The Black Prince

Just adding to the plethora of reviews and putting in my two or three cents. Dame Iris is said to have possessed a prodigious and heavy intellect. And one can see, in reading her works, that this is very true. She is able to see into all the various emotional responses of myriad characters, and to do so faultlessly. Yes, we say, this is true! This is the way he would think and act (or the way I would think and act.) She is mercilessly honest in her descriptions, whether they be of thoughts or actions. And I found the book very humorous. Our hero, Bradley, is himself a humorous character, so serious and caught up in himself. He is a buffoon who constantly makes the wrong choices, yet intellectualizes everything and rationalizes everything to suit himself. I think this is quite an amazing book. As one reviewer who didn't like the book remarked, it is a farce. And yes, it is a farce. But there are nonetheless deep truths running around in here. Dame Iris had this incredible ability to see through people, to put herself in their places and understand just what they would do in any given circumstance. Her characters are so impeccably drawn that we know them utterly. To be able to weave a good story is one thing, that makes a good story-teller. To be able to create characters which live and breathe is yet another thing, and many writers base their works on this alone. But to be able to write impeccably precise prose , create living characters, tell a great story, and have a moral imperative is what makes great literature. The Black Prince is worth a read. This is great literature, and a whole lot easier than all those Russian guys.

Firstly, there are many fuller ( & better) reviews of this novel elsewhere on this page. I would just like to say that this was the first Murdoch novel I ever read, & I've obsessively tracked down all the others since, although I'm afraid symptoms of her disease were becoming apparent from The Message To The Planet onwards. I have never read an author with such an ability to make unsympathetic characters interesting, or go so deep, but what really did it for me was the way that everything that occurs seems to be totally arbitrary & completely inevitable; i.e. real. This provided me with the final piece in my philosophical jigsaw. Nothing comes of nothing. Every action is contigent on every other action & the world is the consequence of googolplexes of such interactions. Free will is an illusion brought about by a complexity which is indivisible (even theoretically), with all the implications that has for guilt, innocence & morality in general

I read Iris Murdoch's "The Sacred and Profane Love Machine" a year ago and didn't much like it. Too much talk, too little action and a plot surrounding a cast of strangely unsympathetic characters that goes nowhere. I thought I was in the same rut for much of the first third of "The Black Prince", when out of the blue, the black arrow of Eros struck and permanently altered the course of the novel. The unexpected change of pace and sudden focus on Bradley Pearce's relationship with the object of his desire at the expense of the adult (and mostly tiresome) characters was a clever Murdoch device that drew me inexorably into the plot. There was no let up in action from there on - the story played relentlessly to its dramatic but tragic conclusion. You see through the eyes of Bradley and form your judgement based on his version of the motives and designs of the unsavoury characters which envelop him but are thrown off guard by the radically different perspectives of the other players (shades of "Rashomon") in the postscript. You get the feeling that nobody's version encapsulates the whole truth (is there such a thing ?) and that everybody creates a best-fit truth that assuages his conscience. Murdoch is heavy on dialogue (nothing wrong with that) but there is a tendency for it to be repetitive (her characters are overly talkative) which can be hellavu irritating. I found that in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine too - must be a Murdoch trait. But whereas the latter is limp and soggy, The Black Prince has a highly intriguing plot and all the elements of a kitchen sink drama-cum-thriller that makes it a winner. A really great read.

I've read about half of Iris Murdoch's books, and I believe this book represents the pinnacle of her achievement. The book is deeply satisfying from beginning to end. The plot, which revolves around an older man's obsession with a young girl, echoes a classic theme which goes back as far as Plato's Symposium. As the author interweaves her meditations on art, beauty, Hamlet, and book-a-year novelists into this standard plot, the book achieves a level of self-consciousness found in the greatest literature. And like her earlier works, it is fun to read. Having the main characters comment on the story at the end is a wonderful device, both profound and entertaining. This is one of my two or three favorite novels. Over the years I've loaned my hardcover edition out to friends so often, it now looks like a well worn library book.

"The Black Prince" is my favorite novel, and I can recommend it unreservedly for its vivid characters, for its complexity, its wit, its drama, for its analysis of human failings and triumphs, loves and hates, and for its prose, which is ecstatic, biting, and brilliant. The ambiguously romantic Black Prince of the title, Bradley Pearson, is an aged bachelor, whose range of somewhat histrionic emotions involves the serene Rachel Baffin, her confused daughter Julian, Rachel's novelist husband Arnold, Bradley's rival in so many ways, Bradley's dysfunctional sister Priscilla, and Bradley's prying ex-wife Christian, who holds the possibility of solace and redemption. In amongst this tangled web they weave Bradley "meditates" on art and metaphysics, sleeping and waking, life and death. Iris Murdoch is the English authoress of a score of popular novels. Unlike the submissions of most writers who attempt to be popular, Ms. Murdoch's elegant fictions are literature, and are also aspirants to the semi-mythical realm of "art". And what is "art"? Is it not, in at least its principle manifestation, great entertainment? And I would assert that the greatness of the entertainment depends mightily upon the reader. I know a man who thinks, and says, that all of Iris Murdoch's books are alike. Very well. Emotional response is surely the beginning of literary criticism (otherwise why bother reviewing this book, or that one?). I identified with Bradley Pearson for several years of my life, and was jubilant that he lived in a world of funny, thoughtful, intensely interesting people, most of whom were not relatives. "Morality" (I put this fragile word between quotation marks because it is so often misused) is intimate to the Murdoch view of things, and the "eternal verities" are influential, even numinous, to all of her characters, including the thoughtless ones. Love, as a unifying force, is awake and vibrant. Beauty is our glimpse of the Godhead. Truth is a paradise into which we may freely pass, if only we have the desire to do so. Justice is as intimate as self-condemnation and as ruthless as violence. Abstractions, in the world of Iris Murdoch's characters, dissolve into human emotions that clarify the world and link us in splendid ways to other human animals. "The Black Prince" is a celebration of our ambiguous and splendid emotions. [November 28, 1996]