The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) | Iris Murdoch

The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) | Iris Murdoch | Rich and rewarding

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The Black Prince (...

	The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) Iris Murdoch Penguin Classics, 2003 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Bradley Pearson, an unsuccessful novelist in his late fifties, has finally left his dull office job as an Inspector of Taxes. Bradley hopes to retire to the country, but predatory friends and relations dash his hopes of a peaceful retirement. He is tormented by his melancholic sister, who has decided to come live with him; his ex-wife, who has infuriating hopes of redeeming the past; her delinquent brother, who wants money and emotional confrontations; and Bradley's friend and rival, Arnold Baffin, a younger, deplorably more successful author of commercial fiction. The ever-mounting action includes marital cross-purposes, seduction, suicide, abduction, romantic idylls, murder, and due process of law. Bradley tries to escape from it all but fails, leading to a violent climax and a coda that casts shifting perspectives on all that has preceded.

"Fertile invention is put to the service of an expansive sense of character; and since the book also has Miss Murdoch's usual narrative energy and intellectual weight, it is the best novel she has written in years." (The New York Times Book Review)

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And Funny, Too.

Just adding to the plethora of reviews and putting in my two or three cents. Dame Iris is said to have possessed a prodigious and heavy intellect. And one can see, in reading her works, that this is very true. She is able to see into all the various emotional responses of myriad characters, and to do so faultlessly. Yes, we say, this is true! This is the way he would think and act (or the way I would think and act.) She is mercilessly honest in her descriptions, whether they be of thoughts or actions. And I found the book very humorous. Our hero, Bradley, is himself a humorous character, so serious and caught up in himself. He is a buffoon who constantly makes the wrong choices, yet intellectualizes everything and rationalizes everything to suit himself. I think this is quite an amazing book. As one reviewer who didn't like the book remarked, it is a farce. And yes, it is a farce. But there are nonetheless deep truths running around in here. Dame Iris had this incredible ability to see through people, to put herself in their places and understand just what they would do in any given circumstance. Her characters are so impeccably drawn that we know them utterly.
To be able to weave a good story is one thing, that makes a good story-teller. To be able to create characters which live and breathe is yet another thing, and many writers base their works on this alone. But to be able to write impeccably precise prose , create living characters, tell a great story, and have a moral imperative is what makes great literature.
The Black Prince is worth a read. This is great literature, and a whole lot easier than all those Russian guys.

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Rich and rewarding

One of the best books by one of the best novelists of the 20th century. The story of the heinously bitter and unreliable Bradley Pearson is rich with complexity of character and situation. Between the bitterness and the self-justification, answers to the questions about "what really happened" become almost unknowable- the only "truth" in the book is emotional truth, which rings from every sentence. I want to reread the book now because once I understood what the main text really "was" I felt like I needed to go back and look at it all again in a completely different light

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Many Personalities, One Voice

Try this hypothesis: the Black Prince's several authors -- Bradley Pearson plus the others who offer commentaries at the end of his work -- are all Bradley, writing as separate personalities of a full-blown psychotic.

Under this hypothesis, the back-story of the novel would be that Bradley's personality was too fragile to sustain even the relatively mundane life he had built for himself. That life falls apart before the action of the novel starts: his well-adjusted wife leaves him, he retires from an orderly job at a relatively young age, he feels blocked in his attempts at writing, and he is traumatized over the approaching end of his sex life by a disappointment with a much younger woman. Under the impact of these blows, Bradley's personality cracks, and his new, multiple personality sets about doing what Bradley couldn't: writing.

The novel itself -- the book that you and I read -- is what the psychotic Bradley writes. As a psychotic, he obviously can't interpret the back-story that led to his insanity: he can tell us that he lost his job and wife, etc., but he can't tell us why.

Nonetheless, in his novel he starts sketching his friends and family. With his psyche out of control, however, these personages rapidly fall out of character and start acting out Bradley's conscious and unconscious wishes, sometimes to the embarrassment of this still reserved man.

Nonetheless, Bradley is happier and more in control in his new world -- a world of which he is, after all, the author. So, he ultimately kills off his old self by writing about the murder of his alter ego, Arnold Baffin, a real writer who Bradley envies. (Although the narrative initially portrays Bradley as only having discovered Arnold's body, Bradley subsequently accepts responsibility for the murder when prosecutors show that he is the only logical perpetrator. Perhaps in the back-story to the novel, Bradley actually did kill Arnold as his first act of full schizophrenia.)

Having killed himself off, Bradley then takes up full-time residence in the fictionalized personalities that his writer-self has adapted from real life, and he starts writing commentaries from their points of view on what he has just finished writing as Bradley. He ends his days in the prison of his own mind, and possibly in the real prison he writes about.

The clues that lead to this hypothesis are both external and internal. Externally, there are the absurd, self-incriminating commentaries that end the novel and that provide the Fowles-like multiple perspectives on the narrative facts.

Internally, I couldn't help feeling that all the characters speak with Bradley's voice. His skill as a writer differentiates the characters' external traits, but somehow they all become philosophers using Bradley's own erudite language to unravel the central puzzles of Bradley's own life. Too much revolves around him.

