The Philosopher's Pupil

"Murdoch’s novels can be divided into three periods. You’ve got the early developmental and experimental stage. Then you’ve got the major period that concludes with The Black Prince. Then you have the later novels. These are often called the ‘baggy monsters’ (a quote taken from Henry James about his large, quasi-allegorical novels.) Later in her life, from Nuns and Soldiers onwards, really, the novels get longer and longer as she tries to expand the range of characters. Sometimes we get 20 or 30 characters in a novel. The novels are quite Dickensian and influenced by Dostoyevsky. She keeps the same ideas and concerns and concepts that I mentioned earlier, but she’s trying to pack in much more of life. There are elements of the historical novel on occasion. The Philosopher’s Pupil is my favorite of the late novels. There’s an enormous web of characters and an interconnected society. This is one of the few novels that creates a completely realized setting outside of London. It’s set in one town that Murdoch develops. It’s a spa town, but it has only a passing resemblance to British spa towns like Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells. The major conflict is that the philosopher is coming back to town. John Robert Rozanov is perceived by the town as a great sage. His arrival sparks off a lot of the action that occurs within the novel. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Like Charles Arrowby, Rozanov has retired from philosophy and teaching. In the novel it says “all the books are inside him now”; he believes he understands everything. And yet he’s a tragically flawed character himself because he falls in love with and wants to seduce his own granddaughter. Ultimately, he palms her off on to somebody else. That’s quite an uncomfortable scene. And then there’s the pupil of the title, George McCaffrey, one of three brothers in the novel who are all antagonistic towards each other. The novel opens with George trying to kill his wife by crashing a car into a canal. The big Murdochian themes are all there. There’s a lot of water imagery; there’s a lot of being outside, looking in through windows. This idea of perception through rain is important in the novel. There’s an enormous cast of characters. There are animals; there’s a small dog that runs into the sea and you wonder whether he’s going to be rescued or not. Murdoch’s good on animals and water imagery. We haven’t talked that through today, but there’s plenty there. It’s a book about aging, as well. All the characters are aging and trying to find their place in life. There’s a priest that loses his identity called Bernard Jacoby, there’s a Quaker, who’s the saint figure, the image of the piece, called William Eastcote, who’s important to the moral weight of the novel. You have different characters who embody different ideas and concerns, or philosophical ideas. Rozanov, the McCaffreys who are chasing after him, Eastcote who’s a Quaker and talks about demythologizing of religion, Bernard Jacoby, the priest who loses his religion and wants to move towards some kind of quasi-Buddhist idea, which was in Murdoch’s mind very much at that time. It’s a difficult novel to talk about because there’s so much going on. It’s very much a big novel of ideas. But it’s beautifully wrought as well. There’s lots of humour, mistaken identity. Those sorts of things. Why read her? Because, like all great novelists, she speaks to us today because she’s interested in universals. She’s interested in what makes us human. She’s interested in our flaws, our ego, our propensity at times of emotional crisis to do stupid things, to fall in love with the wrong person, or completely disregard the person who would be right for us. She talks about familial relations. She asks what it means to consider ourselves outside of ourselves. To think about whether there is such a thing as goodness. Where does goodness exist? Does God matter anymore? What about Judeo-Christian imagery? What does it mean to be good? Should we be good for nothing? Or is there some kind of redemption in life? How do we deal with guilt? A lot of the novels deal with guilt and what happens when we cause people a lot of pain. If they’ve died, how do we then forgive ourselves? All those questions are not just relevant for when she was writing but impact on our lives today because, like the nineteenth-century novelists she wished to emulate, these questions come back again and again and again. As Murdoch is part of this literary lineage she’ll never not be relevant. And I think that her books, although they were out of fashion for a number of years, have recently been coming back into consideration. She’s now being considered in light of her particular take on feminism, she’s being thought of as an important female writer not just as somebody who deals with male narrators. In the past she’s been criticized for that, but since her centenary year in 2019 there has been a reassessment of what her legacy is and how her own life and her own biography is so tied up with her novels. Certainly now that we have biographies, her letters and publications of her poetry and journals to come in the next few years, I think interest in Iris Murdoch will just continue to grow. The only other thing I’d mention is that if I was going to recommend somewhere to start with Iris Murdoch, I’d recommend The Bell . It’s short, it’s contained, it’s got a great story. It’s highly enjoyable, it’s amusing and comic, but there are also plenty of what you might call stereotypical Murdochian images of ideas. If you enjoy The Bell , I think you’d go on and enjoy many more of her novels."