The Green Knight (1993) by Iris Murdoch | Analysis & Commentary

What had Aleph meant when she called him the Green Knight? She may have intuitively seen him as a sort of instrument of justice, a kind of errant, ambiguous moral force, like some unofficial wandering angel. He could have claimed just retribution by killing Lucas or, better still, perhaps maiming him. That was his first apparition. But then later he forgave him and punished him only by that small symbolic shedding of blood. Will Lucas cherish that scar? Clement wondered. Will he ever tell anyone? Will he tell Aleph?

Of course, the Green Knight in the story was testing his opponent from the start, provoking a violence to which, in honor, the chivalrous fellow had later to submit himself.

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Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of Ear Read This, Edinburgh's most powerful literature podcast. I'm Ash, your host, and today I'll be talking about The Green Knight by Iris Murdoch. First published in 1993, The Green Knight is Murdoch's 25th novel.

Our story is kicked off by Lucas Graves' fumbling effort to kill his own brother, during which he apparently causes the death of an interfering stranger instead. However, in the aftermath, Graves' eclectic circle of friends and family are visited by this same bewildering stranger, miraculously alive and in possession of a very particular sense of justice.

Upon its release, Michelle Roberts called it a big fat entertaining novel, as rich and full and strange as one of Shakespeare's late comedies. The Green Knight is dense in literary and mythological illusion. While the setting is contemporary London, we are not quite in the real world. Instead, as my special guest makes clear on today's episode, we are in Murdoch land.

Joining me today is Miles Leeson, lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Center at Chichester University, and host of the brilliant Iris Murdoch Society podcast. There are links to all of those in the episode description box below, and I'll be talking more to Miles about them and his own work in tomorrow's extended interview.

Now, I've wanted to do an episode on Iris Murdoch for a while now. If you're a fan and enjoy today's show, then please leave a comment or get in touch with which book you'd like to hear about next, because I fully intend on doing more episodes on Murdoch novels. I realize The Green Knight is a kind of strange place to start, and it's actually on that topic that I began my conversation with Miles.

It is number 25 of 26, so it is a peculiar place to start. I do have some ulterior motives with Gawain and that kind of thing. But could I start off by asking you, for the benefit of listeners either new to Iris Murdoch or perhaps familiar with some of the better-known novels, how do some aspects of her work change towards the end of her career?

Oh goodness, well they change quite substantially in terms of length, I think you've probably seen that. So when she starts off writing her novels at 250-300 pages, they're quite compact, and the level of detail is there, but it's sort of quite stylized in a particular way.

Whereas when she gets into the novels of the 1970s and beyond, sort of mid-1970s and then through into the 80s, through to The Green Knight, which is obviously in the early 90s, they become much more expansive. The ideas are still there; she's still playing around with philosophy, Shakespeare here of course, medical poetry.

But yet there's also a sense that she's trying to explore a fuller range of human emotion in a sense, and using longer sections of the novel to play some of these out. In fact, I think there's a lot of The Green Knight that feels quite staged in a way. There are elements that feel like they could work as tableau on stage.

There are particular elements, I think, again linking back to the development of the Gawain poem that actually does impact quite significantly on this book. At the beginning of last year, I made an episode on Gawain and the Green Knight, and for one reason or another, I haven't really stopped thinking about that poem.

So full disclosure, the reason we're talking about Iris Murdoch's 25th novel first is because of its connection to Gawain. Now, as Miles and I will discuss, this is no straightforward retelling of the poem with modern characters serving as simple avatars of Gawain, Arthur, Lady Bertilak, and so on.

Instead, there are a host of other illusions and references that distort and complicate these characters. But as a root into the novel and to best explain my initial interest in it, I thought I'd describe for you some of the ways The Green Knight reflects or plays with the poem that it takes its name from.

So what the novel shares thematically with the poem is justice and spiritual submission, themes that ripple out from an unexplainable event resembling divine intervention. When Lucas Graves' attempt to kill his brother is interrupted by Peter Meer, Lucas lashes out at the intruder instead and apparently kills him.

But by way of a miraculous recovery, Peter returns and visits the brothers. This is much like the Green Knight of the poem, who is thought to be dead after his head is chopped off, but then shocks Arthur's court by picking up his head and laying down a challenge. An exactly appropriate payment is what Peter wants, which is just what is asked of Gawain.

Lucas's circle of friends and family function as a kind of court themselves. They feast and celebrate, and they have a keen sense of one another's history. There is a bloodletting, much like Gawain's neck being nicked by the axe at the end of the poem.

The memorable flight of Anax the dog across London, which is vividly described, reminded me of the fox hunted by Bertilak and his men. Just as Bertilak brings the dead fox to Gawain, it is Peter who retrieves Anax and brings him home safe and sound.

Also evoking the hunting scenes in the poem are the slightly sinister references to the game in the cellar that Lucas and Clement played as boys, which they called dogs. Just before Lucas's attack, Clement has a vision of the grail.

The sight of the attack is an abandoned garden marked by an arch of bushy leaves, making a little dark cave, recalling the mysterious green chapel where the poem has its climax. The character of Bellamy has a dream featuring a man bearing an axe and feels a thrill of terror while simultaneously thinking that the man must be beautiful.

This is also reminiscent of the medieval poem, in which the knight, though green and threatening, is described as being noble and handsome too. This unknowability of the knight is reflected in the characters' divergent readings of Peter Meer, as well as the Green Knight of the poem.

He is compared to Mr. Pickwick, Mephistopheles, the Minotaur, and Prospero. The most eye-catching and enigmatic reference to Gawain's story is the appearance of a green girdle in the poem. This is, of course, Lady Bertilak's green girdle, which she gifts to Gawain to protect him from harm.

