Iris Murdoch was a prolific writer, completing 26 novels and several philosophy books in her lifetime. She still holds the record for most Booker Prize shortlistings (a joint record with Margaret Atwood) and the Booker Prize trophy has recently been renamed the ‘Iris’ in her honour.

This month, we’ve picked The Black Prince, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 1973, as our Book of the Month. It’s a part-thriller, part-love story that follows Bradley Pearson – 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.

• Their thoughts on Iris Murdoch’s novels
• Why Murdoch was an exceptionally funny writer, as well as a gifted one
• A brief biography of Murdoch
• A summary of The Black Prince
• What they thought about The Black Prince
• Who should read The Black Prince

• Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
• A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
• The Bloater by Rosemary Tonks

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

—

Jo Hamya: 

I would recommend it to people who really, really love reality TV. If you are a Love Island or Big Brother fan, Iris Murdoch novels are for you. 

James Walton: 

Hello, and welcome to The Booker Prize Podcast with me, James Walton. 

Jo Hamya: 

And me, Jo Hamya. 

James Walton: 

Today it’s Book of the Month time, and our chosen novel for November is The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch, who, for many years, was the answer to the quiz question: who’s been shortlisted for The Booker Prize the most times? In fact, she still holds the record of six, although these days, jointly with… fingers on the buzzers. 

Jo Hamya: 

Margaret Atwood. 

James Walton: 

Two points, Jo. But even so, Murdoch’s continuing status as a Booker Prize lege. 

Jo Hamya: 

Not lege. 

James Walton: 

Lege. She’s a Booker Prize ledge, is why earlier this year The Booker Prize trophy was renamed The Iris. But before we joust with The Black Prince… See what I did there? Maybe we should do a bit on Murdoch more generally, given that while she’s certainly not forgotten now, she has perhaps faded a little since the time I remember growing up as a bookish little fellow in the 1970s when she seemed to be pretty much the main writer of choice among clever grownups. 

But Jo, as this podcast keeps humiliating me, reminding me I was born quite a long time before you. So what was her standing when you were first discovering grownup books in what I guess was 2010s or something scary like that? I ask partly because that famous 1983 Granta list of best of young British novelists with the likes of Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and even a few women I think, has been seen ever since as fiction moving on to a new generation. And maybe Murdoch was the leader of the generation it moved on from. So was she still a big deal for people of your age? 

Jo Hamya: 

I don’t know. The problem is, I think at that age, I had no conception of what Granta even was. It’s not really the pursuit of most 16-year-olds. The way I came to Iris Murdoch is actually really random. I lived in Florida at the time, and I think I remember a secondhand bookshop that was based in a disused garage. Parents of a friend of mine used to take us there to leave us for an hour so they could be free to go do other things. 

James Walton: 

I was impressed that their way of looking after you was to dump you in a bookshop for an hour. 

Jo Hamya: 

Oh, yeah. Well, we were nerds. It was amazing because there was no shelving. It was just piles and piles of books. I remember finding a copy of The Sea, The Sea, and I had no idea who Iris Murdoch was. And I had no idea that The Sea, The Sea was a Booker winner. I think I vaguely knew what The Booker Prize was then. Anyway, the cover then of that book, it was the first edition, weirdly enough, was Hokusai’s the Wave, which I just studied in my APR history class. I saw everything as a sign then. So I thought, “Oh, it’s a sign that I found this novel.” And here we are many years later, 10 years later, talking about it. 

Picked it up, put it aside for two more years and then read it one winter and just fell in love with it so deeply. I think it’s the case though, that if you’ve read one Iris Murdoch novel, you’ve read all of them in a way. Because she has a very specific style and she has certain narrative devices that she keeps coming back to. So this idea of extramarital affairs, love squares. Usually they’re love triangles, but in an Iris Murdoch novel, it’s always the husband is having an affair with someone else, the wife is having an affair with someone else. And then maybe they’ll swap midway through. Someone dies, someone ends up with documents that they shouldn’t. You can always tell what an Iris Murdoch is. But the delight of them is the variety. You never quite know how she’s going to pull it off in the next novel. 

