The Black Prince - Iris Murdoch

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I write a guest review on the first wednesday of every month.

Read: July 2009

The Black Prince in one Tweet sized chunk:
There is a period in the middle when The Black Prince is one of the most romantic works I have read.

“Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.”

So concludes The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch's fifteenth novel which many consider her best. It is a fascinatingly strange novel, slippery and difficult to put down. Part metaphysical enquiry into the nature of art and truth, part romantic liaison, part psychological thriller. You read it engrossed, though at times wonder why. The characters are often unappealing: petty middle class middle age creatures driven by duplicity and jealousy. Yet they are comprehensively drawn and engaging. Murdoch masterfully constructs her plot to rework aspects of Hamlet and bookends it with forewords and postscripts by the characters which counterpoint, clarify, and question what has taken place. The prose is smooth and natural, and the imagery wonderfully symbolic.

Yet it starts out slowly. Murdoch never allowed anyone to edit her work and at times this results in awkwardly paced, idiosyncratically phrased works. The first two hundred pages amble along as Bradley Pearson, recently retired from a career as an Inspector of Taxes, dreams of retreating to the country to write his magnum opus. Yet at every turn he is beset by complications. He bickers with his 'protégé' Arnold Baffin about approaches to writing, is drawn into a strange passionless affair by Arnold's wife Rachel, and tutors their daughter Julian. He is pursued by his ex-wife Christian and her sycophantic brother Frances, and has his depressed sister turns up on his door having left her husband. Poor Bradley, it would be enough to make anyone feel sorry for him. But he is self-absorbed, fastidious, and pompous. He deals with it all in a distracted, unsympathetic and distant manner. He seems to care not a jot for the suffering of others. He is not the most endearing of characters.

And then, just as you are beginning to wonder whether the plot is actually going anywhere, Eros appears with his little bow and arrow and hits old Bradley square in the middle of his heart. He is transformed: softened by love, perfected by love, inspired by love. The apple of his eye is the twenty-year-old Julian Baffin and although at first he proudly determines to maintain their purity by keeping his feelings to himself, it soon turns out that she feels the same way. After a wonderfully demonstrative scene outside the Royal Opera House where each lays their soul on the line they engage in a whirlwind romance. They are like teenagers, effusively professing the never before experienced wonder of total love. Theirs is a romance to change the world, heal wounds, produce great works of art. The Black Prince becomes one of the most romantic works of literature I have read. Their mutual craving for each other takes the breath away, the hesitant heat between them is hard to resist. Bradley subtitles his memoir 'A Celebration of Love' and that is exactly what it is. He ruminates long on the nature of love, is as passionate and erudite as Nabakov at his best.

“When sexual desire is also love it connects us with the whole world and becomes a new mode of experience. Sex then reveals itself as the great connective principle whereby we overcome duality, the force which made separateness as an aspect of oneness at some moment of bliss in the mind of God. I yearned absolutely, yet I had never felt more relaxed in my life.”

These are wonderful passages which convey a great deal yet seem not a dent in the wider luminescence of their love. Julian, in her youthful eagerness reciprocates this all and more. She is the driving force and initiator for all that takes place. Their conversations are filled with uncertainty, hopefulness, disbelief. It all conforms to such a perfect romantic fantasy that one cannot help but wonder if it is not a figment of Bradley's imagination.

The unreliable narrator features in much of Iris Murdoch’s work. Indeed, Bradley’s first line marks him out as inherently unreliable:

“Although several years have now passed since the events recorded in this fable, I shall in telling it adopt the modern technique of narration, allowing the narrating consciousness to pass like a light along its series of present moments, aware of the past, unaware of what is to come...So for example I shall say, 'I am fifty-eight years old', as I then was. And I shall judge people, inadequately, perhaps even unjustly, as I then judged them, and not in the light of any later wisdom.”

Throughout what follows these words combine with Murdoch's reputation to leave the reader eternally unsure as to whether everything, or indeed anything, that Bradley Pearson recounts is correct. You read on, heart beating wildly, worried that these emotions you have inscribed the characters with might not turn out to be tangible. Worse still, you fear that something horrible might be about to happen at any moment, that if he is deluding himself it might all suddenly crash down with tragic repercussions.

Tension builds. I will not concede how it ends, though unseen and delightfully symmetrical twists occur. The greatest achievement of The Black Prince is in the fact that Murdoch plays with the reader’s expectations, intuits them, and replies with a second level of uncertainty and unreliability. The main plot of the novel is followed by four brief postscripts which allow the main characters a chance to respond to the events recounted by Bradley. On the surface it would seem that they might serve only to clarify Bradley’s unreliability, but in the way they are presented, the hard-nosed, broker no argument tone of voice, there are enough holes to make their version of events at least as dubious as Bradley’s own narrative. The result is that the reader comes away wondering whether perhaps, despite everything, his narration might be more accurate than we previously suspected. It all comes back to the quote at the beginning: Bradley’s truth, by being turned into literature, becomes the only truth that matters.

The Black Prince is a very fine work of psychological fiction by one of the most daring writers of the twentieth century. It fuses philosophical discussion with structural creativity. The pitching of the narration is faultless. At its heart it is about the transforming quality of love, its power to change, not only life, but consciousness too. It is a strange feeling at once to dislike yet love the characters. The book is at least as infuriating as it is delightful and it is this which makes it so rewarding. Somehow the faults become positives and the lasting impression is of a book which, in spite itself, warms the cockles of the heart.

8.5 out of 10