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3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
funny
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I love middles. That must be why I love novels so much. Middles are the stuff of novels. Beginnings bore me, endings make me anxious. Middles are everything. I was accordingly shocked and disappointed when the middle of 'The Black Prince' nearly made me chuck it away. The beginning was as crisp and funny as any Iris Murdoch novel: we follow protagonist and narrator Bradley Pearson through a series of ridiculous scrapes that keep preventing him from retiring to the coast to finally write his great book. Bradley is a repressed scholarly type on the verge of what he believes will be a major creative breakthrough. He is not particularly charming and seems insufferably detached from everyone around him, which is what made me start to dislike the novel halfway through. What's this guy's deal? I wondered. Was Murdoch doing this on purpose? Were the aloofness, casual misogyny and portentous arrogance building up to something? Or were they merely the unremarked upon quirks so common in these types of writerly male characters?
I went on a journey with this book. It upended my expectations again and again in that brilliant subversive Murdoch way. It feels almost passé to give a spoiler warning for such an old well-beloved text. But if you haven't read it I beg you: stop right here and let the glorious ending hit you like a ton of bricks like it did me.
But before the reader can get too carried away with self-congratulatory explanations of Bradley's disturbed psyche Murdoch upends our instincts once again. She adds a series of postscripts to the main narrative purportedly written by the 'dramatis personae' of Bradley's tale. Each of them presents their own interpretation of the convoluted narrative and Bradley's character. Each approaches the novel as both a piece of literary art and real-life memoir: they talk of unconvincing characters, lack of clear-cut motivation, lack of fire. My favourite was Francis' (now a reputable 'Dr. Marloe' in stark contrast to the character we meet in Bradley's tale) which was a delightful send-up of the worst excesses of Freudian criticism.
'The Black Prince' is a crime novel which denies us the things that give who-dunnits their ultimate satisfactory flavour: 'a detective's final summing up, pointing out discrepancies, making inferences, drawing conclusions' (472). All these tasks are left to the reader who has so many conflicting threads of actions, intentions and characterizations to unravel that she is best off simply enjoying Murdoch’s wonderful rendition of 'the insane awful funniness of it all' (305).
I went on a journey with this book. It upended my expectations again and again in that brilliant subversive Murdoch way. It feels almost passé to give a spoiler warning for such an old well-beloved text. But if you haven't read it I beg you: stop right here and let the glorious ending hit you like a ton of bricks like it did me.
Spoiler
'The Black Prince', we discover at the very end, is a highly original crime novel. It is an apologia, a post-hoc justification written by a convicted murderer. It is here that all the little slips into the unseemly parts of Bradley's character all begin to make sense: the unsettling obsession with purity ('pure suffering' 'pure love' 'pure art'), the fact that he suddenly (violently) 'falls in love' with his literary rival's twenty year old daughter whom he has known since she was born while seeming to absolutely despise her (he thinks of her as a silly, ordinary, not-very-bright girl). His desire for her manifests as the wish to possess and appropriate youth: culminating in a horrifying scene in which he insists on having sex with her after finding out his sister killed herself.But before the reader can get too carried away with self-congratulatory explanations of Bradley's disturbed psyche Murdoch upends our instincts once again. She adds a series of postscripts to the main narrative purportedly written by the 'dramatis personae' of Bradley's tale. Each of them presents their own interpretation of the convoluted narrative and Bradley's character. Each approaches the novel as both a piece of literary art and real-life memoir: they talk of unconvincing characters, lack of clear-cut motivation, lack of fire. My favourite was Francis' (now a reputable 'Dr. Marloe' in stark contrast to the character we meet in Bradley's tale) which was a delightful send-up of the worst excesses of Freudian criticism.
'The Black Prince' is a crime novel which denies us the things that give who-dunnits their ultimate satisfactory flavour: 'a detective's final summing up, pointing out discrepancies, making inferences, drawing conclusions' (472). All these tasks are left to the reader who has so many conflicting threads of actions, intentions and characterizations to unravel that she is best off simply enjoying Murdoch’s wonderful rendition of 'the insane awful funniness of it all' (305).
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Bit of this made me unspeakably anxious (a good thing) and others reminded me of Sabbath’s Theatre (also a good thing).
The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
On the outside it’s a cast of unlikable self absorbed characters in a dark comedy about not much in early 1970’s London.
If Dostoevsky wrote a season of Seinfeld this would be it.
But deep down there’s Hamlet, Apollo and all the Russian redemption thru suffering themes.
