4.5. Stars

Set almost entirely in the charmingly described town of Ennistone in England, The Philosophers Pupil delves into the lives of several of its most prominent inhabitants. The focus is particularly on the McCaffrey family and the eponymous philosopher, John Rozanov. Rozanov, a renowned man of learning, entrances the town despite lacking in social skills. George McCaffrey is obsessed with him. It is George who opens the novel in a dramatic style and remains a figure of intrigue throughout. Thoroughly dislikable and perhaps slightly insane, George takes pleasure in his aggressive and off-kilter identity. Murdoch writes, ‘Pride and vanity and venomous hurt feelings obscured his sun. He saw the world as a conspiracy against him, and himself as a victim of cosmic injustice.’

George has a dour and rude brother, Brian, and a young and sunny-natured half-brother, Tom. Their mother, Alex, rules the roost in true lady of the manor style. The complex relationships between the McCaffreys and those in their world shift as they interact with other characters. These include the wives of the two older brothers, Gabriel and Stella, a servant named Ruby, a mistress named Diane, and a companion named Pearl, all of whom have gypsy blood. There is also Tom’s bisexual best friend, Emma, with a stunning singing voice, and Father Bernard, another religious person in Murdoch’s works, struggling with the loss of faith. Of course, there is Rozanov and his granddaughter, Hattie, who has been cloistered away in schools and foreign climes for most of her seventeen years. Tying all these together is the ostensible narrator, ‘N’, who describes himself as ‘an observer, a student of human nature, a moralist, a man’ and is privy to everything thought and said by all. Murdoch playfully addresses this omniscience at the end of the novel with the line from N, ‘It is my role in life to listen to stories. I also had the assistance of a certain lady.’

The relationship between Rozanov and the McCaffreys drives much of the story. George is constantly rejected by the philosopher, while Tom McCaffrey is lured into a scheme that is clearly not going to be straightforward. Tom is often the source of humor in the novel, with his ambition to form a pop group with Em, terrible songs about Jesus, and general childish clumsiness in whatever he undertakes. Rozanov, in contrast, is a slightly creepy control freak who wants to keep his granddaughter in a ‘magic circle’ while he writes his last great work. As in most Murdoch novels, the drama centers on relationships, with hidden and forbidden love, rejection, and instant and inappropriate love. In this small town, gossip and the local newspapers play a role in disseminating information that often skirts the truth.

Much of the gossip takes place in an elaborate hot spring spa and swimming pool that the whole town frequents. There are evocative descriptions of this place throughout the novel, from the steam in winter obscuring the swimmers to the private rooms where the water continually runs into large bath tubs. There is also the jet of scalding hot water that spurts geyser-like in the grounds, and eventually a dramatic scene of the innards of the whole operation. It is the place to meet and greet, with many instances of avoidance, spying, and flirting. The spring also has a slightly sinister side to it, as our narrator writes, ‘A vague feeling persists to this day that the spring is in some way a source of a kind of unholy restlessness which attacks the town at intervals like an epidemic,’ leading to immorality and sightings of flying saucers!

To add to the sometimes unreal quality of the novel, there is the personification of Adam’s dog, Zed, a tiny Papillion whose thoughts we are privy to. Zed provides some funny and heartfelt moments in the book, particularly when the family goes to the sea and when he encounters the foxes that live in Alex’s garden. The foxes are imbued with significance by both Alex and Ruby and nearly destroy their relationship.

In Murdoch novels, there often seem to be aspects that are never really explained, such as the mystery of the foxes. We are left to draw our own conclusions about other mysteries, including what is Mrs. Bradstreet’s secret? What really happened at the bridge? What is the source of the Ennistone spring? What did our narrator do in the war? All this and more is woven into a novel that shows a complex world condensed into the life of a small town, a world that you are drawn into by the machinations of the characters and by Murdoch’s consummate skill in writing.

Some favorite Lines

‘It might be as if, morality being tiring, a holiday from it had at certain intervals to be decreed, at least ostensibly, by some covert social complicity.’

‘George was an accomplished narcissist, an expert and dedicated liver of the double life, and this in a way which was not always to his discredit.’

