Laura's Review - The Nice and the Good

The Nice and the Good opens with a suicide in a London government office. The department head, Octavian Gray, asks lawyer John Ducane to investigate the situation and any potential security breaches. Ducane then becomes the axis of rotation for the rest of the extensive dramatis personae in this book. Ducane interviews other members of the department by day, and by night attempts repeatedly -- and unsuccessfully -- to break up with his mistress. No one is quite what they seem.

On the weekends, he is often found at Gray's seaside home in Dorset, where he mingles primarily with women: Octavian's wife Kate and their teenage daughter Barbie, Kate's long-time friend Mary and her son Pierce, and recent divorcee Paula and her nine-year-old twins. Rounding out the group are Octavian's brother Theodore and a tenant, Willy Kost. Here as well, everyone has skeletons in their closet: why did Theodore leave India? What happened to Willy during the war? How did Mary's husband die? What are the circumstances behind Paula's divorce? How can Kate and Ducane carry on their bizarre, not-platonic-but-not-romantic relationship right under Octavian's nose, and with his full knowledge?

Murdoch uses Ducane to move seamlessly between London and Dorset, while exploring goodness and morality:

What Ducane was experiencing, in this form peculiar to him of imagining himself as a judge, was, though this was not entirely clear in his mind, one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely, that in order to become good it may be necessary to imagine oneself good, and yet such imagining may also be the very thing which renders improvement impossible, either because of surreptitious complacency or because of some deeper blasphemous infection which is set up when goodness it thought about in the wrong way. To become good it may be necessary to think about virtue, although unreflective simple people may achieve a thoughtless excellence. (p. 77)

Well, that's all a bit abstract. If I had been in a more deeply philosophical mood as I read this, I might have formed some profound thoughts about morality. Instead, I just enjoyed the twisting plot and the gradual revelation of secrets. This was philosophical, too, but in a different way: Murdoch's style inevitably involves a lot of personal reflection and talking things out. The denouement was neat and satisfying, with a bit of high drama, characters getting exactly what they deserved, and an air of hope.



Cross-posted from my blog.

June Starr: 1969 short list review

Laura suggested that this sort of review might be useful to Complete Booker fans and participants. Maybe you have different ideas about what book should have won, if you've read the list. I think Laura was hoping this might generate some nice discussion. At any rate, let me know what you think. I'm reading all of the short lists in the coming year (or so). The links are to individual reviews at my Reading the Bookers site, where this wrap-up also appears.

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As I indicated in the post on Something to Answer For, that novel makes sense to me as the inaugural Booker Prize winner, though the field is certainly strong.

Mosley’s Impossible Object gives us a stylistic experiment, shifting angles of view and playing with chronology in his account of a love affair and its aftermath. Williams’s From Scenes Like These gives us a vision of lower-class Scottish life as the nation is transformed through increasing industrialism. Spark’s The Public Image gives us a cold, cinematic look into the lives behind movie-star glamour and public relations. England’s Figures in a Landscape gives us a deeply present account of contemporary war. Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good gives us a more traditional if philosophically sophisticated study of love and relationships.

All of the novels engage with if not the immediate present, then at least with the era in which their books are written—with attention to the morals and mores of the time—particularly in their attitudes toward love, relationships, and identity. All suggest a culture in flux, with old certainties—about national and personal identity, war, love, and ways of life--giving way to uncertainty and anxiety.

All of the works, with the exception of Murdoch’s, seem to me to be unsettled and unsettling in a variety of ways. And while I truly loved Figures in a Landscape, Something to Answer For tackles post-colonial themes through historically located action, tragic love, and experimentation. The main character’s cynicism and naivete speak to Britain’s place and identity in the world, while he deals with politics at the personal, national, and international level. The head injury he sustains gives the book the hallucinatory quality that underscores the uncertain present and future that the book's events describe while also making the past real and resonant. Plus—the novel is both readable and stylistically adventurous, not an easy combination to pull off.

Good inaugural choice, Booker committee. Let’s see if next year's committee can hold off the sophomore slump.

June Starr: Irish Murdoch's The Nice and the Good (1969 short list)

Hi, Bookers. I'm June Starr and for the next year at my blog Reading the Bookers, I'll be reviewing all of the books short-listed for the Bookers from the prize's inception to the present. Don't worry, I won't be posting every review here, but Laura persuaded me to post on a couple of Iris Murdoch novels I just read.

Read this review of The Nice and the Good before moving on to the one on Bruno's Dream below. They'll make more sense that way.