In Murdoch's The Green Knight, the youngest daughter of the Anderson household, Moy, leads Peter downstairs by a green girdle. This comes during a fancy dress party where Peter is wearing the head of a bull. For someone interested in Gawain and The Green Knight, this is very provocative imagery.

The poem leaves us with the question of whether or not the Green Knight is acting of his own accord or is a kind of golem or minion obeying the dark arts of an enchantress, Morgan le Fay. Moy, whose name not only invokes fate and art but is a contraction of Morgan le Fay, is shown to possess telekinetic powers.

Is Murdoch implying that the characters seemingly with the least influence on the plot are, in fact, the ones in control? I saw that you posted on Twitter that you thought it was her final great novel, which I was pleased to see because I loved it.

Although you posted a review that didn't quite share the same enthusiasm. So what, in your opinion, makes it a great novel? I think because it's dealing with so many of the ideas that she's used previously, that it's tied into canonical literature, that it's dealing with these ideas of the magician in a very interesting way.

It's not a straightforward or simple retelling of the Gawain poem by any means. There are elements of different characters that have relevance, I think, to both the Green Knight and Bertilak, and indeed others. So she's doing it in her own way.

Yet when I was reading it recently, in preparation for the podcast, I was going through and actually looking to see what else she was picking up on, what other sort of intertext, if you like, that she's drawing on. My goodness, she's going right the way back to the Greeks and then to Shakespeare, the Romantics, and indeed further on.

So there's so much in there, and I think she really likes doing this. She likes to put in little elements from earlier works just to kind of remind a particular type of reader that she can do this.

For some readers, they're just reading it for the plot. She said all she wanted to really do is tell a great story. Yet for academic readers or for readers that have been reading Iris for, you know, maybe have been reading her for 40-odd years prior, there are kind of callbacks, there's other materials in there.

Of course, some of the characters are quite reminiscent of earlier characters in her work as well. So there's so much going on. I actually, whilst I was about 20 pages in, stopped to kind of draw out a family tree because I kept talking to all these people.

Yeah, yeah. And they're often sort of leadingly named, quite playfully named, and might appear at first glance to sort of represent a virtue or be laden with some kind of, I guess, like subtextual cargo. Is that right, do you think? And is the amount of characters a way of sort of representing as many different positions in an argument?

Yes, I think so. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's one particular, the one central argument really is between this kind of the Green Knight figure in Peter Meer's kind of this, I suppose he kind of represents this Neoplatonic philosophy to a certain extent that Murdoch was interested in.

You've got Lucas, and then you've got some opposing him, this Lucas Grave, this against magician kind of Prospero figure, who I think is this kind of quasi-Nietzschean figure. He's very much to do with the will and the world's power, and yet they both kind of collide very strongly.

All of the characters, Clement but also three girls, I think these are the three muses, Aleph, Sefton, and Moy. They all represent particular character traits, but also they are very much echoing back to much earlier fiction, much earlier philosophy and Greek thought.

So you don't have to engage with that as a reader; you can just see it as some rather strange odd girls that are almost trapped in this particular cycle with these older people in London. Yet you can go much deeper, and all the names in her novels do always hold particular relevance and a particular interest for those who want to see it.

Now might be a good moment to briefly introduce our characters, as throughout the podcast, Miles and I refer to them in passing.

Now, to start with, we have two brothers, Lucas and Clement Greif. Lucas is the elder and was adopted. Now a professor of history, he was a yellowish, dwarfish child, awkward and prone to strange mannerisms. His jealousy of Clement, the graceful, beautiful biological son of his adopted parents, is what leads him to attempt murder and instigate the plot.

Clement is now an actor, and despite Lucas's continued bullying of him, remains a devoted younger brother. Having had at some point an affair with Joan, Clement is growing closer to Louise Anderson, recently widowed mother of three daughters. Louise is emotionally isolated and unmoored after the loss of her husband, Teddy.

Lucas and Clement are one pair of opposites: the brooding, malicious bad brother and the kind, people-pleasing good brother. Similarly, Louise and her friend Joan Blackett form a pair of good and bad mothers. Louise is always concerned about the welfare of her daughters, while Joan has a tempestuous, mutually possessive relationship with her son, Harvey.

Harvey spends the novel nursing a broken foot he acquired jumping off a viaduct in Italy. This ordeal was inspired by the Spoleto Bridge, which Murdoch visited and was too afraid to cross. During his convalescence, Harvey considers his life over but eventually makes a second successful attempt at bridge crossing and ends up with the middle Anderson daughter, Sefton, at the family home called Clifton.

The three girls occupy a former drawing room known as the Avery. Aleph, Sefton, and Moy are 19, 18, and 15, respectively. Aleph, the oldest, intends to become a writer and is considered the most beautiful of the sisters. Sefton is studying history, while Moy, not academic but clever as a little mouse, is planning to go to art school.

Just a little tidbit for those of you who enjoyed my episodes on Shakespeare's history plays last year: something that Sefton entertains herself wondering is whether or not Isabella and Mortimer, having murdered Edward II, should have had the nerve to kill his son, the infant Edward III as well. It gives you an idea of how serious-minded these Anderson girls are.

Finally, Moy, not academic but clever as a little mouse, is planning to go to art school. The opening line of the novel, "Once upon a time there were three little girls," is a reference to the story the Dormouse tells in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and casts a fairytale quality over the three sisters, who don't live down a well but in their Avery, where they sing madrigals and discuss art and history.

Their original names, Alathea, Sophia, and Moira, mean truth, wisdom, and fate, respectively. We have Clement, meaning merciful, and as Nicolas Spice writes, Lucas is an amalgam of Lucifer and Judas. Spice adds that Murdoch's nomenclature is the work of an allegorist who chooses names for her characters not for their social connotations but for what they mean.

