Have you found your heart swelling with a miasma of unidentifiable but vaguely exciting new emotions? Did you draw the heavy velveteen curtains against dusk’s dense and thrilling fog just now? You may be a character in a novel by prolific Irish-born British novelist Iris Murdoch. Please investigate your surroundings for the following items to determine whether or not you are part of a constellation of intellectuals trapped in a midcentury melodrama investigating the vagaries of the human condition.
1. Meissen cockatoos. Are you arranging them on the mantelpiece?
2. Cox’s Orange Pippins. Or a memory of Cox’s Orange Pippins. If you do not realize immediately that this is a type of apple, you are probably not in an Iris Murdoch novel.
3. Powerful claret and lots and lots of it and also whiskey and you’re drunk and where’s some more, be a peach and bring us a bottle, won’t you?
4. Your friends have names that sound like Dristan, Climate or Privy.
5. You suddenly prefer the 17th century term “counterpane” to the outrageously modern “bedspread.” Just say “bedspread.”
6. The novelty of electric light is not lost on you
7. Someone you know has died in a tragic and semi-ironic manner that was so very appropriate to their personality. Think about them now. Care for a drink?
8. Your furniture has proper names.
9. You are drunker than you realize.
10. Really drunk.
Tags: iris murdoch, lexie mountain, novels, quizzes
I love Iris Murdoch so much, it hurts.
One of the best things that I have ever done was describe to an ex-boyfriend (at great length) what our future would be like if we were in an Iris Murdoch novel. In that future, we were both scholars / intellectuals, and I was married to a cold, strangely compelling man; my ex-boyfriend had a beautiful, young gay protege. We were drunk all the time.
I have never before heard of Iris Murdoch, but I do believe I need to read these books of hers.
I want to name my son “Privy” now in honor of my favorite author!
Isn’t ‘privy’ an olden-tymes word for ‘toilet’?
This is just wonderful. THE COX’S ORANGE PIPPINS.
Okay number 3 is just describing my life (and 8, 9, 10… shit am I fictional?) But seriously–why is claret so good? Why do liquor store clerks get all weird when I call it claret and are all like “You mean Bordeaux?” (No. I don’t. I want claret. I also want a velvet smoking jacket. And a time travelling salon featuring Lord Byron and Getrude Stein).
I have this conception that Bordeaux becomes claret once you pour it into a Waterford crystal decanter.
Yes! I think I saw that when they were training the junior butler in “Upstairs Downstairs” a long time ago.
What you need, my friend, is a banyan: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O85965/banyan-g…
OMG yes. that looks suave and comfy.
The Toast, I love you.
Ok, now I have to read these books. That's my favorite kind of husband.
Made me laugh out Loud. I just finished A Word Child and the characters were drunk all the time. And the names: Climate and Privy. So on the money. Biscuit is the messenger maid in A Word Child. And remember Moy from A Green Knight? A gem.
Yes! I think I saw that when they were training the junior butler in "Upstairs Downstairs" a long time ago.
So…which Iris Murdoch novel do I read first?
The Sea, The Sea
A Fairly Honorable Defeat
The Sea, The Sea
I have a cox’s orange pippin tree in my back garden. Also my reformed alcoholic fiancee choked to death in a pub. Also I live in a castle. Oops.
Start with Under The Net. If you’re not crazy about Hugo, don’t read any more. But if you are… read the whole canon. Her last two books are incomprehensible, but the others are divine. Divine.
Love her books and am very much enjoying the one I’m reading now: Henry and Cato. I had the experience with her books that each one, as I read it, was my new favorite, with only a few exceptions. I suffered reading The Message to the Planet with its cast of hand wringing, navel gazing neurotics, and pretty much ditto for The Good Apprentice (though the scene where the lovers inadvertently show up at the castle where both the man’s sons are staying is priceless), and maybe one or two others where the characters’ neuroticism wasn’t redeemed by anything else such as an interesting plot. Do keep Google at the ready though–Murdoch has what is for me an annoying habit of larding her prose with non-English terms and phrases, and she used lots of English words I had to look up. The milieu she creates is so consistent through all her novels that I think of them as chapters in one larger work, though each has a distinct flavor.
The Bell is a must. My absolutel favourite.
I am currently very busy adding to my collection of netsuke, when I’m not sleeping with my psychoanalyst brother, or buying emerald tweed dresses that sweep the floor as I pass.
Plus-fours are back in fashion, and go very well with a shining helmet of hair and an old-fashioned tea including homemade gooseberry jam….