Magellan's Log: Iris Murdoch: Letters

With Shakespeare or Beethoven, it’s easy to sense that each did something new and large and living in an old form. Read a few lines, play a few bars. There’s no doubt.

With Murdoch it’s difficult to put your finger on just what she did, not to mention how she did it. Read a few pages, and you’re unlikely to be impressed, unless you happen onto one of the purple patches. Rifle through one of the novels, and it looks dreadfully, well, normal.

Adding to this coloration especially is her use of letters. Her people are always sitting down for a spot of inadvertent self-disclosure in the grand epistolary tradition. Now and then, like one of Beethoven’s old-timey three-quarter time movements, an entire chapter turns up consisting of nothing but letters by a dozen characters (The Accidental Man, for one), from, to, and about each other. Antique in form like Beethoven’s symphonic minuets, which are certainly minuets in name only, Murdoch’s novelistic letters open new vistas of psychic revelation. If triple-time Beethoven hints at an apotheosis of dance, epistolary Murdoch puts human figures between newly and dangerously facing late twentieth century mirrors. And we, for the first time, are right there with them.

What a planet.