James Walton: 

There’s a good description by John Updike on Nuns and Soldiers, which is all over her books, which is, “One man dies, everybody else falls in love and nobody can help anything.” 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes, yes. And there’s always a lot of amazing dialogue of just people relentlessly cutting across each other screaming, “Oh, get out, get out. I can’t bear it anymore.” And then, “Would you like a glass of wine?” 

James Walton: 

I must say with the dialogue, I’m not sure that’s how people speak, but it’s how people speak in an Iris Murdoch novel, isn’t it? And that kind of works. 

Jo Hamya: 

I don’t know. Do you know what? I’m sure I’ve spoken about it on this podcast before, but I also love Rosemary Tonks and her novel, The Bloater, is very much like the Iris Murdoch novels. At least part of them tend to be set in a London cultural scene, whether it’s a theatre scene in The Sea, The Sea or Westminster in the The Nice and the Good, or in this case, with The Black Prince, it’s between Soho and Notting Hill. 

I think most people would associate it with a Hampstead novel, but there is that very posh, plummy way of talking. Almost like you’re at the theatre, it’s very Noel Coward in a way. And I think it is a tradition of novels of the time of maybe ’60s or ’70s London literary novels. 

James Walton: 

Everybody always observes how do these characters make their money? It’s like Monica’s flat in Friends or something, isn’t it? The people are living somehow really, really well without obvious means of support, perhaps because she’s written so many, like 26 novels, and I think you’ve read more of them than I have. What are your favourites? 

Jo Hamya: 

The Sea, The Sea is probably still a favourite because it was that initial discovery. It’s narrated by a semi-retired theatre man called Charles Arrowby who’s retired to the sea to think over his life and write his memoirs. Instead, he gets very obsessed with his first love. She reappears in his life and he has this comically angelic view of her, even though she’s old and plain and entirely boring. He kidnaps her at some point and it’s just mad. 

Also, love is Severed Head, which is again, another classic Murdoch story of a love square or even a love… What’s a five sided object? 

James Walton: 

Pentagon. 

Jo Hamya: 

Pentagon of an extramarital affair, potentially something approaching incest and then an untimely death. 

James Walton: 

The usual stuff then. I know that is a big favourite with many of our fans. I have read that. 

Jo Hamya: 

Murdoch would be really dismayed to know that I really like Under the Net because I think that there’s this beautiful recording of her at the 92Y, doing a Paris Review interview where she says, “I hate it when people say to me that they love my first novel because one thinks, ‘Everything’s gone downhill since.’” 

James Walton: 

That’s Right. Should we do a basic biography just for people who don’t know as much about her as people might once have done? She was born in Dublin, the only child of Irish Protestant parents, and when she was one, the family moved to London where her dad worked as a clerk for the Ministry of Health. But she always, as she said throughout her life, that she always felt Irish, although true to her Protestant roots, was no Republican when the troubles broke out. 

Jo Hamya: 

But her extreme cleverness was clearly there from the early days at Badminton, a progressive girls’ boarding school in Oxford. She edited a poetry book by [inaudible 00:07:22] and got WH Auden to write the forward. She then won a scholarship to Oxford where she scored a first class degree in Greats, which is Latin, Greek Ancient History and Philosophy. Later she also won a scholarship to the prestigious Vassar College in America, but wasn’t allowed to go into the country because while at Oxford, she joined the Communist Party. 

James Walton: 

Along rather and probably I believe with Kingsley Amis not necessarily thought of as a commie, but he joined the party with her as well, her contemporary and a lifelong friend. She’d left the party by the time she was conscripted into the civil service. Because it was war, it was actual conscription. In 1942, she worked in the Treasury and then she joined the UN Refugee Service in Europe before returning to academia and teaching philosophy at Oxford from 1948 to 1963. 

Jo Hamya: 

By 1963 two other important things that happened in her life: She’d become a novelist, starting with my beloved Under the Net in 1954 and continuing very prolifically after that. Ending up with, as you said, James, 26 novels, which is an unusually high number for a literary novelist. There are some people who think she perhaps wrote too much, including possibly her. As we may discuss when we come to The Black Prince. 

