A mystery of a different color... (Books - The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch)

Good old Iris Murdoch. Not exactly a classic whodunnit writer, she. The mystery of what forces motivate human behavior are the ones she likes, though if you think about it, that's really what a P. D. James novel is about too. But Murdoch focuses a tighter lens on the metaphysical aspects of her story. For example:

This metaphysical dilemma was present to him at times not in any clear conceptual form but rather as an atmosphere, a feeling of bewildered guilt which was almost sexual in quality and not altogether unpleasant. If Ducane had believed in God, which he had not done since he abandoned, at the age of fifteen, the strict low church Glaswegian Protestantism in which he had been brought up, he would have prayed, instantly and hard, whenever he perceived this feeling coming on. As it was he endured it grimly, as it were with his eyes tight shut, trying not to let it proliferate into something interesting. This feeling, which came to him naturally whenever he expeerienced power, especially rather formal power, over another person, had now been generated by his questioning of McGrath. And his faintly excited sense of having power over McGrath put him in mind of another person over whom he had power, and that was...

And that's just the detective. There is a crime to be solved in this book and it is Ducane who is assigned to look into the apparent suicide of co-worker in a British government department, but it is the mysteries of the human soul that are the meat of this story (though I am not done reading it). They are the way she connects the mechanics of her story to her own interest (and hopefully the reader's too). It certainly works in my case. As I read that excerpt above, which follows a polite interrogation scene in the action, I thought - Imagine if everyone with the capacity to exercise power were as self aware as Ducane. The world would be a different place. - It is as though the crime becomes the moral engine of the book that then precipitates changes in the private lives of the characters - although I'm not yet sure which "domestic" story is most central. As is usual with Murdoch, there is a good deal of interdependence among the threads of this story.

Holding a single moment up to the light (Books - The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch)

As I mentioned in my previous post, Iris Murdoch's The Nice and the Good begins with a shot, followed up by a body. For another writer that would herald the arrival of a detective and activities focused on the solution of the crime, followed by a gathering, usually in a drawing room, during which said detective reveals all. Not for Murdoch. I'm fifty pages in and nary a detective in sight, although I am suspicious that one of the characters I have met will become one. Rather, we are gradually drawn in to the imbroglios of the extended household of Octavian and Kate Gray, in which figure Uncles, friends from University recovering from broken marriages, and multiple children.

One of the features I like best about Murdoch's writing is her love of taking a simple action between people, and turning it in her capable hands, seeing what is is made of, holding it up to see how it catches the light.

He had a serious staring gaze which, together with a slow pedantic habit of speech, gave him the air of an intellectual. In fact, though clever, he was idle at school and far from bookish. Mary, still unseen, moved closer and saw that Pierce had covered the table with a complicated pattern composed of hundreds of shells arranged in spirals, tiny ones in the centre, larger ones on the outside. Adjusting the outer edge of the pattern he stopped to select a shell from a heap at his feet.

Pierce became aware of his mother and turned slowly to face her. He rarely moved fast, He looked at her without smiling, almost grimly. He looked at her like an animal, cornered but not frightened, a dangerous confident animal. And Mary apprehended herself as a thin dark woman, a mother, a representatibve somehow of the past, of Pierce's past, confronting him as if she were already a shost. This came to her in an instant with an agony of possesive love for her son and a blinding pity of which she did not know whether it was for him or for herself...

This is typical of Murdoch, this deep insight into a simple moment that later might end up motivating a simple action whose consequence may not be at all simple and whose intersection with other people performing many other simple actions is, in fact, likely to be complicated and a source of great entertainment. Murdoch may like to plumb the depths but I never find her heavy. Her entertainments tend to revolve around a moral theme, goodness and niceness come to mind in this case, but I haven't yet read enough to find out.

Mishmash (Books - David's Revenge, The Manual of Detection, The Nice and the Good, and The Mind of a Mnemonist)

I haven't been sticking to any one book lately, so this is going to be a mishmash-post. I have continued reading David's Revenge by Hans Werner Kettenbach and marketed on the cover, unfortunately, as a "terrifying novel from a leading thriller writer." It concerns the visit of a Soviet Georgian man to a German school teacher's home, I do a complete plot set-up here. It's a pity it was pitched as a thriller, because that may have given me false expectations. The book is clearly playing with interesting themes of racial and nationalist politics, the relationship between immigrants and their host culture, and what happens to one man's cherished liberal beliefs when he feel threatened in his own home, but that threat is more intellectual than it is physical. I kept waiting as I read for the intense level of tension that I associate with a thriller to kick in. It didn't. Half-way through, I feel like I know exactly where the plot is heading and I find the writing clumsy and so have lost interest. I'm going to abandon this one.

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry continues with its playfully childish tone and its surrealist set-design, it is more of an amuse-bouche than a serious meal and its entertaining but I never want too big a portion. I finally gave in and started Iris Murdoch's The Nice and the Good. She is one of my favorite writers and I wanted something substantial but amusing and that is exactly what she usually delivers. This book actually flirts with the mystery genre as well, a first in my experience of Murdoch's many books, but with her usual eye for detail and head for philosophical resonance:

A head of department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the nearby and indubitable sound of a revolver shot.

At one moment a lazy fat man, a perfect sphere his loving wife called him, his name Octavian Gray, was slowly writing a witty sentence in a neat tiny hand upon creamy official paper while he inhaled from his breath the pleasant sleepy smell of an excellent lunch-time burgundy. Then came the shot

[....]

Octavian noticed the neatness of the recently clipped grey hair upon the warm vulnerable neck. He had an impulse to touch it, to touch the material of Radeechy's jacket, to pulp it timidly, curiously. Here were the assembled parts of a human being, its clothes and carnal paraphernalia. The mystery appalled him of the withdrawal of life, the sudden disintegration of the living man into parts, pieces stuff. Radeechy, who muffed most things had not muffed this.

I'm looking forward to my first Murdoch in a while and am glad Cornflower Books has ended up choosing it for the August book club.

Finally, having read A. R. Luria's The Man with the Shattered World earlier this summer, I was tempted to read his other "neurological novel" called The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory. I actually found a copy sitting around my lab this week, so I borrowed it. It concerns a famous patient of Luria's whose curious condition gave him an unlimited memory as well as synesthesia. Synesthetics regularly merge information from one sense with information from another sense, even though the second sensation is not actually part of the stimulus in nature. Say, every time they see a shape it is accompanied by a taste or every time they read a letter it is a certain color (even though all the ink is actually black). Luria's writing about his famous patients is fascinating.