Magellan's Log: Iris Murdoch: Hope

If one of the qualities of greatness in art is that such works are if not prophetic anticipatory, then Murdoch’s novels in one surprising pragmatic sense offer hope for us about our bleak future. A fuller appreciation of her people requires a society in which as for them money, class, and politics are issues of secondary importance for almost everyone. Still mired in this painful, violent pseudo-Darwinian jungle of late capitalist oligarchy and compulsive technocracy, we can only with the greatest difficulty imagine such lives, such a culture. It is the heroic and subtle and smiling act of imagining her way into a freer, newly humane future that places Murdoch creatively with Shakespeare.