James Walton: 

And as we say, six of those books were shortlisted, The Nice and the Good in 1969, the first year of the prize. Bruno’s Dream in 1970, the second year of the prize, Black Prince in 1973, the all-beloved The Sea, The Sea in 1978, which won. Good Apprentice in 1985 and The Book and the Brotherhood in 1987. Seeing as she’d already written 10 novels before The Booker began, including A Severed Head beloved- 

Jo Hamya: 

They’re all beloved. They love them all. 

James Walton: 

… And The bell, which I really liked. That was pre Booker. Who knows how many she might’ve been shortlisted if the prize had begun earlier. She also wrote several works of philosophy and I was interested, although slightly saddened that In Our time Radio 4 episode about her with Melvyn Bragg and his guests suggested that it’s as a philosopher that she might be best remembered in the end. 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, the second thing about her is her fascinating love life. Actually, if I think about it now, very ahead of the times, ahead of the curve, love life, what we might now refer to or maybe it was referred to then as well, who knows, James, you can correct me is this polyamorous open marriage. 

James Walton: 

I wasn’t around in the ’50s, Jo. Or the ’40s. I might be old. 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, we don’t mention this for reasons of gossip or tittle-tattle. 

James Walton: 

No way. 

Jo Hamya: 

But it is relevant to a lot of her fiction. 

James Walton: 

Because John Updike, who is one of the problematic American geniuses, stroke dinosaurs I keep mentioning, he considered Murdoch the preeminent English novelist of the second half the 20th century. But he also thought, quote, “A tumultuous love life had been a long tutorial in suffering power, treachery and bliss. The romantic seed for her was like the sea for Conrad or war for Hemingway, a treasure of essential impression.” 

Basically, that complicated love life informs all of her fiction, which is why we’re mentioning it not for reasons of as you say, gossip, that would be terrible. So it fed into more or less all of her fiction, with one of our central themes being a sentence she wrote in Sacred and Profane Love Machine, “The erotic life is never still.” “The news that love is everywhere, violent, protean, consuming, comical, cruel, never grew stale for her” Updike said. And Harold Bloom, another big American critic called her, “An original and endlessly provocative theorist of the tragic comedy of sexual love.” 

That love life seems to have continued even after she married John Bayley in 1956, an Oxford Don who’s rarely described anywhere without the words, mild-mannered, being used. 

Jo Hamya: 

That marriage to Bayley brings us, of course to, what I think I and a lot of other people are worried has become her legacy in a way, in a strange way, that she ended up with Alzheimer’s disease. 

James Walton: 

Yeah. I know this is not a phrase you want to use, but I think a lot of people now think of Iris Murdoch as someone who basically chortled in front of the Teletubbies. And we know this because of Bayley’s memoir Iris, which was published in 1998 when she was still alive and later adapted into the hit movie, Iris, starring Kate Winslet as the young Murdoch and Judi Dench as the older one. A film, as someone once said, that showed Iris Murdoch only is either bonkers or bonking. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, I hate that film. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, I hate that film too. Do you think… I mean I’ve got… Fortunately everyone’s dead now, but you think this was John Bayley’s pass-ag revenge for her infidelity and for her greater fame? Maybe not even all that pass. Can I give you a couple of quotes from the book? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, you can. Absolutely. 

James Walton: 

Okay. Iris was praised for its gentleness and its love, but I do wonder if its motives were quite so pure. There’s a bit, I feel the whole book is, “Look, not so clever now, are you?” Maybe that’s a bit ferocious, but there’s one bit where, for example, she tells him about her lovers and John Bayley says this in a, I think, faux gentle, slightly weird way, “I was really very cast down by everything she had just been telling me. There seemed so many of them, these fortunate persons who at some time or other had been the recipient of Iris’s kindness. They had desired her and not been rejected.” 

And again, is this really an admiring bit? He says when he’s ill, he says: “What I appreciated too was Iris’s complete indifference to the womanly image of a helpmate. She found no bother at all in getting on with it when I was ill.” Do you think he’s really pleased about that? Okay, just one more. There’s loads of them. There’s a bit where they chant, they sing together a song about cuckolding from Shakespeare while they’re driving in the car and he thinks it’s the most tremendous fun, but he has essentially been cuckolded quite a lot, I think. And then he finds a house that he loves, that she doesn’t, and he says, “She acted as if her enthusiasm matched my own. I saw that it didn’t, of course, but I was obdurate. Why shouldn’t I be obdurate for once?” 

