Playing the Game

Reading an Iris Murdoch novel is rather like attempting the London Times crossword puzzle. Both require something other than a common-sense approach, for nothing is ever quite what it at first appears to be: the seemingly obvious is really intricate and complex, and the apparently obscure turns out to be disappointingly commonplace. It is the looking-glass world that English intellectuals tend to relish: a clever world with a special game that only clever people can play. Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are perhaps the best example of this marriage between verbal agility and logical legerdemain.

Iris Murdoch has been described as the best British woman novelist writing today, a judgment which is probably correct but is not necessarily the praise it appears to be. She is a philosopher by training—a sort of training that can encourage the discounting of empirical experience in favor of illusion, if illusion is supported by some theory. Her novels are, in fact, distinguished by a strong element of fantasy, though of a more disciplined and less extravagant sort than that of a much lesser contemporary, John Fowles.

JC

About the Author

Judith Chettle

Reading an Iris Murdoch novel is rather like attempting the London Times crossword puzzle. Both require something other than a common-sense approach, for nothing is ever quite what it at first appears to be: the seemingly obvious is really intricate and complex, and the apparently obscure turns out to be disappointingly commonplace. It is the looking-glass world that English intellectuals tend to relish: a clever world with a special game that only clever people can play. Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are perhaps the best example of this marriage between verbal agility and logical legerdemain.

Iris Murdoch has been described as the best British woman novelist writing today, a judgment which is probably correct but is not necessarily the praise it appears to be. She is a philosopher by training—a sort of training that can encourage the discounting of empirical experience in favor of illusion, if illusion is supported by some theory. Her novels are, in fact, distinguished by a strong element of fantasy, though of a more disciplined and less extravagant sort than that of a much lesser contemporary, John Fowles.