Supposing that something like the above hypothesis is right, then Murdoch's task was, in a way, easy: she just had to put herself in the place of a mad ventriloquist -- Bradley. This should be no great trick for an experienced novelist! Easy or not, she pulled it off, or something much like it.

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Murdoch's Black Prince

This is a thoughtful, difficult novel that explores the ambiguities of human character and the complex relationship between art and passion. Dame Iris Murdoch (1919 --1999) was both a philosopher and a prolific novelist. She wrote "The Black Prince" in 1973. A subsequent novel, "The Sea, The Sea" received the Booker Prize.

The book revolves around several complex characters. The hero is an author, and retired tax inspector, Bradley Pearson, age 58 at the time most of the action of the book takes place. He has published only sparingly but prides himself as a serious author. Most of the story is told by Bradley.

Bradley has long been divorced, but his ex-wife Christian is a major character in the book, as she reenters Bradley's life after the death of her second husband. Christian's brother, Francis Marloe, is a failed physician who offers advice and assistance, of a mixed quality, to Bradley during the story. Bradley is a long-term friend of the Baffin family, which includes Arnold, a highly successful writer of fiction, his wife Rachael, and their 20-year old daughter Julian. The story revolves around the 58-year old Bradley's love and passion for the 20-year old Julian. As the story unfolds Bradley's sister, Pricilla, is leaving her husband and comes to Bradley for emotional support and assistance. Bradley is put to the test about how he will respond to his sister.

The other major character in Murdoch's novel is an editor, "P.A. Loxias', who becomes Bradley's friend and the editor of Bradley's manuscript that Bradley wrote recounting his love affair with young Julian. The manuscript forms the body of the book. Bradley wrote the book after the fact, while in prison for a crime he did not commit. Loxias both introduces and closes the book, while Christian, Rachael, and Julian get brief opportunities to write for themselves and to comment upon Bradley's manuscript. This "Penguin Classics" reprint of the book also includes an introduction by the noted philosopher Martha Nussbaum which is unusually detailed and, perhaps, could be read as yet another editorial comment on Bradley's story that might well have been part of Murdoch's text.

The story is full of ambiguity, vacillation in its characters, and violence and thus is almost a retelling of Hamlet -- Shakespeare's play that figures prominently in this book. Another main influence on the book is Plato, particularly his great dialogue "Phaedrus" which explores the relationship between art, erotic love, and rhetoric, as this novel does as well. It is always good to be reminded of and to think about Plato. A third, less obvious influence, I think is Buddhism. The influence of Buddhist thought on Murdoch is explicit in her novel "The Sea, The Sea" but it is here as well. The book can almost be read as an illustration of the three basic traits of existence as developed in Buddhist thought: suffering (dukka), change, and egolessness. Bradley and the other characters struggle to see the world and other people clearly but are prevented from doing so by their own passions and self-concepts.
Bradley achieves a Buddhist-like detachment near the end as he reflects upon his experiences.

In reading the book, I found it helpful to distinguish clearly between the body of the story that Bradley recounts and the time that he wrote it, some years afterwards, while left alone with himself to reflect. Bradley was swept with passion for a relationship that could not have lasted, that he did not fully understand, and that lead to tragedy for many people. Yet this passion helped him, in the final analysis, attain a degree of peace and understanding. He was able to tell the truth in writing his story and to present himself, terrible warts and all. Love lead to great human sorrow for Bradly, but it also lead to his ability to present his experience in the form of art and to reflect upon it dispassionately.

Portions of this book are rather wordy and inner directed. It needs to be read carefully. But I found it an inspiring treatment of the nature of human erotic passion and its force for life. The book will appeal to readers willing to reflect and to explore themselves.

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Original, but snobbishly intellectual

The Black Prince is a curious piece of work. It is completely fiction, but it uses this device in that the "publisher" is a friend of the "narrator" who has written most of the book. There are epilogues by other characters in the story and by the publisher himself at the end.

Now about 90% of the book is "written" by the narrator, who obviously is a flawed man. He is immature, pompous, selfish, and probably a little mad. And on top of it, he is a flawed writer as well. He has longwinded asides about everything under the sun, and rationalizes and over-explains all his behaviour to the nth degree. Now come to think of it, I'm sure Iris Murdoch intended this to be so, ie. she intends the reader to figure out that the narrator is a flawed and pompous man and writer. But my question is, does that make a good book? It brings to mind the old one-liner: if a book that teaches failure does badly, is it a success?

If the author makes the narrator a bad person, well and good, but when he is made a bad writer as well, one must howl something is amiss. This is really why the book did not work for me: I thought Murdoch's device, although very original, was snobbish and intellectual. At some point I had to stop putting up with it and say "narrator = writer => Murdoch = pompous + flawed".

Now I felt Murdoch does have mastery over language and characters, so perhaps another book of hers might be really good (this was my first Murdoch). "The Black Prince" though, I thought was all very good in maybe a creative writing classroom, but not out of it.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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