A Word Child

"I chose it because it balances well with The Black Prince , and is very close in date with it. It comes from her most renowned period, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, when she was producing almost a novel a year. All of them were very well received and very well reviewed. A Word Child is not unlike The Black Prince in the sense that it’s based around this one rather odd man called Hilary Burde, a repressed creature who we find out has had a difficult childhood, but has a brilliant mind. Through the support of a teacher, he manages to get to Oxford, and he could have gone on to be an academic superstar. But he has problems because he’s fallen in love with the wife of a friend, Gunnar Jopling, and the wife has fallen in love with Hilary, too. He shouldn’t have done this, quite clearly. There’s this awful moment when Hilary drives her away from Oxford and there’s a car crash and she dies. And she’s carrying Gunnar Jopling’s child as well. That’s the background to where we begin. Hilary is 41; he’s a very minor civil servant in London, living in a shared flat and keeping himself to himself. He’s also responsible for his sister, Crystal. The relationships between siblings and twins come up in a lot of Murdoch’s novels. They’re very important in The Black Prince and in The Bell. And they are in this novel, too. Crystal sees things. She’s not classically intelligent, but she’s able to perceive reality as it really is, while Hilary isn’t. Later on, Gunnar comes back into his life and explains his love for his new wife and, in a tragicomic way, history repeats itself. Hilary falls in love with the second wife, and the second wife falls in love with him. There’s quite an uncomfortable scene between the second wife, Kitty, and their servant, Biscuit (not her real name). The back and forth between the two of them is quite racist and derogatory. There are questions in the novel revolving around obsession. Hilary is in some sense this enchanter figure. If Murdoch believes there are some who perceive reality as it really is, Crystal is one. Christopher is another; he’s a saint-like figure. There are people that are patient and people that are violent and wish to take possession of people—that’s what A Word Child is all about. Hugely, yes. She ought to be seen as the heir to the nineteenth-century realist novels of George Eliot , Dickens , Dostoyevsky , even going back to Austen . Her great favorite, whom she described as the patron saint of the novel, was Shakespeare. She wants to tie herself in to that huge canon of Western thought and literature. It was a response to the high modernism of the generation before her."