Well, this was the fifth time at least that I’ve read this book (I recall taking it on holiday to Greece and reading it in the reception area of a Turkish hammam on a day trip while my husband was being pummelled and terrified (he thankfully didn’t end up exploring any bubbling pipework below the baths!)). Yet again, I’ve aged past the characters’ ages. Yet again, things that I thought happened in the middle happened at the end and there wasn’t as much of some themes as I’d remembered. But my goodness, this one stays firmly in my Top Five.

If you’re doing the readalong or even selected books along with me, or of course some time afterwards, do share how you’re getting on and which have been your favourites so far.

Iris Murdoch – “The Philosopher’s Pupil”

(31 December 2018)

I absolutely loved re-reading this book. I think it’s her most “George Eliot-ish” novel, isn’t it – is that a sacrilege to say? The huge web of characters, the interconnected society, the whole world in one town, the omniscient narrator who occasionally addresses the reader directly …

It opens of course with that seminal scene of Bad George crashing his car into the canal, complete with wife Stella. Oddly, I always associate this scene with “An Accidental Man”, probably because of the car crash there, and also George is a bit of an unlucky man making his own bad luck, like Austin Gibson Grey, in my opinion. And the shadowy figure of the dodgy priest, Father Bernard is there, as he always seems to be  and is indeed at the end at the scene of George’s other big misdeed – a funny touch when you’re re-reading and know just how much he worms into people’s lives. And we very soon find that our narrator is N (with “the assistance of a certain lady” as he admits at the end, p. 558). What will happen to Stella now George has tried to kill her, if he has? Is his old university tutor coming back, and will he want to see him? Just who does Rozanov want to install in a quiet house and why? The community acts as a sort of chorus as events unfold, with a sub-plot of a restaging of a peculiar opera going on at the same time.

The big Murdochian themes are all there, with the novel starting with “malignant rain” and a car in a canal and punctuated by the baths and Lud’s Rill, the geyser in the grounds, worried over by the superbly sketched in director of the baths.  We have a lot of being outside, looking in, mainly to do with the Slipper House, which Tom does a dry run for his later peering early in the novel when it’s still empty, but with Pearl looking in to Belmont and Ruby staring at Maryville, the house by the sea. In case we’re missing someone climbing over a fence by having the back gate to Belmont’s garden open, Gabriel sees the mysterious naked man climbing over one. George follows Diane three times before he finds her properly (and she’s searched for in Paris, too). Big flabby faces with wet mouths are represented by Rozanov, slippery hair in plaits and buns by Hattie. Stones are found in Hattie’s soapstone seal, Gabriel’s malachite egg she buys for Adam and hides and the stone circle at which strange things are seen, Rozanov is upset to see have been cleaned, and where George has his ‘episode’. There’s also talk of rocks that the hot spring comes out of, although only the surface ones around Lud’s Rill are visible.

Animals are beautifully represented by the mysterious foxes and the lovely Zed, a full character in his own right with his own thoughts, emotions and reactions. Who doesn’t have their heart in their mouth when he goes into the sea, even knowing what will happen? What a fantastic character who makes the book in the same way the parrot does in “The Book and the Brotherhood”.

The little ‘feminist’ touches are back in this novel, something I’ve completely missed in every other reading of all of them but am increasingly noticing now (and although Alex is a bit haggard and yellowy, the descriptions of her ageing are not nearly as horrible as those in many others of the novels). Gabriel has a year in secretarial college but wants to go to a university, before she is “overtaken by marriage. Now who and what was she? Brian’s wife, Adam’s mother” (p. 60). This is on top of her other “chief grievance”: “Brian’s selfishness to which she quietly gave in, forgiving though not forgetting” (p. 60). The feminist sector of society, while gently mocked, are I think seen as a force of good, trying to help Diane and Stella.

Like with the ageing, IM seems to have relaxed a bit on her views on marriage in this novel: although the marriages of the two older McCaffrey brothers are not successful as such, there are not so many damning statements on the condition, and we have positive hopes of Tom’s. The only real statement is this rather lovely one:

It is a feature of marriages, including happy ones, that two people who live together may have quite false ideas of one another. This does not at all necessarily lead to disaster or even inconvenience. (p. 546)

There’s a lot of religion of course, including religion lost (Alex and Rozanov’s Methodism,Father Bernard’s Judaism and then high Anglicanism. But Adam is a pantheist and Alex makes little fetishes, while Father Bernard carries on practising after his faith is lost and ends up feeling he needs to explain NOT-religion to everyone in Greece. And the books – both George and Rozanov are writing books which are, of course, unfinished. The only completed book is the one N writes! In fact, Rozanov has lost all interest in books, including perhaps his own, made clear in a melancholy description of his state of mind: “Unless one is a genius, philosophy is a mug’s game” (p. 132)

The humour is back, having been a little missing at times in the last read. The descriptions of the townsfolk and their habits are droll:

It is even alleged that people make a habit of leaving their offices early at four-thirty, bathing and resting until six and then proceeding to the pub. I have met some of these offenders myself. (p. 32)

I also loved this description of Brian:

Of course compared with George he was ‘nice’, but he was not all that nice. (p. 43)

The descriptions of Emma’s startling counter-tenor voice are also most amusing, with windows opening in London and glasses ringing in Ennistone when he produces it, and who can not giggle at Father Bernard’s consternation at having “managed to chuckle in a suggestive way” (p. 239) when phoning Hattie and then his struggles when he has his academic session with her: “Father Bernard was excited too, but not by the grammatical quest” (p. 261). The set-piece where four people watch George going to re-enact his scene by the canal is also very funny.