Then when she’s actually ill, I think this is a chilling phrase, he says: “Now we are together for the first time.” So he’s got her now, now that she’s got Alzheimer’s. 

In The Black Prince, there’s a lot of women who get exposed at their worst, come onto The Black Prince in a minute, never fear. When they’re exposed to their worst, they’re feeling down or they’re hysterical or they’re upset or they’re ill and their husbands invite people around to look after them or see them. And the women hate it. One who says, “He asks you round to see it all. All men despise all women really.” And then a separate woman, “Ashamed. Oh, ashamed, showing me to all these people.” I feel that Iris would’ve been ashamed. Ashamed that she was being shown to all these people by John Bayley. Am I being too harsh on him, do you think? 

Jo Hamya: 

No, I think that’s entirely fair. Down with John Bayley. 

James Walton: 

And that is what people think of Iris Murdoch is… 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, I don’t know. I think maybe it’s a bit dramatic to state that that’s all the people think of Iris Murdoch because she is after all also a respected philosopher, the author of 26 novels. My prevailing image of Iris Murdoch really is just of this incredible woman with the most unkempt bowl cut you’ve ever seen in your life saying the most brilliant things to camera. Stern, intimidating, until all of a sudden you realise that she’s the funniest person in the room. I think, I don’t know, I’m so jealous of anyone who managed to be taught by her in the brief time that she was still at university. I think it must’ve been very, very frightening until all of a sudden you realised that you were the luckiest person alive. 

James Walton: 

This might be ungallant or possibly even slightly worse, but she doesn’t look an obvious seductress, does she? But there’s one bit in a biography where she says, “One thing I’m confident of is I can seduce anybody.” A, that seems to have been true in her life. And B, certainly true of our books, I think. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. Well, it’s not all about looks. It’s a vibe as well, James. 

James Walton: 

Really? Okay. Okay. Yeah, maybe it is. Should we move on rather hastily to The Black Prince? And do you want to tell us the basic… 

Jo Hamya: 

The plot of… Is there a basic plot? 

James Walton: 

That’s hard. That is a hard one. 

Jo Hamya: 

I’m going to start out by saying this sounds a bit strange, but I think you’ll know where I’m coming from, James. Anyone who listened to our interview with Graeme Macrae Burnet and has read His Bloody Project will understand the form that The Black Prince takes. There are multiple documents which alter your perception of the main body of the narrative in quite ingenious ways, and there is a crime at the heart that’s gradually revealed to you. 

Our main character is Bradley Pearson, who, depending who you ask, is a writer. 

James Walton: 

If you ask him, he’s definitely a writer. 

Jo Hamya: 

If you ask him, he is definitely a writer, although I think his idea of writing depends very heavily on not writing. 

James Walton: 

I’d love to come back to that, but yeah. 

Jo Hamya: 

We will come back to that. But the book opens on two editorial notes. One from a Mr. P Loxias who is his editor and one from Bradley himself. There are some quite salient lines in those editorial notes which become evermore relevant as you go through the novel. So Mr. Loxias says: “That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse. Art is a doom. It has been the doom of Bradley Pearson.” And Bradley Pearson himself says, “All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth. Indeed, is truth. Perhaps the only truth. I have endeavoured in what follows to be wisely artful and artfully wise.” 

Which brings us on to the main body of The Black Prince, which is a five-way love story. Bradley Pearson is making plans to leave London to work on his novel, having finally retired from the tax office. 

