Iris Murdoch explores the fragility of relationships. Thirty years is plenty of time for friends to change their opinions. Not least of each other.
Iris Murdoch’s 15th novel is part-thriller, part-love story: a book that explores the intricacies and inconsistencies of human relationships.
Bradley Pearson, narrator and hero, is an elderly writer with a ‘block’. Adding and contributing to his torment are a host of predatory friends and relations - his melancholic sister, his ex-wife and her delinquent brother, and a younger, deplorably successful writer, Arnold Baffin. Not to mention Baffin’s restless wife and disturbingly engaging daughter. Bradley attempts to escape. His failure to do so, and its aftermath, lead to a violent climax and a most unexpected conclusion.
Iris Murdoch
About the Author
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin and made her writing debut with Under the Net in 1954. She wrote 26 novels and several books of philosophy.Revisiting The Black Prince
Having read and re-read Murdoch’s works for 20 years this novel is, I think, her very best. It shows us both the confident artist at the height of her powers, and yet undercuts that with a metafictional work that displays both the artifice of fiction and the conflict that lies at the heart of any writer. This is why this novel, and indeed all her fiction, continues to endure; as Bradley tells us, ‘the rag bag of human consciousness is only unified by the experience of great art or of intense love’.
Read Miles Leeson’s essay on The Black Prince here
Other nominated books by Iris Murdoch
Through the spiritual trials of two troubled stepbrothers, Iris Murdoch conducts an inventive allegorical exploration of morality.
Iris Murdoch turns her microscopic gaze on vanity and obsession in her 19th novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1978.
Obsessed with spiders and preoccupied with death, an old man lies at the centre of Iris Murdoch’s intricate web of relationships and passions.
A government official lies dead - but awkward questions around his supposed suicide remain in Iris Murdoch’s thriller-meets-romantic comedy.
An exploration of love and its excesses, missteps, and modest triumphs.