And what IS Mrs Bradstreet’s terrible secret?

There’s duality all over the place – the Slipper House and the main house, the brothers (well, three brothers), George’s wife and mistress, Alan’s two wives (and Fiona has a brother who has also died), two servants (and three cousins), the town and the baths, the town and London, the UK and America, Lud’s Rill and the controlled bath house, the young people and the old guard. Nesta regards the babies in the baths and can’t help being enchanted; George wants to drown them and indeed thinks of that when completing his own ‘drowning’ of his tutor. Zed appears to be a bag on the lawn of Belmont and a plastic bag floating in the sea.  We have portents, as well – George sees the number 44 everywhere.

Who is the saint and who the enchanter? Well, John Robert Rozanov is the obvious enchanter – everyone he meets ends up doing things that they often really do not want to do in order to please him. He even enchants his own grand-daughter. However he is conscious of using his powers and so he’s not entirely classic enchanter material:

Father Bernard detested walking, but he was already himself captured and caged. (p. 162)

Being so concentrated on was beginning to give tom a panicky feeling of being trapped. He wanted to get up and lean on the mantelpiece, or open the door into the hall. But he could not move. he was fixed by John Robert’s glare and John Robert’s purpose. (p. 271)

William Eastcote is described as being a saint, repeatedly, and he’s the person people want to go and confess to and ask for help. He never gossips and this is because of his “virtuous austerity” (p. 414) although he’s all too painfully human, reminded of his mortality constantly. The McCaffreys think of him as “‘a place of healing'” (p. 473). He’s also the only Quaker to speak in a meeting that’s described. His speech there is a sort of ‘how to be good’ bringing in themes from all the other books. People should print it out and regard it daily. I might do so!

Let us then seek aid in pure things, turning our minds to good people, to our best work, to beautiful and noble art … Shun the cynicism which says the our world is so terrible that we may as well cease to care and cease to strive, the notion of a cosmic crisis where ordinary duties cease to be and moral fastidiousness is out of place. (p. 205)

I wonder if he, like Charles Arrowby’s father in “The Sea, The Sea” is a portrait of IM’s father (although I say I don’t like looking for that sort of stuff, he is reminiscent of his portrayal, I feel). The other saint is poor put-upon Gabriel, with an angel’s name, a ministering touch and unfortunate floppy hair. Critically, she is described as “the silliest wettest human-being I’ve ever met” (by Alex, p. 485), a bit like Anns Perronet and Cavidge, although, like them, she doesn’t live in a mess (maybe female saints don’t?) and is really good at mending things. Is there an argument for Stella with her lack of feminine wiles and inability to “conceal her strength” (p. 79)? She has netsuke, after all, and a father in Japan …

Attention is a theme although not pushed unsubtly. N is the only person who looks at Stella’s netsuke, and all George wants is to be paid attention to by Rozanov.

Looking at links to other books, poor old Alex, stranded in a relic of her past life reminds me of Henry’s mother in “Henry and Cato”. Like her, Aliex has had her faithful retainer since her teens. As I said, George reminds me of Austin, the “Accidental Man”, and of course even more than this we are given a tiny glimpse of Hugo Bellfounder, Jake’s confidant in “Under the Net”. On p. 82 we’re told “He kept up with William Eastcote and with an eccentric old watchmaker with whom he had philosophical conversations” and then later, we find he’s died: “‘What about all those valuable clocks?’ ‘He left them to that writer, I forget his name'” (p.99) (in the introduction, Malcolm Bradbury claims this is IM (p. xvi). But surely it’s Jake?). Again with “Under the Net” is it chance that Rozanov pursues quarries of lines of thought into nets (p. 135)?

The car going into the canal and the fine balance of the act reminds me of Rain’s Morgan going into the river in “The Sandcastle”. As my lovely commenters pointed out regarding “Nuns and Soldiers” we are at a time of change here – Ruby is restive, Rozanov is back, and there’s a periodic uprising to do with Lud’s Rill which makes everyone go a bit odd. Diane with her cluttered room and odd clothes is all the prostitute/mistresses in the oeuvre, her boyish hair and figure perhaps a clue to how some of the other genderfluid women might have ended up. Mistaking French is in there, this time actually not understanding at all (p. 145). Like in “Nuns and Soldiers”, Tom like Tim undergoes trial by water and emerges changed and grown. Like in “An Accidental Man” and “Nuns and Soldiers”, Tom and Rozanov pass each other in The Crescent but don’t notice each other.

Looking forward through the remaining works, the obsession with the old tutor prefigures “The Book and the Brotherhood” and I was excited to find George post-stones described as “weak and pale like a grub in an apple” (p. 547) as this prefigures Stuart Cuno in “The Good Apprentice” being described as a white grub (more than once?). She must have liked and retained the image.

On rereading this one in particular: so everyone’s in their early 40s apart from (maybe) N, and definitely Alex, William Eastcote (sob!) and John Robert Rozanov. So I’m older than them again. But this time I do still have kind thoughts towards the young crowd, where I went off them in other books. I remembered a lot of the set pieces and being somehow obscurely almost in love with N, but somehow thought that Tom’s adventure among the pipes was a lot further back in the book than it was (and also John Robert’s demise). I also thought there were lots more walks with philosophy for Rosanov and than there actually were. Odd, isn’t 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.