Still to mention is Anax, the collie Moy is currently caring for, whose old master, Bellamy James, is currently forcing himself into solitude in the hopes of achieving spiritual enlightenment. Finally, the catalyst for transformation for all these characters is Peter Meer, whose name, Spice says, is part rock, part world, part peace.

I found myself asking throughout, so who's playing Gawain? It kind of kept changing for me, and I wasn't at the end confident at all that I got it right or that it was even one person. I was wondering if you had any theories on that, or is that not really the right way to think about this book?

I would say it's not the right way to think about Iris. I would say that she never takes on particular roles for her characters and then just explores them in a different role. So yeah, clearly you've got Peter Meer, who is this kind of Green Knight figure, and yet also he's a magician type.

He's a kind of a, Murdoch's bringing in elements from The Tempest; she's bringing in elements from sort of older theological thoughts. She's making him into this kind of angelic figure as well, which I suppose is also playing in a little bit into the Gawain poem.

Yet also, I think later on for Gawain himself, well, are there elements in Clement? There are elements in Harvey; there are certainly elements in Bellamy as well. There are these male seeker figures that she has, and she quite often has them in her work.

Yet you've also got this kind of dark magician figure in Lucas, Lucas Grave as well. And yet the female characters do also have a particular role to play in the development of the drama. So yeah, I see this novel very much as a drama rather than a kind of a novel in its strictest sense.

There's quite a lot of internal process thought that we have written throughout the narrative, interspersed with quite long blocks of discussion. She would do this in the 1970s onwards quite often. There'd be conversations between two people, and you had to get quite a long way into the conversation before you realized, "Oh, it's that person speaking to the other person."

And there'd be, because she doesn't make it that obvious, it doesn't say "said Emil" or "said Fly" or whoever else it might be.

Not always, because I think she wants you to think about the ideas that she's playing with more than about the characters who said them. And also, of course, there's these wonderful, and I think sometimes overblown, set pieces that she's really fond of using throughout.

Because she's drawing on so much else besides Gawain, I think that sometimes the kind of links to Gawain can throw you off scent a little bit. She's just trying to bring everything in. I think perhaps she realized that this was going to be her final great work.

The Jackson's Dilemma, which follows this, is a much smaller work and much more condensed work and not particularly great as far as fictional work goes. So there's so much in The Green Knight; I think that she's just pouring in from her kind of accumulated 40 or 50 years of writing and reading and thinking, not just in fiction but in philosophy and in drama as well.

What makes you think she perhaps thought that this was going to be her last great work? I mean, she wasn't officially diagnosed publicly with Alzheimer's, and it wasn't released that she was suffering with Alzheimer's until I think '96 or '97.

But certainly, there's been some work done over the past 10 or 15 years to have a look at how an earlier onset Alzheimer's could have been figuring in her work. And certainly in her last work, Jackson's Dilemma, it's very much a novel that's concerned with loose ends and elements of plot that don't tie up.

I think here, much like a Shakespearean comedy, it's all tied up at the end, and people generally marry off and find happiness. I'm not sure, but more in fact my fights happens. But yeah, I certainly get the sense that with this novel, and certainly in the archives at the University of Iowa, there are notebooks, there's preliminary materials; it's all in there, much as it was for the previous novels.

Whereas for Jackson's Dilemma, some of the notes are quite scatty and thin, and there's only one particular version of it. So I think she knew that she was coming to the end of her work. The year prior to this, she published her last great work of philosophy, Metaphysics to Guide Morals, which I think is hugely important for thinking about The Green Knight if you've got a sort of philosophical mindset.

She'd also kind of finished or kind of rejected her final great work on the philosopher Martin Heidegger, which she sort of stopped writing in '93. She's continuing to write letters to various correspondents even into the middle of the 1990s.

But as far as academic work goes, there's a sense that I'm getting, having sort of read and thought about Murdoch the last 20-odd years, that she knows that she's coming to a particular point in time and actually she's running out of time. Therefore, she's putting everything that she knows, not just about how to write novels and fiction and fictionality, but all of her great loves are there in The Green Knight as well.

I'm really glad you mentioned it, the conversations going back and forth and not being able to keep track of who's who. Do you think that's a deliberate way of trying to get the reader to consider all of these characters in sort of composite? As we said, there's not really a Gawain figure, but it sort of makes a bit more sense if you regard three characters as one at once as representing sort of parts of that?

Yeah, or having elements of them. I think she does this really well with clothing. If you notice that whenever Peter Meer is on stage, I think it's, or in view, he's got a green umbrella or he's got a tweed coat that's got a little bit of green or whatever else he might be wearing.

But then later on, once Harvey and Sefton get together—sorry, plot spoiler—then Harvey starts wearing elements of green as well. I think there's this idea that green can be a form of spirituality, a form of liberation.

You see this idea of color play is dotted in throughout. So yeah, I would certainly agree with you. I think you're right that she wants us to consider actually there's elements of defusal of particular characters from particular stories that she's reusing, reinterpreting.

Like obviously Gawain and the Green Knight is the most obvious one. But right at the very first page, we start off with this chapter called "Ideal Children," and it starts off, "Once upon a time there were three little girls," and they lived at the bottom of a well.

Well, that's the story from the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, and she kind of understands that, although not everybody would pick that up. But there are some people that will, and so then we're thinking about, well, this is a kind of a fantasy, it's a fable, it's not real.

So right at the beginning, I think we're not into a realistic London of the late '80s, early '90s by any means. We are in a kind of a magical play space, not unlike A Midsummer Night's Dream or something like that.

We are honest, we're honest in a kind of a stagey version of London because, let's face it, in this novel, nobody goes to work, nobody does any real problem, nobody doesn't need proper graft. Indeed, they're all quite, they're quite well-to-do, they're middle upper middle class.

