It’s a testament to Murdoch’s skill and power as a novelist that it isn’t just about the surprises. She creates delicious suspense and complex plots but is much more than a teller of entertaining stories. While plots are wonderful things, and Murdoch is a great plotter, my not remembering some of them over the decades has only led to a joyful rediscovering each time I open one of her books.
What makes a novel alcoholic? In light of the above admission about my 2017 thought process, I deduced that I had not made a thorough enough case for choosing A Fairly Honourable Defeat as the tie-in for liver disease and decided to conduct some qualitative research to find out which is Iris Murdoch’s most alcoholic novel.
Murdoch’s philosophy of ‘unselfing’ was first coined in The Sovereignty of Good in the 1970s. While the term itself was original, Murdoch’s attempts to grapple with concepts related to the morality of the self followed a trajectory laid down by centuries of her predecessors. One cannot fail to see parallels with the likes of Keats, for example, whose theory of ‘Negative Capability’, an idea that argued for attention to beauty and the freedom of the imagination, was epitomised in his poem Ode to a Nightingale.
Iris Murdoch herself visited Japan along with husband John Bayley at the request of the British Council. They stayed for around two weeks and the lecture Iris gave in Kobe that I attended took place at the Kobe Institute of St. Catherine’s on Friday 28th May 1993. This wide-ranging talk was on ‘The Modern Novel’.
I discovered Iris Murdoch’s novels around the same time that I was becoming immersed in Powell. I had read a few in England, starting with The Bell, before my move to Japan in the mid-1980s. And so, I became a Murdochian as well as a Powellian.