herself with a dream – which comes true but at what a cost!. Emily is an ‘unmarried mother’ and in the 1970s that came with a stigma. Harriet is the ideal wife but, although she has the contentment and comfort of her domesticity, she feels the need for protection of her dogs. She has night fears that all is not well, and the dogs become a symbol for Blaise of his own secret depravity.
Murdoch captures a time when women did not know who they were because the old models of what a woman should be had been and they were trying to work out what they should be. (As I type this I am thinking that this is still going on today of course.) At the same time, society expects them to conform to the traditional expectations, – nurturing mothers, beautiful or home-breaking mistresses, saintly wives etc . To illustrate Murdoch gives us three examples of mother/son relationships – Leonie/Monty, Emily/Luca and Harriet/David, all with different and faulty in their own way.
The 1970s was also quite a violent time politically – as the random act of terrorism which kills Harriet at the airport demonstrates.
As Liz so well observed there is a lot of doubling and there are elegant patterns. There is the interplay of the conscious and unconscious life illustrated by the dreams of each of the characters which continues outsider their moral and public lives.
There is the contrast between the commuter belt semi-rural home where Harriet and David are rooted and the rather squalid flats where Emily and Luca are placed.
Also the names of the houses are nicely matched – Hood House the family home brings to mind the idea of being wrapped up, safe and protected from sight. Monty’s house Lockett’s sounds like a place of imprisonment which reflects Monty’s state of mind and his relationship with his late wife. But I do like the images of the interior decoration and the tiles.
There is a wonderful contrast between Monty and Blaise. Monty has created two characters who do not exist and manufactures their lives – Milo Fane who is the protagonist in his successful novels and Magnus Bowles whose psychological condition he fabricates for Blaise as a fictitious patient who is an alibi for his weekly nights away in London with Emily.
Blaise deals with people’s inner life as a psychoanalyst but he has no imagination and no empathy – he regards Harriet as being insufficiently intellectual for him, yet the reader suspects he himself is not very bright. He knows the theory of psychoanalysis and just applies it to what the patient presents him with. Monty who is the writer of middle-brow fiction is actually a much better at interpreting people than Blaise as well as a successful author. One feels that Blaise’s book will never be published and his surviving patients do rather better without him.
Monty is a great character – he is a sort of magician figure: he is the artist and often like a puppet master he creates and manipulates, but he is also very much a hurt and flawed human being.
I am not sure Edgar is a saint, but he is very much a complement to Monty. I am very fond of him for his self-awareness and vulnerability. He appears rather as a rich buffoon but we are taken into his dark places after Harriet’s violent sacrificial death. We are told of his struggle when her death ‘broke into the terrible abode of his demons’ acknowledges sadly that ‘His love for women was unrequited and his love for men undeclared’ – which makes for a lonely life. But he is content that at the end ‘there were two people who needed him. He had two people of his own to love and cherish’.
I like Peter’s observation about how Iris Murdoch assumes authorial control, just like Monty does. We are reminded we are reading a novel and Murdoch having given her characters freedom is nonetheless in charge. But I was enthralled and shocked being in the world of this novel – it is so rich and certainly one to go back to.
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Mar 01, 2019 @ 15:03:31
There’s really no deadline, and it’s always great to have your considered thoughts. I love your reading of the women against their times and your assessments of Blaise and Monty. Edgar reminds be a bit of Effingham in The Unicorn, a bit.
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“The Sacred and Profane Love Machine” round-up and “A Word Child” preview #IMReadalong @IrisMurdoch | Adventures in reading, running and working from home
Mar 01, 2019 @ 21:22:55
Jun 22, 2019 @ 18:32:27
I first read ‘The Sacred and Profane Love Machine’ in the early 1990s, during my first flush of enthusiasm for Iris. I remember feeling, at the time, somewhat disappointed either in myself or in Murdoch. After the heights of ‘The Sea, The Sea’ and ‘A Word Child’ (can you believe I was reading in non-chronological order?), there was so much about this book I didn’t get. The strange title, especially the inclusion of the word ‘Machine’. The long, long passages of introspection. The unjust, even cruel, fates of Harriet and Luca. The paucity of humour, even of the morbid variety, beyond some poor taste punning by Blaise on the theme of ‘forced entry’ after sleeping with Kiki St. Loy.
This time around, I got a lot more out of the novel. In large part, I suspect, because I am more accustomed to Murdoch’s different styles. With a few exceptions – the aforementioned Kiki, Pinn – the characters feel real and well-rounded. We all know stoic, long-suffering women like Harriet, and insecure sleazebags like Blaize. We have all known, maybe even been, hyper-hormonal truculent teens like David.
For long stretches, there is little action by way of plot. Harriet moving from one house to another is a seismic event. Instead we have pages and pages of character development and earnest probing after classic Murdoch questions – what should Harriet do to be a good wife, a good person, in this painful situation? Is Blaize’s jejune love for Emily somehow better, purer, more real than his veteran feelings for Harriet – or vice versa?
TSAPLM, as no-one calls it, is a slow and involved novel. When I read it the first time, I think I was too impatient and probably rushed through to get to the plot twists that never occurred. This time I savoured the characterisation.
The one bit that still doesn’t work is the descriptions of dreams. Hearing other people recount their dreams is, famously, a boring experience, even when it is fascinating for the teller. I get that Blaise’s profession is the introductory mechanism for the re-telling of dreams, but I felt they added little to an already rich and engaging narrative.
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Jun 25, 2019 @ 10:17:51
I certainly agree with you on the dreams, they’re OK in moderation but there are a lot of them here! I also found this an odd one on first reading and appreciate it more now – maybe I’ve got more life experience now and realise that dying, the dissolution of marriages and changes to relationships in reality move at a slower pace than one would imagine as a youngster! I need to write an essay on reading IM as I age and her characters stay constant!
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