The Black Prince

📕 For this, her new novel, Iris Murdoch projects herself into the person of an unsuccessful novelist in his sixties and lets him write it himself, looking back at his own life to find material for the book toward which he has been striving. He is the narrator and principal character. As a story, it turns out to be one of her very best dramatic narratives: a "celebration of love" that is filled with surprises, intense emotion, subtle interrelationships. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idyls, murder, and due process of law. Yet no less than usual of Miss Murdoch's own kind of irony and insight into motives is visible. She has been generous to her imaginary novelist, Bradley Pearson, in lending him her powers. And she has created in him (unbeknownst to him) a wholly credible and appealing character. The story is set in an ingenious framework. Bradley Pearson is deeply concerned with the old questions, What is Truth? and What is Art? and she makes a serious case for his words: "Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth." She lets him write a novel that is truth in his terms, is absorbing in itself, and becomes a valid work of art in her setting. Meanwhile Bradley's characters are making plenty of trouble. His melancholic sister has decided to come and live with him. His ex-wife has appeared with the infuriating intention of redeeming the past. Her delinquent brother wants money and strong emotion...