Book description
Iris Murdoch's twenty-third novel begins at a midsummer ball at
Oxford, where a group of men and women - friends since university days
- have gathered. Dancing under the stars are the charismatic Gerard
Hernshaw, Rose Curtland, who has loved Gerard in silence for years,
Duncan Cambus and his restless wife Jean, Jenkin Roderhood, the
saintly schoolmaster who is the group's moral centre, Gerard's
tormented niece Tamar Hernshaw, and David Crimond, the monomaniacal
Marxist genius.
Years ago the friends banded together to finance a political and
philosophical book to be written by Crimond. On this summer's evening,
Crimond's actions touch off a crisis and by the night's end the
vindictive ghosts of the past have invaded the present.
Passion, hatred, a duel, a murder and a suicide pact all disturb the
old world of academic reflection and weekend parties. Partners change,
the book is completed, somebody has to die.
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents.
She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville
College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the
Treasury, and then worked with UNRRA in London, Belgium and Austria.
She held a studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge,
and then in 1948 she returned to Oxford, where she became a Fellow of
St Anne's College. Until her death in February 1999, she lived with
her husband, the teacher and critic John Bayley, in Oxford. Awarded
the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year's
Honours List. In the 1997 PEN Awards she received the Gold Pen for
Distinguished Service to Literature.
Iris Murdoch made her writing debut in 1954 with Under the
Net, and went on to write twenty-six novels, including the Booker
prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978). Other literary awards
include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black
Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Prize (now the Costa Book Award)
for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her works of
philosophy include Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals (1992) and Existentialists and
Mystics (1997) She wrote several plays including The Italian
Girl (with James Saunders) and The Black Prince, adapted
from her novels of the same name.