James Walton: 

Even that’s quite good as he introduced himself as a writer, he realised he’s been a tax man all his life, but actually now he’s going to write his great novel. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes, now he’s going to write his great work when all of a sudden he is intruded upon by his ex-wife’s brother, Francis, who has arrived to give him the news that Christian, said ex-wife, is back in town and may call in on him. Shortly after, while Francis is still quite unwantedly in the room, Bradley is further interrupted by a phone call from his friend slash protege slash rival, Arnold Baffin, who says he may have killed his wife. He’s not sure. Francis happens to be a doctor of sorts, although he’s been disbarred for handing out dodgy prescriptions. Bradley takes him over to Arnold’s place, manages to revive Rachel Baffin, draw her out of the bedroom, manages to have a conversation with Rachel, which includes that line that you quoted from of, “He’s invited you all around to look at me in this terrible state.” And then goes back home to find his sister, Priscilla, on his doorstep who has just left her husband, Roger. 

Roger has shacked up, in fact has been shacked up for quite some time with a younger lover named Marigold who is now pregnant. This becomes a very salient point for Priscilla’s very fragile mental health. She is suicidal from the very beginning of the novel, but no one seems to believe her. No one, particularly Bradley, seems to believe in the concept of mental health in this book. 

James Walton: 

Bradley also takes a dim view of someone going off with a younger woman at this point, doesn’t he? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. Which is very hypocritical of him. 

James Walton: 

Because? 

Jo Hamya: 

Because it’s very hard to track all the people falling in love with each other over the course of this novel. But Bradley eventually falls for Arnold and Rachel’s 20-year-old daughter, Julian, by way of giving her lessons on Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet, which is very pertinent. But this happens only after Rachel has fallen in love with him and he has tolerated it but tolerated it as far as groping her breasts in bed a bit. 

James Walton: 

Meanwhile, of course, Arnold has fallen in love with Christian, his ex-wife and he… 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. And according to Bradley’s telling of this novel, Christian may be in love with Bradley as well. Not only that, but Christian’s brother Francis might be in love with Bradley. It’s not clear. He’s certainly very devoted to him. 

James Walton: 

And Bradley might be in love with Arnold. Seriously, we exaggerate not at all. And that all builds up to one major crime. 

Jo Hamya: 

Crescendo. 

James Walton: 

And we know there’s going to be a big crime. We don’t know what it is. And then we hear it from his point of view, from Bradley’s point of view, and then all the other characters then comment at the end about whether he’s telling the truth or not. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. 

James Walton: 

I think we could go on for much longer about the various tangles, but I think that’s the basic plot, isn’t it? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. And this is so true of all Iris Murdoch novels, is that essentially what you have is a cast of about 5 to 10 characters who are just having the most chaotic, messy, I believe what Jada Pinkett Smith would call entanglements with one another. You’d think it’s hard to keep in your head, but honestly part of it is a bit like watching Love Island or reality TV or just gobsmacked. My partner was turning to me while I was reading this book in bed and he kept going, “God, this must be amazing. You keep gasping, you keep jumping up and then shaking your head and groaning and laughing. It’s exactly like what you look like when you watch Love Island.” 

James Walton: 

That’s interesting. And also the fact that we’re laughing as we’re saying so-and-so’s in love with so-and-so is also in love with so-and-so might be in love… But it is meant to be funny, I think. Iris Murdoch in a way thinks all of this, the power of erotic love is on the one end dangerous and powerful and treacherous and damaging and also hilarious. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. 

James Walton: 

She might be right. On the hilarious point can I ask you a question? So most of it’s narrated by Bradley Pearson and he’s sometimes described as self-mocking. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. 

James Walton: 

But do you think he is in on the joke? A couple of things. He uses inverted commas for more or less any word or phrase coined since about 1900, doesn’t he? He says, “This book,” because we know that something sensational happens in it that he’s involved in, we don’t know what it is. He says, “This book might well prove my only quote ‘bestseller’ partly because it’s become quote, ‘front page news.’” And then when he’s describing his wife, he says, “Christian was a rather ‘sexy woman.’” And then he’s got all these of courses. “Of course the mind of the lover abhors accident.” And when Julian, Iris Murdoch’s, I think, famous for female characters with boys’ names. But anyway, Julian, the 20-year-old girl he falls for, he says, “So named, I hardly need explain after Julian of Norwich.” 

