“Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason. The absent Paul, haunting her with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. Dora suffered from guilt, and with guilt came fear.” The opening of The Bell
“‘Gracie darling, will you marry me?’
‘Yes.’
‘What?’
‘Yes.’
Ludwig Leferrier stared down into the small calm radiant un-smiling face of Gracie Tisbourne. Was it conceivable that the girl was joking? It was. Oh Lord.
‘Look, Graqcie, are you serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I mean—‘
‘Of course if you want to back out of it—‘
‘Gracie! But– but– Gracie, do you love me?’
‘Can you not infer that from what I said just now?’
‘I don’t want inferred love.’
‘I love you.’
‘It’s impossible!’
‘This is becoming a rather stupid argument.’
‘Gracie. I can’t believe it!’
‘Why are you so surprised?’ said Gracie. ‘Surely the situation has been clear for some time. It has been to all my friends and relations.’
‘Oh damn your friends and relations– I mean– Gracie, you do really mean it? I love you so dreadfulkly much—…” From The Accidental Man
“I daresay, an unfashionable thing to say nowadays, I am not ‘very highly sexed.’ I can live perfectly well without ‘sexual relations.’ Some observers have even thought I must be homosexual because I did not have perpetual mistresses! I hate mess. Perhaps my morally hygienic mother somehow taught me to. And I have never liked he complicit male world of foulmouthed talk and bawdy. Of course I have had not a few love affairs. But I never bribed a woman into bed.” From The Sea, The Sea
Iris Murdoch is known for creating complex novels that delve into the interior lives of characters while carrying a plot and making statement about contemporary (Twentieth Century) life. Her use of elements from a range of styles and genres– fantasy, gothic, thriller, historical, psychological, mythological– give her novels interesting layers that give each novel a distant feel. She is able to borrow elements from these diverse styles without adopting them wholesale or falling into thier traps and cliches. No, her novels are decidedly realistic, perhaps tinged with a bit of melancholy, but her essentially flawed characters are seen as whole people. Comic touches, with human foibles and discrete descriptions of thought and physicality.
As you read through her novels, they seem to become more and more complex, just the western society did throughout her career. Political passions never seem far from the surface. Murdoch proves that entertaining stories do not have to be simplistic or bland.