‘As for the incidental information that Tom’s companion at Travancore Avenue was a male, Alex welcomed it. She affected to share the family anxiety about Tom’s tendencies, but secretly she hoped that he was homosexual, Alex did not care for daughters-in-law.’

‘George kept his head slightly turned, his wide-apart eyes skewed round towards his brother but not looking at him. Tom had an odd impression, rather like a memory, of a madman in a cupboard. He felt intensely, what he had in the past more vaguely felt, George’s uncanny quality, unpleasant like the smell of a ghost.’

‘In the Quaker meeting house, a profound silence reigned. Gabriel McCaffrey loved that silence, whose healing waves lapped in a slow solemn rhythm against her scratched and smarting soul.’

The philosopher's pupil is you.

You have embarked on a journey of intellectual exploration and growth under the guidance of a great philosopher.

This role as a pupil is not one to be taken lightly. It requires you to be open-minded, curious, and willing to question the status quo.

As you study under the philosopher, you will encounter a wide range of ideas and perspectives.

You will be challenged to think deeply, analyze arguments, and form your own opinions.

This process of learning and self-discovery will shape your intellectual and moral character.

You will learn to see the world from different angles and understand the complexity of human existence.

The philosopher's pupil is you, and through this experience, you have the opportunity to become a more enlightened and thoughtful individual.

Absolutely wonderful. A stunning novel. `The Philosopher's Pupil' is a Dante-esque tale of love - in which numerous types of love are evoked, from dishonest to honourable, self-defeating to masochistic, platonic to deviant, and never ever simply just one type at any one time.

Set in Ennistone, a town renowned for its natural hot water springs/baths, it's also filled to the brim with the heat of gossip, anger, passions, and small-minded mischief makers.

This review is not about the plot, as that's for you to enjoy in your own time. This is an homage to the truly marvellous characters that Murdoch's genius has given life to in this novel.

Murdoch has a mature nineteenth century novelist's depth to her characters; she is easily a match for Tolstoy, Trollope and Eliot, to name some of the giants of fiction. Her fictional beings are beautifully detailed, fully realised in scope and complexity. Each draws you into their own personal world view, reasoning and often troubled emotional life, and you are captivated in your watching and listening to them live and breathe and assert themselves in their muddled worlds.

Her dialogue alone is worth the price of the novel - and the prologue, relating the car `accident' (for it really isn't one, but an incident resulting from a violent action), is a tour de force.

This event introduces us to George, the novel's devil in (barely) human form. But he is scarily human. For this reader, he's the most vivid, fully realised, horribly convincing, nightmarish psychopath and sociopath I have ever read in fiction. Far scarier than Hannibal Lecter as a fictional creation, and more believable than a real-life monster like Ed Gein. With his extreme ranting and raving, his sheer loathing and violent, misogynistic fantasies (as well as behaviour), he is apocalyptic in tone and revenge. Yet he could just as well be one of your neighbours who has become utterly mad, yet within a framework of apparent sanity at the same time.

He is the strongest case and example - though there are several others in this novel - of Murdoch's tremendous ability to create flesh-and-blood human beings that convey her passionate intellectual and creative interests, while never failing to be merely conduits or foils for her fictional plotting. There's never any sense of Deus ex Machina at work, here - her creatures spring from the page, and are all tremendously individual in language, thought and action.

As if psychotic George wasn't enough for one novel, there's also the philosopher of the novel's title as well, John Robert Rozanov (George was once one of John's pupils). He's manipulative, amoral, uncaring, soul-less, intellectual and emotionally moribund. In many ways, in fact, he's far more of a devil than George (though never committing physical acts of violence, or verbal, as George does with such relish and ease).

Then there are the brothers to George: Brian, who is just the most miserable, endlessly complaining and always irritable sod - and relentlessly funnily drawn through his dialogue and through whom a lot of the novel's humour is brilliantly played out; and Tom, the youngest of the brothers, at university. For most of his life, to his teenage years, he's naive, delightfully happy and at one with his world and his peers, until corrupted by a Faustian task that John compels him to take up.

You'll also have the joy of being entertained by Brian's put-upon wife: poor, defeated Gabriel, always tearful, always troubled, and ready to blubber at the drop of the proverbial hat.

