Poetry

...Murdoch's argument in favor of goodness and love doesn't--can't--preclude God...

...Even for a Murdoch novel, Bruno's Dream is extraordinarily wet...

...She is in favor of"the techniques of religion," specifically prayer, and opposed to self-absorption in any form...

...The quality that most gives her novels their beauty and importance, however, isn't the result of her virtuous will alone, and it certainly isn't purely intellectual achievement...

...Murdoch is brilliantly acute and deeply reflective...

...But the shapes of churches, homes, and fences are as vague as childhood lessons in geometry...

...God's reflection in human life after all is the most accessible, as well as constant and concrete, manifestation of his presence...

...She counsels "loving attention"--concentration on goodness, especially in other worthy human beings--as the way to achieve and enact virtue...

...The pouring rain and the flooding are an extreme yet absolutely believable circumstance...

...It takes us out of ourselves, yet we don't completely enter the worlds Murdoch creates...

...It is the liveliness in Iris Murdoch's novels--their bounce, and the convincing reality they convey--that shows the existence of form, meaning, and mystery in the universe...

...Whether or not it qualifies as religion seems to me less a question of theology than semantics...

...The writer gives us distance along with immediacy and pleasure...

...Cumulatively, the literary and psychological connotations of water, for example, join in our minds with the worlds Murdoch creates in The Philosopher Pupil, The Nice and the Good, and Bruno's Dream to enlarge our understanding exponentially...

...In Bruno's Dream the young succeed at love and Bruno becomes reconciled to the living and the dead...

...In water, John Ducane's soul is reborn and George McCaffery's is liberated, all in ways we feel as well as observe...

...Addressing his fleshly shadow is everybody's business, conscious and purposeful or not...

...People put the always messy, sometimes wicked, past to rest, and settle down with each other...

...The generosity with which she uses these attributes is wholly admirable, and the result is prodigiously productive...

...The filament strung in the bulb hung from the ceiling vibrates with cerebral tension...

...it shudders light and the light probes from the window like a ~alpei...

...Her portrayal of the force and beauty of the natural world, of human character in its variety, and her story-telling ability--her dexterity at building and resolving plots--together create an "utterly demanding present...

...The source of the vitality in Murdoch's work is beyond explanation...

...The motion of the novels, though sometimes frenetic, is toward the internal peace and freedom love brings, not toward obsession or fixation or any other psychological distortions...

...Murdoch offers her philosophy and advice partly, at least, to fill a void in a godless world, but I don't see anything contradictory in a believer's living them out...

...Words, however, are important...

...Murdoch the philosopher and Murdoch the artist are wonderfully consistent...

...the everyday lives of the people Murdoch creates are never simply mundane, because the world in which they live incorporates the intangible...

...her stories don't offer either the romanticism or "the consolation of despair" she deplores...

...Her characters have opportunity, Carl L. B(mkston In A Phonomonolog3j, of Fog A mind settles on the neighborhood...

...She's a warm writer...

...This is Murdoch's stance, articulated in The Sovereignty of Good, and shown to us in the novels...

...Murdoch's extensive and pervasive use of symbols extends and amplifies our grasp of reality...

...I walk within a thought...

...When a duel is fought, people slip on the mud and then swim through the Thames...

...and she lends them, too, open-heartedness...

...Leafless trees finger its tissues, as if to pulse their sap into its cells and rooftops slice it like razors of indigestible ideas...

...Only the spondees of the clock knock against walls white "and bare as concentration...

...I think she succeeds in meeting her own impeccable standard...

...Murdoch is an absolute believer in the importance of literature...

...Its London becomes both a jungle and a biblical flood...

...402: Commonweal...

...The water washes away Bruno's most prized material possession, leaving him with his spirituality...

...Good," she says,"is the magnetic center towards which love naturally moves...

...Instead, they demonstrate the words of an acquaintance of mine, a young woman troubled and grieving at the possibility ofber beloved mother's premature death, who said that, in any case, "God's breath is everywhere...

...In the 1961 essay "Against Dryness" (available in Modern Critical Views: Iris Murdoch, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1986), she argues that art--good art, not the slick and sentimental, the overly formed or the lazily formulated--can give us the fullest possible truth, one without self-delusion...

...We look at them and think about them, rather than sink into them...

...Critical as she is, Murdoch is never mean...

...In the downpour and the deluge, scars of old sins fester and heal, current ones reveal themselves and are quelled, and a fortune in the shape of a stamp collection floats away...

...Murdoch's rendition of the baths and river and ocean, and just plain damp is sensuous...

...It seems to me that whether one sees God as a symbol on which to focus, integral to human understanding, but limited to ending with our individual earthly consciousness, or believes God is a separate entity to be better known in the future, Murdoch is supplying us with enlightening and enlarging ways of understanding and acting...

...The rain is unremitting and the gardens are sodden...

...Where it cuts away the evening fog I .see a square of uncut grass...