Thanks for having me here. I'm looking forward to being a member of the community.

June

And now--Iris Murdoch.

I had a thing for Iris Murdoch after I finished The Sea, The Sea in 2001. I decided to read all of 26 of her novels. I bought and read Under the Net and The Bell before I got too busy and my intentions faded away--to be revived, I imagined, during some mythical lazy summer (when I would also finally learn German. That’s another story). Since Murdoch has been the most frequently short-listed writer for the Booker with seven nominations (and one win), it looks like that revival is now in order. I’m looking forward to rereading The Sea, The Sea—since I remember NOTHING about it at this point beyond the fact that it was my favorite novel for awhile. I’ll be interested in seeing if I’m still smitten this time through.

But that’s another shortlist—1978’s to be exact—so let’s get back to the matter at hand: The Nice and the Good. Which I also liked very much.

For one thing, the novel is right up my alley: a big, shaggy realistic novel with lots of characters who talk and think their way through a variety of interpersonal dilemmas.* The Nice and the Good has a cast of characters so big that the publishers put a “playbill of the principals” on the flyleaf for handy reference. Since Murdoch is herself a philosopher, it’s no surprise that there’s thought and discussion aplenty. Characters contemplate themselves and others, mulling over their own sense of integrity and identity, their motivations and behavior, and, as the title promises, over what “separates the nice from the good” in both “the self-seeking and the blank impersonal face” of love (378, flyleaf).

The novel begins on a violent note—with the apparent suicide of British government official, Joseph Radeechy. But while uncovering the facts surrounding Radeechy’s death gives the book a plot to work with, his death is less important than the effects it has on other characters, most of whom knew him little, if at all. Radeechy works in a Whitehall department for Octavian Gray--and it is Octavian’s friend and department legal advisor John Ducane, who must solve the mystery of the man’s death. In love with Octavian’s wife, Kate (with Octavian’s full knowledge and approval!), Ducane is a frequent visitor to the Grays’ Dorset seaside estate, where the couple resides with their daughter Barbara, Octavian’s misanthropic brother, Theo, and a variety of other needful friends—Holocaust survivor Willy, widow Mary Clothier and her son Pierce, and divorcee Paula Biranne and her 9-year-old twins Edward and Henrietta.

None of these characters is defined in and of themselves but primarily in relation to others--on the estate, in Whitehall and greater London, and beyond. Through what becomes a rather dizzying array of relationships, Murdoch explores the variety of profiles that love may show. Couples separate, reunite, change partners, remain constant; individuals plead for love, accept and reject proposals and companionship. Whatever the pain and confusion, or even the shame and infamy, that such intimate negotiations occasion, Murdoch insists that without them, life is a shabby thing.

Late in the novel, Murdoch puts Ducane in a life-threatening situation--interestingly unconnected from the Radeechy plot--so that he may come to this conclusion about his own life and his role in the Radeechy plot:

I wonder if this is the end, . . . and if so what it will all have amounted to. How tawdry and small it has all been. He saw himself now as a little rat, a busy little scurrying rat, seeking out its own little advantages and comforts. To live easily, to have cozy familiar pleasures, to be well thought of. . . . Nothing is worth doing except to kill the little rat, not to judge, not to be superior, not to exercise power, not to seek, seek, seek. To love and to reconcile and to forgive, only this matters. All power is sin and all law is frailty. Love is the only justice. Forgiveness, reconciliation, not law. (328-29)

This position leads us to the sort of Shakespearean comic ending hinted at in the flyleaf playbill and the allusively named Grays,** with plenty of marriage (or its equivalent) and good fortune to go around.

Murdoch is great at probing the inner life. She makes us recognize how an idea can obsess and rule us—despite our understanding of its negative effects; she makes us appreciate the importance of our own conceptions of ourselves and what happens when we are forced to interrogate those conceptions. She knows that identity encompasses more than we might imagine, and that we must look to others as well as to ourselves to know it.

As I said above—right up my alley. Let the Murdoch revival begin!


* If they spend most of their time indoors, that’s also a plus, though not mandatory. I’m not big on rapturous or even detailed descriptions of landscapes. I don’t mind a few walks and picnics, or some contemplation by the sea, all of which feature in The Nice and the Good, but I generally prefer to experience my scenery in person. That’s one reason I was so surprised to love Barry England’s Figures in a Landscape. The lead characters there, McConnachie and Ansell, are only indoors long enough to steal a suitcase and some canned goods.

**Octavian and Kate sure sound Shakespearean to me.