There's a kind of cliched Australian barm and Kenneth Rathbone, of course, but most of them are quite free to just almost do what they want and have these kind of expressive parties or singing parties. There's no TV, for example, that the girls have.

Nicolas Spice writes of the Anderson girls that by the age of six, the children enjoy Beowulf and Greek myths. At eight, they devour Dickens. By 12, they have read most of Shakespeare. Television is anathema to them; audio, video, and disco just Latin verbs.

The comic precocity of the sisters and their detachment from the mannerisms and clutter of the modern age encourages the fantastical atmosphere of the novel. Even though we have one foot in the late 20th century, it is as if the novel is so overlaid with centuries gone by that the appearance of a modern artifact can feel like an archaeological curio.

According to Murdoch's biographer, Peter Conradi, she colonized the century and gave it back to us as myth. Sometimes an aspect of the 20th-century world is inserted, as it were, within inverted commas into the mythology. Such emblematically selected features of modernity seem as poetically mysterious as the mythical intensity they enliven and contradict.

So just as we have relics of the Gawain myth confused or distorted by their proximity to other mythic resonances, the ornamental landscape is similarly disordered and discolored. As Clement says, pieces of the story are here, but aren't they somehow jumbled up and all the wrong way round?

Despairing at this lack of order, Clement predicts that he will go on blindly and secretly jumbling all these things together and making no sense of them as long as I live. Maybe every human creature carries some inescapable burden that is being human—a very weird affair.

Clement's failure to find an organizing principle to make sense of the people around him reflects the author's intent for the novel to fight back against philosophy. The very weird affair of being human was, for Murdoch, the novel's domain.

However sad and awful the thing it narrates, she said, the novel belongs to an open world—the world of absurdity and loose ends and ignorance. In real life, that which is horrible lacks the significance of art.

The novel is intensely aware of this fact. In fact, particular novelists endeavor very often to close the form by various artifices to make it more like a poem. This may work, but I think that the nature of the novel is somehow that a sort of wind blows through it and there are holes in it, and the meaning of it partly seeps away into life.

So for all of its jumble of illusions and mythic intensity, Murdoch land aims to be more lifelike than those closed forms in representing the bagginess and flimsiness and horribleness of existence. Murdoch identified less with closed form novels, saying instead that it was with Dickens, George Eliot, or Proust that I feel I'm in the world where great art belongs.

Yes, so she wasn't particularly happy with the way that fiction was going. Particularly, she wasn't keen on postmodern fiction. I mean, she writes one particular postmodern novel in the early '70s called The Black Prince, which for my money is the best.

But then she is very much then concerned with bringing elements of the Shakespearean into the novel, and she does that throughout the '80s and into the '90s, which has this great period of reading Shakespeare in the late 1960s. From then on, fiction is very much infused with Shakespeare, but also, you know, Dickens gets a mention as well.

There's this great tradition of the long 19th-century novel—Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James—all of whom I think are again kind of background figures in this novel.

Could I ask you a bit more about Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals? Because you mentioned it was written around about the same time and bears an important influence on the book.

Yes, so it was originally produced as the Gifford Lectures. She was only the second-ever woman to give the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh; it's quite prestigious—in '82. She spends the next 10 years working it up into a book, and her lectures in HD were not particularly well received.

I think she tried to do too much with them to think about, well, how can metaphysics actually, in a secular society, be a guide to public morality, really to individual morals, and provide guidance? Over, you know, 500-odd pages, she tries to work through these ideas, and I think she pours so much of herself into it over the intervening period, from the early '80s right the way through to '92 when it's published.

You can see that it's very much in alignment, obviously not just with the novels that were published in the '80s but also The Green Knight as well. These ideas are constantly playing in her mind, and you see you've got Eastern mysticism and Eastern philosophy, but you've also got all of her favorites come up in Metaphysics to Guide Morals in particular strategic ways.

Yet in the novel, they're also subsumed into the kind of the production of the novel as well. So you've got references to Plato, to Augustine, to Nietzsche, strongly to Eckhart as well, who seems to be a really central figure to Schopenhauer—all of whom are written out in a very obvious and particular way in Metaphysics.

Yet here, all of their ideas, I think, caught in this novel, again, like I said earlier with thinking about character names, you don't have to engage with what Eckhart might have to say about looking for God just inside your soul.

Yet if you do, then her fiction gets a much greater relevance and interest. I think Martin Amis wrote that Iris Murdoch is a believer. She believes in all kinds of things. She believes in magic, monsters, veridical visions, transcendent art, prophetic dreams, pagan spirits, God, and the devil.

But most centrally, Murdoch believes in love. We'll touch on magic again in the next section, but for now, let's talk about love. You could argue that to write in the concluding chapters of a long modern novel that being human is a weird affair is to risk criticism, even scorn.

Has it all been for this, the reader may ask? The realization that being human is weird, especially a reader used to those novels bearing the significance of art—novels with closed forms promising to answer the questions that they pose.

But riskier still, in my opinion, is Murdoch's earnest, adamant insistence on the transfiguring power of love. After all, part of the weird affair of being human is being fallen. Pure love for the adult characters in The Green Knight is made unlikely, embarrassing, or impossible by their doubts and vices, their inescapable burdens.

Love is more available to those closest to a state of innocence. There is Moy, the youngest Anderson daughter, who not only sheds tears for the thought of killed insects but feels even inanimate objects have a kind of life. Moy will die of her own sensibility, one character remarks. She identifies with everything.

Then there is Anax, the dog separated from his owner, heard wailing in torment, who when reunited with Bellamy actually screams with emotion. The boldness of such expressions of love can seem comic, even as we sympathize with the likes of Moy and Anax.

The other character capable of this kind of love is, of course, Peter Meer. The injury dealt to him by Lucas renders him a kind of tabula rasa, no longer a man but an instrument, as Peter says himself.

