The Black Prince

I would say that I didn’t know what to expect going into The Black Prince, but that’s not quite true.  I’ve read a couple of Iris Murdoch books previously; The Sea, The Sea and The Bell and I’ve noticed that she tended to go in for tales about artist/ writer types struggling with The Muse.  Or, to put it another way, men (and always men it seems) of a certain age with too much free time on their hands.  Hero of The Black Prince is Franz Kafka-esque former taxman-cum-author Bradley Pearson.  At 58 he’s retired from his day job and following a small amount of earlier success plans to write.  Naturally, he does everything under the sun but write.

The story itself is full of twists and turns that we completely unexpected (one lust fill romance aside).  What starts as a total farce of a man’s attempts to leave London for a break being thwarted by his ridiculous friends and family gets pretty dark later on and ends in a place so far removed from the book’s beginnings that they barely resemble the same story.  I’m trying to not reveal too many spoilers her.  This is a good book (if you have a fair appreciation of Hamlet) and I want to encourage people to read it.  The Black Prince is a wicked blend of dark humour- there’s a hilarious scene early on involving Pearson’s suicidal sister, his meddling best friend and recently returned ex-wife- and stunning literary technique.  The story is followed by four post scripts from characters that call the reliability of Pearson into question when he cannot respond and we’ve previously been given no reason to doubt him.  At least not any more than your standard first person narrated tale.

Aside from the story, there’s a hell of a lot of feminist fodder in The Black Prince.  I don’t know if Murdoch herself had much to do with feminism.  She would have been one of those women of my grandfather’s era (he was only a few years old than her) who would have been nearing the end of middle age when second wave feminism really got big.  Pearson himself is of the same age.  Accordingly, Pearson’s views on women are somewhat dated.  Yes, some of this is definitely just the character rather than the period he was formed in.  Pearson is naturally distrustful of women and holds firm in his view that platonic friendship between the sexes can’t exist.  But the book itself at times seems to be patronising its female characters: Julian is ridiculous for wanting to learn from an educated man, Rachel is deemed so for craving affection away from her indifferent and at times violent husband.  Of course, we’ve already established that the whole thing’s told to us by the unreliable Mr Pearson, so it could just be a symptom of that.  In fact, any accusation of misogyny can be passed off as Pearson’s own.  In the post script it is revealed that Julian marries her once mentioned childish ex-boyfriend.  Again, as our previous view of him is filtered through Pearson it’s hard to tell if Julian was ever indifferent to him, but it’s still surprising that she is not changed or developed significantly by the events of the novel.

In all, it’s a good book and I’m not quite sure what I want to say about it.  The way it plays out is so unexpected that going on about any of the elements too much is pretty spoiler-y and, as I’ve already said, I don’t want to ruin the book for people.  I’ve really enjoyed reading The Black Prince, though.  Murdoch’s one of those authors I always seem to forget about and rediscover periodically.  Its’ a strange thing; I’m never in the mood to read her, but doing so is always so rewarding.

The next book up is sci-fi classic, The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.