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scarpuccia 's review for:
The Black Prince
by Iris Murdoch
First thing to say, if you don't like unlikeable characters stay clear of this. The narrator of this novel is as unlikeable as they come. He's a misogynist, delusional, self-righteous, self-absorbed, easily unmanned, neurotic, infantile, priggish and yet at the same time he can be piercingly wise. He's also wildly unreliable as the narrator of his own story. William Bradley is a bachelor with exalted aspirations to be a great writer. He'd rather write nothing than anything substandard. So he writes nothing. His friend Arnold is a prolific and successful novelist. He is scornful of his friend's literary achievements. At the beginning of the novel he receives a panicked phone call from Arnold who tells him he has killed his wife. He rushes to the house and finds Rachel, the wife, badly bruised and distraught. Not long afterwards he will share an amorous moment with Rachel. But soon he will fall in love with Arnold and Rachel's daughter. He's so in love with her that he vomits over her dress on their first date at the opera - one of the funniest literary moments of my year. This family provide him with the whole gamut of his imaginative life. Is it real life or is it fantasy?
To begin with one takes the narrator at his word. But, in degrees, his version of events becomes ever more difficult to believe. And as this shift occurs one begins to feel more sympathy for him. I guess at the end it doesn't matter much whether his story is true because he's offered us so much in the way of truth about human existence. It was spoilt a little for me by the postscripts of the other characters telling their conflicting versions of the truth, all of which were irritatingly opaque and overly misleading.
The most prominent idea I took from this book is that we can't help telling the truth about ourselves even when we lie.
To begin with one takes the narrator at his word. But, in degrees, his version of events becomes ever more difficult to believe. And as this shift occurs one begins to feel more sympathy for him. I guess at the end it doesn't matter much whether his story is true because he's offered us so much in the way of truth about human existence. It was spoilt a little for me by the postscripts of the other characters telling their conflicting versions of the truth, all of which were irritatingly opaque and overly misleading.
The most prominent idea I took from this book is that we can't help telling the truth about ourselves even when we lie.