Also art thru suffering or is it poetic justice?
The female characters are written like a man who has no respect for women (Malcom Lowry or Hemingway) wrote them. The narrator and main character Bradley has a pathetic sister named Priscilla. I didn’t like her much.
Reviewers say The Black Prince is Murdoch’s best work.
Recommended but not for the faint of heart.
On the outside it’s a cast of unlikable self absorbed characters in a dark comedy about not much in early 1970’s London.
If Dostoevsky wrote a season of Seinfeld this would be it.
But deep down there’s Hamlet, Apollo and all the Russian redemption thru suffering themes.
Also art thru suffering or is it poetic justice?
The female characters are written like a man who has no respect for women (Malcom Lowry or Hemingway) wrote them. The narrator and main character Bradley has a pathetic sister named Priscilla. I didn’t like her much.
Reviewers say The Black Prince is Murdoch’s best work.
Recommended but not for the faint of heart.
It was tough going there for a while, with an unsympathetic narrator who was interested only in himself and might well be shading his memoir to paint himself in the best possible light. He very much put me in mind of Lolita's Humbert Humbert - an unreliable narrator. And that was before the Roshomon-like postscripts, where the surviving characters each gave their own version of the events, and you're left to pick and choose which 'truth' to believe.
somewhat enjoyed - characters not likeable, allusions to Hamlet and Freud interesting, main character did become sympathetic at the end
I really wanted to add Iris Murdoch to my list of amazing women authors, but it just didn't happen. Is this a 70's thing? I can't think of anything published in the 70's that I liked, but maybe I'm just really really disenchanted with this book.
It felt like it was written much earlier, the language was stuffy and so so British in the worst way. And the unreliability of the narrator just served to exacerbate the read.
I think that my main problem with this novel was the fact that it mixed a story with long ramblings on art and philosophy. I am sort of reminded by what little I read of Ayn Rand, which is never a good thing. The thing is: if you are going to have a story told by an asshole, why should I give any merit to what he says about art and life? I feel like it was supposed to be all deep and meaningful (and in a different setting perhaps it would be), but the teller made it seem pretentious and navel-gazing, which added even further to the feeling of boredom and disgust this novel left me with.
Should I have read The Sea, The Sea instead? I have no desire to read anything else by this woman, but I hate the feeling of having no idea why other people who I totally respect as readers absolutely love her works.
I did have fun with the actual physical process of reading this book though. I had bought an old used thoroughly battered copy (one of those mass market paperbacks I love so much, the paper is rough and familiar and you can hold it open with one hand!) and fairly soon the cover ripped off. I would have been disturbed if I had been enjoying the story but I didn't much care. Then when I took it to work I realized it was still too big to carry around in my uniform (man I love my Nook even more now) so I ripped away the pages I had already read, and just started ripping them off as I read them. I felt like Cheryl Strayed in Wild when she was ripping the pages as she went to lessen the load she had to carry on the trail and fed them to the fire. I would have liked to burn these pages, seeing as they were so infuriatingly boring.
It felt like it was written much earlier, the language was stuffy and so so British in the worst way. And the unreliability of the narrator just served to exacerbate the read.
I think that my main problem with this novel was the fact that it mixed a story with long ramblings on art and philosophy. I am sort of reminded by what little I read of Ayn Rand, which is never a good thing. The thing is: if you are going to have a story told by an asshole, why should I give any merit to what he says about art and life? I feel like it was supposed to be all deep and meaningful (and in a different setting perhaps it would be), but the teller made it seem pretentious and navel-gazing, which added even further to the feeling of boredom and disgust this novel left me with.
Should I have read The Sea, The Sea instead? I have no desire to read anything else by this woman, but I hate the feeling of having no idea why other people who I totally respect as readers absolutely love her works.
I did have fun with the actual physical process of reading this book though. I had bought an old used thoroughly battered copy (one of those mass market paperbacks I love so much, the paper is rough and familiar and you can hold it open with one hand!) and fairly soon the cover ripped off. I would have been disturbed if I had been enjoying the story but I didn't much care. Then when I took it to work I realized it was still too big to carry around in my uniform (man I love my Nook even more now) so I ripped away the pages I had already read, and just started ripping them off as I read them. I felt like Cheryl Strayed in Wild when she was ripping the pages as she went to lessen the load she had to carry on the trail and fed them to the fire. I would have liked to burn these pages, seeing as they were so infuriatingly boring.
dark
funny
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes