#MURDOCH_Iris

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Regency Buck

Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck

(England, 1810s: dislike turns to love in Regency high society; will he tame her or will she tame him?)

20th-Century Romance

Caroline Fireside, Goodbye Again  (will heroine sacrifice glamorous film career for love?)

M.M. Kaye, The Far Pavilions  (love across the races in dying days of British Raj in India)

Margaret Pemberton, Never Leave Me  (successful Californian looks back on doomed wartime love-affair with German officer, when she works for France Resistance)

Erich Segal, Love Story  (two college students fall idyllically, tragically, in love)

Comedy of Manners

Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head  (sexual merry-go-round in "swinging" 1960s London)

P.G. Wodehouse, Bill the Conqueror  (Percy Pilbeam"s havoc-strewn career as editor of "Society Spice")

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones  (escapades of foundling wandering 18th-century England to find truth about himself)

Mary Wesley, The Vacillations of Poppy Carewe  (rich heiress reviews young men in her life to find the "best" - i.e. the least obviously eligible - husband. Love intervenes)

Period Romance

Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber  (love and adventure in 17th-century, Restoration England)

Rosalind Laker, What the Heart Keeps  (two immigrants in 1900s USA fall in love, make life together in Wild West and early Hollywood)

Norah Lofts, The Brittle Glass  (independent girl grows up in 18th-century Fens, a place of smugglers, gipsies and highwaymen)

T.N. Murari, Taj  (love of Indian Shah Jahan and his wife, for whom he built the Taj Mahal)

Regency England

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility  (love-affairs of two sisters: sensible Elinor and impulsive, romantic Marianne)

Joan Aiken, Mansfield Revisited  (spirited girl "tames" brother-in-law"s snobbish family)

Clare Darcy, Elyza  (plain girl disguises herself as boy to find romance)

Caroline Courtney, Duchess in Disguise  (spurned wife disguises herself to win husband"s love)

Romantic Mystery

Helen MacInnes, Ride a Pale Horse  (US journalist at Prague conference approached by would-be defector)

Anne Bridge, The Ginger Griffin  (intrigue and unhappiness in pre-Revolutionary China)

Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting  (English governess in France, caught in family feud, saves charges from death, finds love)

Jane Aiken Hodge, Polonaise  (love and politics in 1810s Poland, caught between Russia and Napoleon)

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MURDOCH, Iris

Irish/British novelist and philosopher (1919-1999)

The subject of Murdoch's two dozen novels is personal politics: the ebb and flow of relationships, the way we manipulate others and are ourselves manipulated. The time is now; the people are middle-class, professional, usually from the English Home Counties -- and they are all bizarre, possessed by a demon which blurs reality and dream into a single, mesmeric state. Seduction, mysticism and moral disintegration are favourite themes, and the innocent late adolescent (whose effect on other people's lives is often devastating) is a standard character.

THE BELL  (1958) Should we live our lives by the conventions of society or moment by moment, defining ourselves by our own changing moods and enthusiasms? This question perplexes every character in The Bell: all are waiting for a sudden inspiration or discovery which will define their existence, show them how they should behave. The setting is a lay community housed in a former convent, a refuge for an eccentric collection of inmates whose peace is disturbed by the arrival of two amoral innocents', Dora and Toby. The Bell was popular in the hippie 1960s, and still seems to catch the wide-eyed, distracted mood of those times. But its story and characters are fascinating and its images (for example that of the nude, startlingly white-bodied Toby diving, like a fallen angel, into the murky convent lake to investigate a sunken bell) are as disturbing as they are unforgettable.

Murdoch's other novels include The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle, A Severed Head, The Red and the Green, The Time of the Angels, The Sea, The Sea, The Book and the Brotherhood, The Message to the Planet, The Green Knight and Jackson’s Dilemma.

READ ON

The Book and the Brotherhood

The Green Knight

To An Unofficial Rose : see also pathway

Antonia Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden Mary Flanagan, Trust Irene Handl, The Sioux Mary McCarthy, A Charmed Life D.M. Thomas, Birthstone Alice Thomas Ellis, The 27th Kingdom

 more :Tags  Pathways  Themes & Places

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An Unofficial Rose

Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose

(nine people, all looking for love; nine intertwined, entangled lives)

Lure of the Exotic

Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast  (tired of US civilisation, man takes family "back to nature" in Ecuadorian jungle)

Olivia Manning, The Rain Forest  (young couple, psychically "lost", seek solace on magical, sinister tropical island)

Patrick White, Voss  (explorers "find" themselves by trekking across Australia; at home in Sydney, girl waits breathlessly for news)

Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot  (widow seeks happiness by surrendering to impulse, going on haphazard Far Eastern odyssey)

Rosamond Lehmann, A Sea-Grape Tree  (deserted wife seeks spiritual and psychic reassurance on Caribbean island)

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits  (Trueba family women, over four generations, order their lives by magic, fantasy and psychic communion rather than as their patriarch ordains)

Searching for Self

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse  (thoughts and memories of large close family on holiday: projected day-trip to a lighthouse focuses each of their lives)

Lisa St Aubin de Terán, The Bay of Silence  (apparently happy, successful film actress haunted by schizophrenia)

Christopher Isherwood, A Meeting By the River  (two brothers, extranged and "lost", find Buddhism, true love and tranquility of soul)

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf  (lonely middle-aged recluse "rehabilitated" spiritually by three mystical, possibly fantasy young people)

Lawrence Durrell, The Dark Labyrinth/Cefalù  (group of tourists enter Cretan labyrinth in search of psychic identity - and each quest is unexpectedly fulfilled)

Eleanor Dark, Return to Coolami  (four people motoring in Australian outback discover themselves)

Women Alone

Jenny Diski, Rainforest  (professor tries to stop intellectual meticuluosness destroying emotional life)

Anita Brookner, A Misalliance  (divorced woman, keeping up facade of busy, fulfilled existence, is troubled by chaotic emotional life of people she meets)

Bernice Rubens, Our Father  (archeologist"s meeting with God in Sahara triggers a search of her past and the relationship between her charismatic, enigmatic parents)

Susan Hill, In the Springtime of the Year  (young widow "rehabilitated" from grief by calm rhythms of country life)

Jane Gardam, Crusoe"s Daughter  (Robinson Crusoe gives lonely woman purpose in life and grasp on sanity)

D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel  (case-history of disturbed woman, erotic and violent, reflects nightmarish psychic experience of all 20th-century humanity)

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Ulysses

James Joyce, Ulysses

(journey of self-discovery on a single Dublin day in 1904)

Cities (where we live is what we are)

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet  (Alexandria)

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye  (New York)

Eleanor Dark, Waterway  (Sydney)

James Plunkett, Strumpet City  (Dublin life and troubles - of all kinds - before World War I)

Saul Bellow, Humboldt"s Gift  (Chicago)

Ireland

William Trevor, Mrs Eckdorff in O"Neill"s Hotel

Roddy Doyle, The Snapper

Molly Keane, Good Behaviour  (large Anglo-Irish family collapsing under its own eccentricity)

J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man

Flann O"Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds  (homosexual biographer doing research, finds himself being engulfed by his subject and by memories of his own past life)

"Joycean" novels (big experimental, all-encompassing)

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy  ("autobiography" of 18th-century English gentleman turns into the longest, richest shaggy-dog story ever told)

Salman Rushdie, Midnight"s Children  (Saleem and family, "handcuffed to India", experience the 80-year evolution of indipendence and self-renewal)

Italo Svevo, The Confessions of Zeno  (explaining to his psychiatrist why he can"t give up smoking, Zeno tells the tale of his extraordinary, inadequate existence)

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces  (self-confessed genius bestrides New Orleans like an anarchic, flatulent colossus, finds it too small to accommodate his appetite for mischief)

John Barth, Giles Goat-boy  (US professor tries to bring up child free of original sin)

Alexander Theroux, D"Arconville"s Cat  (jilted by sophomore lover, D"Arconville leaves US Deep South to "find himself" in Venice)

Joyce Cary, The Horse"s Mouth  (eccentric artist determines to live bohemian existence, boozy and bawdy, reinventing his oen character from day to day)

Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers  ("memoirs" of aged homosexual novelist, who has been at heart of all human betrayal and bitchiness since the 20th century began)

Robertson Davies, What"s Bred in the Bone  (odyssey of art-forger, thief and conman, as discovered from his will)

Self-Discovery

Joseph Heller, Something Happened  (empty man, New York business executive, reviews the reasons for the failure of his career and family life)

Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle  (middle-aged schoolmaster, besotted with young artist, finds his whole life toppling round his ears)

John Fowles, The Magus  (man seeks true meaning of experience: is our life as real as it seems, or a series of illusions - ans if illusion, how well-disposed is the illusionist?)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway  (middle-class Englishwoman preparing for dinner-party reviews - and reveals - her whole existence and inner self)

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way  (part Three of Remembrance of Things Past - the effects of death - of love and the death of the beloved)