And also is he joking… Okay, there’s this bit where after he’s failed with Rachel, she’s tried to seduce him and slightly failed. And then on the way out he bumps into her 20-year-old daughter but decides to buy her a pair of boots and sees her thighs as a result of buying her a pair of boots. And experiences quote, “The anti-gravitational aspiration of the male organ, one of the oddest and most unnerving things in nature.” And then says when he takes Julian out, he goes to the Covent Garden Opera. He so overcome with emotion. He hasn’t told her that he loves her at this point, that he vomits and he goes running off. But he stops to say, “Selection of a place to be sick in is always a matter of personal importance and can add an extra tormenting dimension to the graceless horror of vomiting.” 

And after he finds a place by a pile of peach boxes and throws up, we have a paragraph beginning, “Vomiting is a curious experience, entirely sui generis.” And he goes on to explain why. Now, obviously I think this is all very funny, but surely it’s Iris Murdoch being funny rather than Bradley Pearson, do you think? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes, I think I would agree with you, actually. There’s this bit midway through, what Bradley Pearson often does is make these little interludes to address his editor, P Loxias, directly. But obviously it seems as though he’s also addressing the reader. I guess Loxias is his reader, but we’re his reader. Anyway, there’s a point at which during one of these interludes, he says, “It was not frivolous to connect my sense for an impending revelation with my anxiety about my work. If some great change was pending in my life, this could not but be part of my development as an artist since my development as an artist was my development as a man.” And then he says, “It had often, when I thought most profoundly about it, occurred to me that I was a bad artist because I was a coward. But now courage in life prefigure and perhaps induce courage in art. 

I think you are right, it is Murdoch being funnier rather than Bradley Pearson being funny because for him there is no separation between… I think he’s telling us these things, what it’s like to vomit, what it’s like to get an erection in these very lofty terms, very earnestly because it speaks to his moral character in some sort of way. There’s this bit in the editor’s note that Bradley Pearson provides where he says that he’s going to… The tale that follows is told as though it were happening to him in the moment. Yeah, he hopes he has kept his gift pure, which to me is… I think the other thing that gives it away is that he is like a sickening misogynist. 

James Walton: 

He is misogynist. He thinks all these women are ghastly, but then that bit at the end where they all have their say, Christian and Rachel and Julian, they are all ghastly. So again, this might yet again not be an either or, but are both ands. But I do think that Iris Murdoch is not entirely distanced from Bradley’s view of these… 

Jo Hamya: 

I don’t know because I think she emasculates him to a massive degree as well. Him and Francis as well. Bradley is always insisting that everyone should repress their feelings always. But you know that part where Francis starts telling Bradley, “I’ve been so unhappy in my life. When they struck me off the register, I thought I’d die of unhappiness. I’ve never had a happy relationship, never. I crave for love. Everybody does. It’s as natural as pissing, and I’ve never had a bloody crumb of it.” And Bradley just goes, “Stop talking this foul rubbish. Try to be a man.” Francis is there, going, “I can’t. Oh God, it’s just the bloody pain. I’m not like other people. My life just doesn’t work.” And Bradley goes, “I’m going to bed. You’ve got your sleeping bag there. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” 

James Walton: 

He absolutely does. Bradley regards nervous breakdowns and hysterics as in some ways self-indulgent, doesn’t he? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. Bradley’s not exempt from having a nervous breakdown or his own bout of hysterics towards the end of the novel as well. The men are just as contemptible as the women in this novel. 

James Walton: 

For sure, for sure. 

Jo Hamya: 

But I think, I don’t know, maybe this is my bias as a woman reading this novel, but there’s a very self-conscious aspect of the way in which men are terrible in this book that actually is expressed by the women outwardly, whether it’s in the afterwards by Christian saying that she completely disagreed with Bradley’s portrayal of her as a horrible wife. Bradley says that he left her and she says, “No. Well, I left him because we were just both very depressed. He didn’t make me happy.” Or indeed Rachel after she’s just been hit with a poker by Arnold, her husband, and she says, “All men hate women really.” He shoots me down. He beats me all the time.” All the men in this novel cheat on their wives relentlessly and then say, “I don’t cheat on her presently, so I haven’t really in the past.” 

James Walton: 

The wives cheat on the husbands a bit, but no, you are right. But it is interesting though, an interesting fact about Iris Murdoch is a lot of first person narrators in her many, many novels, not one of them is a woman. She only ever does male first person narrators who do get the (censored) taken remorselessly out of them I think. 

