Magellan's Log: Iris Murdoch: Knock Knock

Against her hard-won grain with its nobly paced fake classicism, where every book begins with hope and time enough to spend pages and pages and pages setting scene and character, The Philosopher’s Pupil starts like some cheap thriller with a drunken ride through the night, an ugly marital spat and splash as the angry husband plunges car and wife into a canal. The abrupt intrusion is shocking like the suddenness of the forte chords that wrench us out of and into the world at the opening of the Eroica.