Peter takes an apparently selfless, loving interest in the family, which is so abrupt and disconcerting that Clement calls it an embarrassment, as if something huge and strange has shot up in our midst and we simply cannot conceptualize it.

An all-loving moral force, an unofficial wandering angel, is difficult to take seriously. Here, Clement acknowledges that he can't quite comprehend it, just as we readers may get to the end of the novel expecting some kind of trickery.

By making her instrument of love such a confounding figure, Murdoch points to love's radical possibilities. Kanan Safke writes that Murdoch's belief that love is necessary in order to change our essentially selfish view and see the reality of the other explains Murdoch's penchant for complicated cases that challenge the reader to rethink accepted values of morality and ethics.

And there is indeed a trick at the end, as Peter is institutionalized. His selfless actions as an instrument of love can finally only be interpreted as insanity. As Safke writes, the fact that Peter is taken to a psychiatric institution underscores the madness of Peter's stance, which means that his so-called madness represents an attitude that cannot be grasped by the mind through knowledge.

The only character who sees Peter for what he is is the landlord of the castle, Kenneth Rathbone. Nicolas Spice writes that Rathbone is a recognizable descendant of Zacchaeus, the publican who, being too small to see Jesus in the crowd, climbs a sycamore tree and so gets noticed.

The point is obvious: access to God or the good is often easier for the simple soul, while education may prove a disadvantage. One thing I've noticed in the world of Murdoch's novels is there's occasionally a quite casual acceptance of supernatural phenomena, which is quite funny and strange.

Like in The Nice and the Good, there are these recurring UFOs which are just there and not really delved into too much. Of course, it's the children.

Yeah, it's just the children that see them. And here, there's a character who's sort of quietly practicing her telekinesis. It's obviously very attention-grabbing to all of us, except the characters.

Why do you think there is this paranormal element in some of her novels? The majority of the paranormal elements in the fiction are always connected with teenagers and children.

It's often assumed, I suppose, when you're thinking about the paranormal, that quite often poltergeists and other paranormal activity quite often in the literature manifest themselves around teenage girls. So I think that's why Moy is kind of gifted in the novel with telekinesis, or vague telekinesis.

She doesn't do that much with it; she moves stones about. I think perhaps she could do far more if she really wanted to. Yet she's also tied into this much more naturalistic, ecological mindset, whereas Aleph and Sefton, the intellectuals, and it's said that Moy is not an intellectual.

She does art, and she's connected with the earth, really. But yeah, like you say, Nice and the Good, you've got the UFOs. You've got UFOs again in The Philosopher's Pupil from the early 1980s. You've got ghosts; you've got quite a quasi-vampire in another novel.

And they're always connected to young women. I think too, not just to adolescence and development, but also to this idea of magic surrounding usually young characters that are connected to reality and connected to the earth.

It's interesting actually to think about this idea of renewal within this novel and how renewal is connected to some of the young people, but also those who are enlightened and can see it.

So yeah, it's a whole area of discussion and development, I think, for Murdoch studies more generally. But in this novel, it's very much a working out of anxiety as well and about finding one's place in the world.

Yeah, it's haunting. Sounds like a rubbish pun, but it does. You're really left with it, and it does seem in both those novels, Nice and the Good and The Green Knight, it does seem like something that the adults have moved, like lost a sort of a century world that they've lost somehow.

They're concerned with the world, aren't they? They're concerned with relationships between themselves. And also, I think they're looking quite often, they're looking back to the past, whereas these young women are, again, coming looking at towards the end of their childhood.

But also, they've had the disruption of the death of their father, which occurs prior to the novel, to Teddy Anderson. So I think that that kind of rupture in life is an important one for a lot of Murdoch's adolescents.

Quite often, that's also connected with the imaginings of the supernatural. In his classic biography, Peter Conradi writes of Murdoch that while sternly skeptical in so many ways, for example about psychic research, which she deemed dangerous rubbish, she was enthusiastically credulous in others.

During the writing of The Green Knight, Murdoch attempted to perform telekinesis, the ambiguous gift that she grants to her character Moy. In this typically casual appearance of the supernatural, we hear that Moy accepted her gift as a strange, not unfriendly presence or form of being, which joined her life with the life of things.

Only sometimes, for it had various manifestations, it frightened her. Earlier, we talked about how commonplace modern items like fax machines, by sharing the same textual space as items of antiquity, take on a kind of mythical equivalence to grails and green girdles.

Similarly, the specific magic of Moy's is normalized by its proximity to instances of everyday magic. When she and her sister Sefton clear the kitchen scene, it is as usual by magic.

It is not the only time the word "scene" is used to impose a theatricality on the action. When a character appears for the first time late on in the novel, they announce in a Shakespearean, beer-carrier-like way, "I am a newcomer to this scene."

When the staginess is revealed like this and we see behind the curtain or catch the scenery wobbling, we can't help but reconsider characters explicitly linked to theater—the actor Clement, a wardrobe mistress.

We may begin to suspect that those who make scenes for a living might be responsible for the fantastical, diverting scenes in the novel. Linda Simon writes that in The Green Knight, Murdoch offers a keen satire on the way we create fantasies and diversions to protect ourselves from moral complexities and spiritual acuity.

For all of this dense complexity of introspection and analysis, there is this quite comical contrast with a very simple motive at the sort of heart of the events. The inciting event of this novel is a brother wanting to kill his brother.

And yes, when asked why, he sort of shrugs it off as, "Well, why did Cain want to kill Abel?" It's not just simple; it's almost stereotypical. Is that, I found that really quite funny, especially given who it comes from—Lucas, the academic and the most sort of character that everyone thinks is so enigmatic, having this very straightforward motive.

Is this because the plot is less important, or is it simply because the exploration is more interesting? I think the plot is important. I think Murdoch tries very hard to keep all of these kind of disparate elements in play.

