Though Irish by birth, as a novelist Iris Murdoch remains utterly within the Oxbridge world which was her personal universe. Her characters, with few exceptions, are products of that competitive, claustrophobic society and her fiction invariably explores the complex dilemmas of choice, desire and need; love, and above all, ego. Ego and vanity frequently feature in her fiction, as "impossibly young" 50-somethings grapple for romantic fulfilment.
Metaphysical battles are waged in dense, deadly serious, completely comic narratives (shaped by Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Proust), which are also upper-class romps in which sex and philosophy are interchangeable. While she was the definitive Oxbridge insider, Murdoch never lost the ability to observe the inhabitants of this narrow academic world with all the open-eyed wonder of a natural outsider. Sexual yearning and sexual guilt preoccupy her cast of clever Peter Pans who possess Oxbridge degrees, erudite vocabularies and smart wardrobes, favouring rich velvet, corduroy and tweed.
For all her intellectual, moral and philosophical concerns, particularly her abiding obsession with the nature of goodness, Murdoch's work delights in worldly - and wordy - detail. Few 20th century writers devote more space to physical description; faces, bodies, textiles and meals are endlessly described. The colour of a character's eyes will be mentioned several times - as are the striking blue orbs owned by a collie in The Green Knight (1993).
Even when developing situations of moral and emotional turmoil, Murdoch does not stint on physical description. No doubt called upon to deflect her obvious cerebral intensity, the density of description fails to confer a tactile, living quality on fictions which consistently live in the mind not the emotions. Physical references are also invariably used to stress the enduring youthfulness of her characters. It must also be conceded that for all their cleverness and appeal - Murdoch often has more than one of her characters in love with, or loved by, more than one of the assembled paragons and misfits - few of her protagonists are likeable. Privilege and education as explored by Iris Murdoch usually add up to self absorption and smugness. While the humour in the novels is due to Murdoch's innate irony, her characters are not witty.
Murdoch was a scholar; a moral philosopher of international standing, a university philosophy lecturer and talented linguist who read several languages. Even at their most convoluted and embarrassingly theatrical, her novels testify to her intellectual curiosity and benign wonderment at the things people do. It is true that the more one reads of her work - and I have read all her novels - the more critical one becomes, noting the thematic narrowness and repetition. To read several of her books, is in fact, to read them all. To say she creates a world which is instantly recognisable is not wholly complimentary - during a 40 year career, that world would approach self parody. Any veteran Murdoch reader might well wonder whether her objective in devising such daft plots was merely her philosopher's method of emphasising the absurdity of life? Was Murdoch the philosopher testing the form, or merely exposing human behaviour?
Few serious literary writers, are capable of writing as baldly and even as badly. Murdoch's prose can be diffuse, pedantic, graceless, weighted by multiple clauses and undermined by fussy little asides such as when a simple reference to apples becomes "apples (not Cox's Orange Pippins, which had not yet appeared in the shops). She was also guilty of writing appalling dialogue - her characters engage in dialogue as spoken nowhere on earth except in a Murdoch novel.
An exchange between two of the younger lovers in The Green Knight runs as follows when in characteristic Murdoch style, the pair having recognised their emotions, immediately fall to analysing them. "Listen, Harvey," urges Sefton, "I am older than you are, I am thousands and thousands of years older than you." Harvey replies, "I know that, but it is not relevant now."
It is not surprising that within hours of the death of Murdoch, who never relinquished her personal Irishness, novelist and critic Malcolm Bradbury was saying: "If one was to compile a list of the best five English writers since the war, she would be up there." The worth of such an assessment can only be judged by a serious evaluation of the achievement of the post-War English novel, itself a contentiously debated subject, dwarfed as it is by the genius of Evelyn Waugh (1903-66). Murdoch's seventh novel The Unicorn (1963) takes place in a mythicised Co Clare, while two years later The Red and the Green, which was set in Dublin during the lead up to the 1916 Rising, appeared. But her fiction is rooted in the English tradition, in the moral, particularly English comedy of manners as practised by Anthony Powell.
Often wrongly compared with the magnificent Jane Austen, with whom she shares little and certainly, no stylistic similarities, Murdoch did develop a particular type of English novel from where Aldous Huxley had left it in works such as Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928).
She was not experimental - her interest in form and structure was casual - Murdoch told stories about humans at the mercy of their emotions. It is surprising that her stature is so much greater than that of Anita Brookner, another academic and fellow former Booker Prize winner. Murdoch and Brookner inhabit opposite ends of the scale in terms of length; Brookner's tight, well observed fictions are far briefer than Murdoch's. Murdoch juggles several sets of confused characters; Brookner focuses on loners. Murdoch's world is a cluttered stage. Like Saul Bellow, a far finer novelist and possibly her intellectual equal, she always sustained the abiding central thesis of her fiction: that the cleverest people do the stupidest things in relationships.
Murdoch refused to be edited and no editor dared remove a comma. Such authorial defiance will in time prove costly to her critical standing. The plots are predictable, even ridiculous, and too often she allowed her fascination with literary and classical allusions to attempt to counter the banality of the behaviour she was chronicling. Murdoch was no post-modernist or even modernist, but to describe her as a 19th century novelist because she wrote longer and longer novels is lazy - and wrong. Her fictional world was that of the 20th century, in which people can make messes without going to war.
At her best, in novels such as Under The Net - her debut which was published in 1954 and acknowledged as a fine first work (it was in fact her fourth attempt at a novel) - A Severed Head (1961), An Unofficial Rose (1962), Bruno's Dream (1969), A Fairly Honour- able Defeat (1970), An Accidental Man (1971) and the 1978 Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea with its echoes of The Tempest, Murdoch is readable, engaging, even brisk. It is significant that the sharpest of her fiction dates from her prime.
That dangerous tension between the quasi-trite and quasi-profound which is the stuff of life ensures the suspension of Murdoch's fiction between high moral debates and trivia. Her legacy as a novelist may be seen through her influence on a writer such as A.S. Byatt.
Still, at her best, as in Bruno's Dream and A Fairly Honourable Defeat, her intelligence and humanity shine. She was never an original, yet even at her most stylistically chaotic, and even in her most random narratives the warmth of this formidable individual invariably surfaced.