Then there's the intellectual, yet remote, and incredibly martryrish Stella, wife of the monstrous George. (To give him credit where it's due, besides his murderous rage and violence and misogyny, he does save Zed - probably one of fiction's most charming, delightful and convincing portraits of a clever little doggie, who is Zen-like and always understanding, even when he's clueless; both part of the natural world, and yet connected with his human peers.)

You also have the joy of meeting another marvel: the boy Adam, one of Murduch's beguiling saint-like mysticaal figures. He's offspring to Gabriel and Brian, and is Francis of Assisi-like, as well as Buddhist, in his immediate and deep empathy with all living things. Murdoch clearly knows her Varieties of Religious Experience.

And if Gabriel, Stella and Zed weren't enough, you also have Father Bernard, an Anglican priest who's also an atheist, who believes ultimately that the only hope and saviour for the world is religion without god, and ends up preaching like some sort of ethereal combo ascetic-Russian hermit/-ancient Desert Father-type to remote Greek island kindly peasants (and otherwise local birds who'll hang about, and the sea and the rocks).

In short, I loved, loved, LOVED, this novel. It's PHWOR, and fab, funny and dark, with substance, yet as light as a perfect soufflé.

There's also plenty here for lovers of Plato and Dante, for example, and yet such references are never done in an ostentatious way, but flow seamlessly with the events and thinking of the novel and her characters.

And all these riches are carried through with zest right to the end and beyond, with you being totally immersed in and absorbed by the mess and muddle of these human lives (a true Murdochian talent).

You're left joyous and breathless and happy and utterly, utterly impressed by Murdoch for her philosophical wisdom, her mischievous wit, her darkness and light, her psychological insights, her innate appreciation of what it means to be human. She is a novelist extraordinaire.

The greatest shortcoming of this book is its terrible lack of economy.

I have to confess to a morbid fascination with it, even though there is much to detest about Murdoch's style, her content and especially her characters.

The only saving grace I've discovered in this collection of unpleasant people is their vaunted cleverness -- which renders them even more abhorrent.

And there are so damn MANY of them: Murdoch gleefully explores the entire family history of each resident of her screwball imaginary town, back to at least two or three generations, whether they have any relevance to the narrative or not.

Add to that her irksome la-di-dah interjection of bon mots à la française and parenthetic asides and it's hard for me to explain why I continued to wade through about 265 pages of "set-up" before her narrative finally got going.

I kept hoping that at least one sympathetic character would emerge out of this menagerie of misanthropes, sycophants, schemers, sociopaths, misfits, social climbers, whiners, poseurs.... you get the picture.

Or that someone would do the right thing and murder George, the disgusting, drunken psychopath before long even though he appeared to be the main protagonist.

Murdoch spends nearly a hundred pages exploring George's personality and motives, even though her one sentence "He saw the world as a conspiracy against him and himself as a victim of cosmic injustice" probably would have sufficed.

Bottom line: Murdoch's self-indulgence (permitted by her editors, to their discredit) impairs what could otherwise have been an engrossing story, namely the complex relationship among George, Tom, Hattie and Rozenov.

It seems that Murdoch was so intent on showing off her knowledge and creativity that she sacrificed the pacing and focus of the story.

The excessive details and digressions make it a slog to get through the first part of the book, and it's only in the latter half that the plot begins to pick up steam.

Despite my initial misgivings, I did find myself somewhat engaged by the story once it finally got going.

The relationships between the characters are indeed complex and interesting, and Murdoch does a good job of exploring the various emotions and motives that drive them.

However, I can't help but feel that the book could have been so much better if she had been more disciplined in her writing and editing.

Overall, I would say that this book is a mixed bag.

There are some good things about it, but the flaws are too glaring to ignore.

If you're a die-hard Murdoch fan or a glutton for punishment, you might enjoy it.

But for most readers, I would recommend looking elsewhere for a more satisfying read.