I mean, there are quite long sections in the novel where Lucas is just not there, and the medal is able to write him out by saying, "Well, he never goes to parties, he never socializes."

And of course, you kind of let him off the hook at the end by letting him go to America with Ayla and have a really nice life. And you think, "Well, actually, hang on, isn't there something?"

You know, Peter Meer talks about justice. Is there any justice at the end of this novel? But for Murdoch, you would say, "Well, actually, that's just how the world is."

Well, the world is messy. It's just full of chance. You know, she calls it the thinginess of the world or the messiness of the world. But actually, sometimes justice doesn't work, and yet we've all got to find it within ourselves.

She says to be merciful and allow mercy to be shown to us. So that's, I think, an important element of the novel.

Yeah, I think that that's another sort of comic flip of the novel is that the Peter Meer, the sort of inverted commas Green Knight standing, appears to be replaying the beheading game of Sir Gawain in the Green Knight at first, demanding, you know, an appropriate—I think he says an appropriate payment or a, you know, retribution, basically saying, "Do the same violence unto Lucas as he did unto Peter."

But then he changes his bargain completely and says, "Actually, I've become very fond of your family, having observed them, and I just want to get to know them."

Yes, I think that's quite disconcerting, isn't it? It is, yeah, really strange. If anything, it's more disconcerting than the original offer, I would say.

And I'd like to kind of go back to what I was saying earlier about this idea that it's not a realist novel in that sense. It's very much a, I'd say it is a novel of ideas, and it's a staged novel of ideas, but it's using the stage of a kind of a London set.

Of course, we get a very strong sense of London as a real place, particularly when Anax, I'm sure we'll discuss later, runs away, and this then tries to get back to North London.

There's a cycling through the London parks and the driving to kind of try and find him as well. But yet there are certain things that's only with the interior scenes, whether it's in Lucas's house or in Clifton, that feel very much as if they could be put on the stage.

The players in the novel, the characters in the novel, are expressing particular ideas. I don't think that that's not to denigrate the novel at all; I think it works very well like that.

But I think Murdoch develops it in this way in order to hold all these disparate elements together and to make sure that actually there is a particular ending, even though maybe the ending isn't as satisfactory as perhaps we might have imagined.

That was probably the part that felt the most Gawain-y was the, these indoors locations where everything is said and hashed out and sort of set up.

For the first, I would say for the first half of the novel, it could almost feel like you're not necessarily in a particular city. There are these basic two, like you said, sort of stage sets, and we don't see much in between other than the attempted murder.

That's the one bit that stands out from the early part of the novel. But then we have this scene with Anax, and that seems a lot like the traveling sequences in Gawain, which are much more solitary and beautiful as well and surrounded by scenery, which suddenly sort of blossoms in the second half of the novel.

Yes, absolutely. And Murdoch is writing this from life as well. She always kept her flat from, I think, in the '50s, but she spent some of the Second World War living in London, just near Victoria Station.

But then she always kept a flat in Cornwall Gardens in London and spent half the week there and half the week in Oxford, not just when she was teaching in London in the 1960s at the Royal College of Art, but even after that, right up until her death.

She had her London life, her London friends, and she would often be out walking or something or going out to restaurants, parties, socializing with all sorts of people. So I think she's one of the great writers of London, along with Dickens and Woolf.

I think certainly one of the best of the post-war writers of London. And yet, in the first draft, she got the direction that Anax would travel in wrong.

She would, I don't know if you know, after her first novel, she would never be edited at all by anybody. She would just—

Oh really?

No, she'd go along to the publisher with typed-up drafts in a plastic carrier bag and just dump the plastic bag and say, "Get on with it, and don't touch a comma, don't touch a paragraph."

And of course, she had her readership; she sold very well, especially after the publication of her fourth novel, The Bell, in '58. And she was very resistant to being edited.

For the journey that Anax takes, it was only when Peter Conrad got the dog to write a letter to Anax the dog and to suggest, actually, yeah, I know it sounds weird, but it worked.

Murdoch took this in good grace and in good heart and then rewrote that section with Cloudy actually telling Anax how he should have got back to North London.

So, wow, that's one of the, I think, the only major edits that she made to this novel.

I haven't checked the acknowledgments, actually. Is Cloudy in there?

Possibly. Her not being edited after her first novel, yes, was that common at the time?

It was a different time, yeah, in the '50s. I mean, Under the Net did very well, and I think that was quite heavily edited.

There are typescripts, again, in the States in an archive, but I think she was quite upset about what the editor wanted her to do. But obviously, being a first-time novelist, she had to kind of say, "Okay, that's fine."

But I think she was very committed to her vision of what she wanted to do and very, you know, she's a powerful woman, and she was able to make sure that even if edits came back to her, she would always refuse them.

They always wanted to publish the next Iris Murdoch. So that was the deal.

It's the sort of deal you expect of sort of grand old men of letters in their dotage, publishing big bloated novels past their best.

I mean, there is an argument to be made that the novels of the '80s and '90s are indeed big bloated novels. This kind of James, Henry Jameson kind of style of the big baggy monster.

So, you know, the thing about the Golden Bowl or Wings of Dove, I mean, they're not that long, but I think compared to, yeah, certainly her novels, as I mentioned, start off in the kind of the average 250 to 300-page mark.

And yet when, how, and then we're getting on towards 500 pages for The Green Knight. The Book of the Brotherhood is enormously long, as is Good Apprentice.

Measures the planet, not the ideal places to start with Murdoch, I would say to your listeners.

Coming back to Anax, I wanted to ask you about the issue of goodness in Murdoch's novels. I feel like I'm reading her, I've been trained to look for who is truly good and not get distracted by someone who might be merely obliging or just innocent.

Could you tell us a little bit about, and so in this novel, I couldn't help thinking repeatedly that Anax was perhaps the good center?

