Book description
Stuart Cuno has decided to become good. Not believing in God, he
invents his own methods, which include celibacy, chastity and the
abandonment of a promising academic career. Interfering friends and
relations question his sincerity, his sanity and his motives. Stuart's
step-brother Edward Baltram is tormented by guilt because he has, he
believes, killed his best friend. He dreams sometimes of redemption,
sometimes of suicide. Funny, compelling and extremely moving, THE GOOD
APPRENTICE is about guilt ridden despair, and the difficult problem of
how to try to be good - and the various magical devices which console
those who are sensible enough not to try.
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 the worked with UNRRA in London, Belgium and Austria.
She held a studentship in Philosophy at Newham 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.
Since her writing debut in 1954 with Under the Net, Iris
Murdoch has written twenty-six novels, including the Booker
Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978) and most recently The
Green Knight (1993) and Jackson's Dilemma (1995). Other
literary awards include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The
Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Prize 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 has
written several plays including The Italian Girl (with James
Saunders) and The Black Prince, adapted from her novel of the
same name. Her volume of poetry, A Year of Birds, which
appeared in 1978, has been set to music by Malcolm Williamson.
