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Adapt or Perish
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11431 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1994 |
2,569 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen is a contributing editor to Kirkus Reviews and a
freelance reviewer for the Boston Globe, Sewanee Review, and
several other publications.
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THE GREEN KNIGHT
Iris Murdoch
New York: Viking, 1994
472 pp., $22.95
"How much do we know of any other creatures, or of ourselves?"
The changes rung upon this nagging philosophical question, and the motley host of foolish mortals who uncomfortably embody it, parade bravely throughout the twenty-four increasingly complex and fascinating novels that have made their creator, Dame Iris Murdoch, one of the most admired contemporary British writers.
Her fiction's theoretical emphases and argumentative texture emerge naturally enough from Murdoch's background and training. Born in Dublin in 1919 to Anglo-Irish parents who were themselves literate and accomplished people, Iris Murdoch studied philosophy at Oxford, then worked in the wartime Civil Service for the Treasury Department, then in Europe with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration before returning to Oxford to teach philosophy. Writing in her spare time until retiring from teaching some fifteen years ago, Murdoch has produced a large and impressively varied body of work, including besides her shelfful of novels a highly praised study (Sartre, Romantic Rationalist) of the existentialist philosopher who influenced her early work, poems, plays, and several well-regarded works of moral philosophy (including, most recently, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals).
Though they are often forbiddingly dense and intellectually demanding, Murdoch's fictions bristle with colorfully deranged characters and intermittent explosions of unrestrained melodrama. She writes about upper-middle-class academic and professional people, bound together as colleagues, or lovers, or longtime friends. Immediate and extended families alike open their figurative arms to seductive strangers who, seeming to promise some fulfillment or enlightenment, instead unravel tightly woven living arrangements that insulate such cozy microcosms against the unruly outside world.
More like the classic nineteenth-century novels than any others being written today, Murdoch's novels expose settled, complacent beings to challenge and change. Encountering the world, and other people, her characters must adapt or perish; generally, they adapt.
Early and representative work
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