Yes, but yeah, no, absolutely. He's the focus of the good, isn't he? And I think that the howling and the crying when he hears Bellamy's voice can be really affecting.

And also the obvious joy when, I think he screams, doesn't bark, he screams, I think, as the novel says, when Bellamy at last comes back and claims him again for more.

Although, of course, it breaks Moy's heart, I think. But as does Harvey's going off and will later. And clearly marry Sefton.

So yeah, I mean, Moy is hard done by, but yeah, Anax is, I think, a very good center. There are varying levels of characters. I think Louise is a very good character, the girl's mother.

She has to deal not just with the death of her husband but also the fallout of her later rejecting the offer of marriage from Lucas, but also how Clement and Bellamy relate to her.

She seems to be this central figure, and quite often you have a sort of central female figure in Murdoch's fiction, certainly the later novels. You know, Bellamy is a seeker; he's trying to be good rather than nice.

I think Clement's given the name, of course, is trying to be good rather than nice, trying to be better. But yes, there are particular characters that do go forwards, and there are particular characters that perhaps stay where they are or maybe even slip backwards in this novel.

But nothing gets played out completely, I would say. And so we are left, I think, as readers perhaps wanting to know more about what happened after the actual ending of the novel, even though the novel is quite substantial.

The question of how to be good leads us to the question of justice. When Peter Meer asks for an exactly appropriate payment, he implies a medieval sense of justice—blood for blood.

With the Arthurian poem in mind, we might think this is crude or barbaric, but in fact, Peter's request, which incidentally does not result in an exactly proportionate injury to Lucas, by being personal and private, circumvents any dependency on institutionalized justice.

The law's view on Lucas's actions is voiced by Father Damian in a letter to Bellamy, as he acted in self-defense and without any violent intent. I do not see that he need feel guilty.

But Lucas, in fact, has a lot to feel guilty about, not simply in regard to Peter but his foiled violent intentions towards Clement. Interestingly, Lucas's own inner sense of appropriate payment seems to be satisfied by his apparent killing of Peter.

When the brothers reunite and Clement presses him about that fateful night, Lucas says, "Do you mean do I intend to try again? No, I think this may sound odd, but one man can die for another. All that hatred had to go somewhere."

Bellamy, when he isn't worrying God with prayers, worries to Father Damian that those prayers are becoming too fat. In one of his letters to the priest, Bellamy refers to Galatians 3:20 verses concerning the formation and purpose of the law in Israel.

Justice is a covenant between Israel and God, in which Israel is represented by Moses and God by angels. Peter, who at one blinding moment appears to Bellamy to be composed from light, is strikingly angelic in much of his behavior.

His sense of justice is a loving one. He fulfills what Bellamy idealizes angels to be—a kind of celestial supportive older brother, loving, dependable, and strong. Peter Meer's family motto is "Virtue follows strength," taken from Murdoch's own Irish ancestor, Alexander Richardson.

After Peter is institutionalized, the family receives word of his death from his doctor, who says his patient seemed to be kept alive by his courageous will to accomplish certain ends. These accomplished, he relaxed into a calm submission to an inevitable death.

It's interesting that you mention A Midsummer Night's Dream because, a bit like the sort of dual roles there and the kind of, what's the right word, sort of tiers of groups of characters, I felt there was something quite similar here with the rival magicians and then the two sort of matriarchal figures.

I mean, maybe there's even three, actually, counting Cora. But there's Joan and Louise. They do seem to be these sort of pairings, and sometimes they're quite distinctly drawn.

You know, Lucas and Clement, for example, you can't help thinking of them as good brother and bad brother at times, definitely. Is there something to this sort of wider symmetry?

That's like pairings, like Peter and Lucas, and then the two matriarchs, who Joan in particular sometimes gets called a bit witchy. So you're tempted to go, "Well, two wizards, two witches, maybe?"

Yeah, you're absolutely spot on to see that going on, and it's necessary because if you're going to pair people off at the end, as Shakespeare does in his comedies, then you do need to have these particular images and these particular characters that will serve the narrative and produce the plot.

But also, I think Murdoch needs to have these kind of opposites or figures that are shadowy figures. Some of these minor characters are quite shadowy figures, I think, in some regards, that do provide support for some of the elements of characterization that Murdoch is trying to work through her major characters and provide them, in a sense, with a kind of a form of mirroring but also a form of ballast.

I think some of these characters make the reality of the major characters actually more prominent and more obvious. So yeah, you've got it with Clement and Lucas. Also, of course, this kind of, as you see, these magician figures that I think Murdoch is drawing very much on The Tempest here.

But I think you also have it between Louise and, as you say, some of the other older female characters in the work as well. I think Louise is kind of trying to negotiate after the death of her husband and also the whole development of the narrative that actually she needs to kind of reimagine her own identity.

I think by having a range of middle-aged female characters that she can kind of distinguish herself against, so that's actually really useful.

Yeah, because I suppose she, like a couple of the other characters, there were these strange sort of transitional moments. This handsome, youthful Harvey, who suddenly has a rotting leg—well, he sort of blows it up as a rotting leg—and feels, you know, done for.

Yeah, my youth is over; I've got this, you know, I've got a slightly painful broken leg.

Yeah, just keep off it for six weeks; it'll be fine. Read a book.

And then, yeah, like you say, Louise, who there is a hint of a—well, more than a hint of a bit of a free song with one of the other characters, but that seems to have been long dead.

She seems to be past that point. In fact, she seems to be encouraging, I think it's Clement, onto her daughter instead. So it seems like the gaps between some of the ages are really quite odd and have maybe perhaps recently shifted.

Yes, and of course, the model they hadn't shifted. I mean, she was, in her youth and into her early 20s, 30s, she was enthralled by particular older men, enchanter figures, who she would then have relationships with.