Can I introduce another big-ish theme at this late stage? I think about discussing The Black Prince I think in half an hour, is like discussing Middlemarch in half an hour or something. It’s just a massive book. I remember saying this is one of the best books I can remember reading for a long, long time. But one thing I think that is definitely going on is Iris Murdoch’s self-portrait or at least self-discussion from Murdoch herself. 

So Bradley Pearson’s theory of Hamlet is Shakespeare passionately exposing himself, speaking as few artists can speak in the first person yet at the pinnacle of artifice. And I think again, this might be one of the things that Iris Murdoch agrees with Bradley Pearson about. And it’s certainly what’s going on in this book I think, because Arnold Baffin, who is, we may not have mentioned I think yet, is a very successful novelist. And according to Julian, his daughter, she says about him, “He lives in a rosy haze with Jesus and Mary and Buddha and Shiva and the Fisher King, all chasing round and round dressed as people in Chelsea.” Now, that’s about the most serious [inaudible 00:29:32] thing you could say about Iris Murdoch’s books really. We have a summary of another of his books where basically people talk about religion forever until someone’s killed by a falling crucifix. 

Sorry, Baffin is constantly criticised by everyone as Iris Murdoch was for writing too much and too fast. And Bradley says of Arnold, I regret to say, “Saw art as fun.” Everybody agrees that he wrote too fast and too much. At the same time, there’s definitely a strand in the novel which asks, “What’s wrong with writing a lot?” early on, Bradley says of Arnold, “He wrote easily, producing every year a book which pleased the public taste, wealth, fame followed.” Which is quite Murdoch-y Arnold, I regret to say, he says, “Saw art as fun.” With a joke, why is that a matter of regret? Is that really so bad? 

And I think we’re definitely meant to draw a comic contrast between Arnold Baffin, who in some ways is preposterous with this, seeing Jesus and Mary and things in Chelsea, but with Bradley who when he introduces himself as a writer, again, pretty pompously right at the beginning, says, “A writer is indeed the simplest and also most accurate general description of me, insofar as I’m also a psychologist, an amateur philosopher, a student of human affairs. I am so because these things are part of being the kind of writer that I am.” But one thing that isn’t part of being the writer that he is actually writing. So he says, “I have a hope and believe kept my gift pure. The most potent and sacred command, which can be laid upon any artist is the command, wait. [Inaudible 00:31:05] saints of art who have simply waited mutely all their lives rather than profane the purity of a single page.” 

It really reminded me, I don’t know if you’ve read The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester. 

Jo Hamya: 

I haven’t, no. 

James Walton: 

There’s a similarly, I wonder if in fact he’s almost influenced by The Black Prince, but there’s the guy in that who is trying to impress a young woman with exactly that theory. He says, “An artist should be assessed by what he doesn’t do, painter by his abandoned and attempted canvases, a writer by his refusal to publish or indeed to inscribe.” And then the woman replies to him, “Yeah, but how can you tell? How does anyone know about the books you aren’t writing? What’s so different from just sitting there on your bum?” Iris Murdoch is on the one hand saying, “Maybe I do write too much. Maybe I have got these Arnold Baffian tendencies, but it’s better than just not writing anything, sitting around on your bum. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes, I think she addresses that head on quite early on. Pearson writes this scathing review of Baffin’s latest novel, to which Baffin at some point responds, it doesn’t get published, but he reads it nevertheless and responds, “You and you aren’t the only one. Every critic tends to do this, speak as if you’re addressing a person of invincible complacency. You speak as if the artist has never realised his faults at all. In fact, most artists understand their own weaknesses far better than the critics do.” And this I found very touching. Baffin says, “I believe that the stuff has some merits where I wouldn’t publish it, but I live, I live with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I’m always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all, one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.” 

“An aspect of this is that any artist has to decide how fast to work. I do not believe that I would improve if I wrote less. The only result of that would be that there would be less of whatever there is and less of me. I could be wrong, but I judge this and stand by the judgement . Do you understand? An alternative would be to do what you do, finish nothing, publish nothing, nourish a continual grudge against the world and live with an unrealized idea of perfection, which makes you feel superior to those who try and fail.” 

