The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I might not be clever enough to read Iris Murdoch. Or British enough. It’s possible that there’s a boatload of British socio-political context involved. And since I don’t have it, I don’t understand the book.

But I can only offer my judgement from my context. So: I did not understand what this book was about.

There’s an inciting incident that makes a lot of sense. And there’s one character who has to deal with its consequences. So he must be the protagonist. And the marketing copy on the cover treats him like the protagonist, too, so there’s that. But then there’s a pair of characters having an affair. And there’s another character trying to figure out what he wants to be when he grows up. Either of those could have been their own novel. That would have been fine.

It never became apparent to me what they had to do with anything.

She does a good job creating that particular Iris Murdoch atmosphere. But there’s a peculiar disjointedness. Let’s see if I can explain it: There are some excellent scenes. And those scenes require that certain characters be present. And those characters are present. But they have no good reason to be.

“Wait,” I kept asking myself. “Why is so-and-so here?” And the only answer was that she needed to be there so the scene could happen.

In fact, this could be the whole point of the book. The father seems like a magician throughout. I suppose that’s because he has a little magician-ish iconography, and because people treat him like he’s important without there being any clear reason why he should be important to them. Like they’re under his spell. And then also there’s this mysterious way characters get dragged back and forth to be at their scenes. As though there’s a hidden puppet-master.

So maybe the secret meaning of the book lies in the fact that the plot is nonsense? If true, it seems like cheating to me.

I shouldn’t fail to mention the best scene. At one point the protagonist takes a ring off his dead father’s finger. That’s the best scene. It’s kind of hard to say why. Something about symbolic resonance. Which is a kind of authorial magic, so I want to give Iris Murdoch proper respect for it. She was able to set up a scene that got under my skin without me knowing why.



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