Iris

"It’s very different to The Forgetting, even though they’re vaguely about the same subject. It’s not a portrait of Alzheimer’s at all: it’s a portrait of a person, and Bayley treats the disease as if it’s just another aspect of this person. He never loses sight of Iris, and in a way his view of her becomes sharper and sharper as the book develops. He doesn’t really view Alzheimer’s as a disease so much as a kind of bad sort that Iris has got herself mixed up with, which, as he loves her, he’ll put up with. He’ll tolerate it being around while they’re having dinner, and he’ll even join in with it. He sits and watches Teletubbies with her and actually quite immerses himself in the experience. There’s real sense of the disease being just a facet of her personality, and I think it’s a really interesting way of viewing it. A few reviews of the book said that it’s a love story and then commend the fact that it’s not a very sentimental love story. I’m not so sure that it’s a love story as such: it’s more than that. It’s more of an ode to freedom, and to Iris Murdoch as a free and self-directing, self-possessed person who has not chosen, but has built the disease into her sense of herself and of her freedom, and he doesn’t want to take that away from her. I think that’s what makes it such a touching book – much more than it being a love story, it’s more about preserving her as she is and was. As a philosopher Iris Murdoch was very concerned with the idea of freedom, and yet the characters in her books were often not very free individuals, stuck in weird and constrained situations. I got the sense that Bayley didn’t want to make her a constrained character in his book, and wanted to keep her alive and as she was in real life. It’s a very beautiful book because it doesn’t yield to the disease: it describes it, and he’s horrified by it, and there are a lot of bleak moments. But he’s really intent on seeing her as she is."