I want to connect this. 

James Walton: 

That’s very interesting. That is the rebuttal, isn’t it? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. And I want to connect this actually to, funnily enough, the section about vomiting, which is not just physical, but also it sounds cliche, but metaphorical. The point at which Bradley Pearson vomits his guts out in front of Julian is also the part at which that idea of repressing everything, of never writing a word breaks for him and he begins to say everything. 

James Walton: 

Hadn’t noticed that. 

Jo Hamya: 

There’s this really brilliant passage where he seems to take on a very Baffian impact perspective on speed being conducive to producing some kind of plot. He’s vomited. He’s told Julian that he’s in love with her, and then there’s this really tragic comic scene where he leans over to kiss her on the cheek and hold her wrist to convey his intentions. And she says, “Would you like to come to the opera with me? Someone else got me tickets.” And he goes, “Oh, who’s the someone else?” And she says, “It’s my boyfriend.” 

Bradley Pearson goes home devastated. And then he realises, “I had in fact lived through almost the whole history of being in love in just over two days. I say almost the whole history because there is yet more to come. The condensed phenomenology of the business had been enacted within me on the first day. I was simply a saint. I was so warmed and vitalized by sheer gratitude that I overflowed the charity. I was so privileged and glorified that resentment, every memory of any wrong done to me seemed inconceivable. I wanted to go around touching people, blessing them, communicating my great happiness, the good news, the secret of how the whole universe was a place of joy and freedom, filled and running over with selfless rapture.” 

On it goes and he says that there’s the counterpart to that, which is that then his world was crushed, et cetera. But this is the point at which he stops pontificating and starts actually producing maybe, well, he produces the novel at a later point, but he starts talking to people. He actually starts acting rather than thinking and repressing. 

James Walton: 

I think obviously we haven’t plumbed the depths of Black Prince, because that might be the work of our lifetime, but I think we’ve enjoyed it, Jo. Would that be fair? 

Jo Hamya: 

Oh God, I love it. As I said, I think Iris Murdoch is the best winter read possible because it’s just absorbing and it’s chaotic and crazy and it makes you laugh and it staves off my seasonal affective disorder by a good week reading a Iris Murdoch novel. 

James Walton: 

I feel slightly ashamed to say this in The Booker Prize Podcast where the Iris is about to be awarded, but I’d only read before Under the Net, which I thought was pretty good. And The Bell, which I thought was pretty good, I mean very good, but The Black Prince, unbelievable. Apparently the ’70s is meant to be a pomp. So I’m going to read more of the ’70s books, including The Sea, The Sea, and I will give A Severed Head a go. Jo, I think it’s pretty clear that I’d recommend this book to anybody who it’s ready for a bit of a wrestle. It’s not an easy book. The consensus seems to be at the moment that it is her best novel, but maybe not a good stock as it is quite complicated. Who would you recommend it to? 

Jo Hamya: 

I think this seems counterintuitive because as you said, there’s this idea of an Iris Murdoch novel being something that’s read by very high-minded intellectual people. But when you break it down, honestly, they are just really funny books about people ill advisedly shagging. So I would recommend it to people who really, really love reality TV. If you are a Love Island or Big Brother fan, Iris Murdoch novels are for you. They’re just drama and people saying the wrong thing, kissing the wrong person, and occasionally ending up killing someone. 

James Walton: 

And that being tragic and silly and also hilarious. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. That’s it for this week. 

James Walton: 

You can find out more about our November Book of the Month, The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch @thebookerprizes.com. If you decide to give it a go, you can join the conversation. It’s our Facebook book group @facebook.com/thebookerprizes. 

Jo Hamya: 

Next week we’ll be talking to the 2022 Booker Prize winner, Shehan Karunatilaka, just days before this year’s winner announcement on the 26th of November. 

James Walton: 

And finally, remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack at @thebookerprizes. Until next time… 

Jo Hamya: 

Bye. 

James Walton: 

… goodbye. The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Meolo and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht Production for The Booker Prizes.