So I think with readers reading it now, it does jar that Louise is saying to Clement, "Why don't you, you know, Moy's interested in you, Sefton's interested in you, fed for Lucas? It's Lucas's teaching Sefton."

Is there some kind of sexual freedom going on there? And of course, he goes off with Aleph, who is 18, 19, and he's 40-ish, 40.

Yeah, and it's all kind of not exactly swept under the carpet, but it's kind of, in a sense, celebrated. I think these discrepancies and also Harvey, of course, earlier on with older women, it's celebrated as almost like this kind of Greek sort of master and pupil relationship, which obviously it is.

Lucas, Lucas. So Murdoch is a little bit out of time in that regard. And yet we might say, well, it's just that that's playing into what we now see as this done trope of the abusive older man.

I think it partially is, but Murdoch didn't quite see it like that from her own experiences. I mean, she did have some very disturbing and damaging relationships with particular men earlier in her life.

You do also think, reading the novel, well, I mean, who else is there? The world becomes so sort of concentrated on these characters that if people are going to pair off, there's only limited choices.

There aren't lots of eligible men of an equivalent age, although Aleph and Sefton, of course, both get offers from Oxford, so they could disappear and have a particular life after that.

And for Moy, perhaps, as you say, it is limited, but Moy is, I mean, the reuse or recycling of the Leda and the Swan myth with Moy in the Thames is particularly disturbing, I would say.

And I'm not sure how well that works. And yet Murdoch, I'm not going to say she shoehorns it in. I think people have to read it and see for themselves.

For me, it feels odd and disjointed, but again, that idea of the raping of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan and then how Moy deals with Murdoch deals with Moy in the river and then how she has to almost have this kind of shameful journey back to Clifton is a very odd one.

But yeah, I mean, that touches on a lot of earlier points about these intertexts that Murdoch's using. But certainly, as you say, there are, in the play, obviously, you only have particular certain players.

You can't have people going and getting married off stage because that would spoil the development of the narrative. Right? So who are you going to marry them off to?

You mentioned the older woman that Harvey's involved with, Tessa. We haven't spoken about her yet, and she has an important role to play in the ending, which is a bit of a rug pull after having what appears to be a not comedic but classic comic ending, everyone being paired off.

And Peter Meer being almost an angelic figure of good and harmony, he's revealed to be a madman and a mad butcher.

Yeah, and is rapidly sort of swept away. What do you think is behind this kind of disillusioning end?

Of course, later we find—perhaps you don't want me to spoil the plot.

I mean, you can take this out.

Oh no, we know that Peter then dies, which I think actually is probably for the plot itself a good thing because it then, I think, alleviates some of the pressure that the other characters are under and allows them to go and have a life.

You know, Peter exits the scene through death; Lucas exits the scene by going to America, and it gives them a bit more breathing space, a bit less pressure for the rest of the characters.

Yeah, and I think that this disillusionment of the end, although later on that, you know, some characters do get a happy, inverted commas, ending—Louise, Clement, Harvey, et cetera—is to say, well, that's life.

Some, you know, death is going to happen to us all, the novel is saying. And yet we've got to make the most of the time that we have here.

And so the pairing, the romantic pairings off and this kind of hugely, I think, Eros-infused elements with them, with the marriages. But also, I think this, you know, there's this questioning about what, you know, how sex can be a means by which we can kind of escape our everyday lives and almost transcend ourselves.

I mean, Murdoch is quite keen on exploring that in many of her novels. But yeah, there are characters that do well, and there are characters that Murdoch, some characters will have a depression.

Yet she would say, well, that's just life. That's just how things work. It's random, it's chancy, it's difficult to predict. And yet she's suggesting here that actually, not just with Bellamy but with so many other characters, that you can't go off alone.

You can't do this by yourself. But actually, somebody who's perhaps angelic or spiritual like Peter Meer is able to go and do this.

I mean, even Father Damian leaves behind his priesthood, his Catholicism, and so on, and doesn't want to search for God anywhere outside of himself.

I think Murdoch is suggesting that actually pairing up or being in community is actually something that's absolutely essential.

And I think that's also the danger is that we can be rejected or accepted, and sometimes it doesn't depend on us; it depends on others or our circumstance.

So I think she's being realistic in that particular sense, despite the heightened speech and despite the various, you know, strangenesses in the events—resurrections, telekinesis, etc. Everything, it still feels true, even if it doesn't feel realistic.

It's true to this, to Murdoch, yeah. It's true to how she wants to produce her own fictional world.

And if you have a look at some other London novels, obviously Nice and the Good, we mentioned earlier, it's partially set in London, partially set in Dorset in the rural area.

But a number of her London novels, also a lot of her characters in the London novels could all live in the same kind of London in Murdoch land.

So there are different kinds of forces that direct people, and generally, they don't involve a nine-to-five job or, you know, they often involve being, having the time to sit and think about these particular huge life-consuming choices and modes of being.

I think in so many other novels, people just kind of, characters just get on with it, and they don't really, they're not as self-reflexive.

And then the novels aren't as reflective, perhaps. Murdoch just put it in her particular way.

And that's all we have time for today. Thank you very much for listening or watching if you're with us on YouTube. A huge thank you to my guest, Miles Leeson.

Remember to tune back in tomorrow for an extended interview with Miles, and you can find links to his work, including the Iris Murdoch Society podcast, in the episode description box below.

That's all for today. Until next time, happy reading.

[Music]

Do [Music]

Well, I think there's very, very little great art. And one reason for this is that both the artist and, of course, the consumer, too, as it were, seek too readily to be consoled.

That some kind of pleasing, a consoling pattern, sentimentality would be one aspect of this, which then prevents one from producing something which has got the kind of hardness and truthfulness which great art has got.