Magellan's Log: Iris Murdoch: Gesamtkunstwerke

The novels are operas without music, or rather with a great unheard music, the one we know is there, here, all the time, governing, leading, commenting on, clarifying the action, night and day. Except, unlike opera, here in these novels through a kind of real-time metempsychosis we not only watch we participate, partake of fully through the author’s artfully directed vision and focusing of our attention, which moves constantly hither and thither, external dialogue, internal monologue, solos, duets, trios, quartets, bravura quintets, sex-, and septets on occasion.