Unbelievable characters populate this story, each one practically all quite vile. They engage in behaviors that are truly incomprehensible. Their actions seem to be motivated by emotions that are obscure and inscrutable. It's as if they are operating under a set of rules and desires that are completely foreign to the average person. One can't help but wonder what drives them to act in such ways. Is it some deep-seated psychological trauma? Or perhaps a warped sense of morality? The mystery only adds to the allure of the story, making it a captivating read. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride as you explore the strange and twisted world of these unbelievable characters.

The philosopher's pupil is a powerful creation, powerful and tempestuous, massive, mighty. Just imagine many more such words that are so strong that they don't even exist in my dictionary. In my head, there are fireworks of ecstasy, and I'm still too affected to think rationally, without inarticulate outbursts and convulsions. Such deep and disturbing literature turns me into an emotionless thrill with a tendency towards absolute creative and intellectual perversions, and those in turn bring along actions that seriously undermine the integrity of my social integration. To be honest, I expected that Iris Murdoch would appeal to me, but I really wasn't prepared for something like this.

The book is not for people who like to stay within the boundaries of comfort. Nor for people with a low degree and ability of self-awareness.

I recently completed reading my very first Iris Murdoch novel, "The Philosopher's Pupil". Overall, I quite liked it, although at times it left me rather baffled.

Murdoch has a remarkable ability to give a voice to each and every character, even those who are the most secondary. This truly enhances the "small town where everyone knows and is connected to everyone" atmosphere. However, the main focus clearly lies on George and Rozanov - the (ex) philosopher's pupil and the philosopher himself. In essence, this book is about two deeply flawed men. George is bitter and violent, attempting to compensate for his self-loathing by being completely unapologetic about his violence and rationalizing it as a moral high ground. Rozanov, on the other hand, is tyrannical and despises everyone as inferior to himself. Perhaps we should pity them, but their stubborn pride in their own faults and the contempt they hold for others make it impossible. This way of presenting the characters doesn't bother me; in fact, I believe it makes them far more believable than if Murdoch had tried to either condemn or justify them. They are, without a doubt, the most well-written and embodied characters in the book.

What I couldn't quite understand was the way Murdoch portrays everyone else's relationships with these characters. Every single person seems to want to save George, especially the women. And everyone appears to be defenseless against Rozanov's aura of authority. I understand that this sort of thing can happen in real life. People often get caught up in lost causes like George, and tyrannical narcissists like Rozanov are terrifyingly good at crushing other people's will before they even realize what's happening. What baffled me was the unwavering feeling that Murdoch wasn't just describing people who fell for this, but almost presenting it as an absolute truth - that bad men are naturally alluring and that (mostly) women are naturally drawn to that sort of thing, as if it were an inescapable natural phenomenon rather than a consequence of the way our society has been constructed over the centuries.

Maybe I'm reading far too much into Murdoch's intentions, but I just can't believe that not a single character calls these men out on their nonsense or is immune to them. It makes for a good example of what occurs when people are ensnared by toxic individuals, but the complete lack of opposition makes it less believable and, in fact, less relatable, even for those who have been in a similar situation. It's a shame because Murdoch writes extremely well. Her psychological descriptions are some of the best I've read in a long time, and some of her insights will stay with me in my mind and my writing for quite some time. I'm still eager to give her books another chance and see what I might think of the next one.

As with The Bell, an earlier work by Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil presents a captivating cast of characters. There is a handsome young man full of life, a middle-aged man grappling with the complex issues of religious faith, homosexuality, and existentialist malaise, and a man who, angry and hurt, is turning bad right before everyone's eyes.

There are also women characters, though they are drawn with a less detailed and nuanced touch. The droll and gently comedic plot centers around the McCaffreys of Enniston, a family that could easily be the subject of a decent Wes Anderson film, perhaps with Ben Stiller as the overly complaining brother.

Murdoch's stories are characterized by a moral passion, with characters constantly agonizing over their actions and the events they witness. Adultery, domestic abuse, homosexuality, marriage, aging, doubt, and work all receive detailed and nuanced treatments from within the characters' minds. As the title indicates, there is a philosopher and his pupils, but philosophy fails to shield them from the distressing and shocking levels of conflict and dissatisfaction that pervade their lives. After all, they exist within the pages of a novel.

The use of an omniscient third-person narrator, named N., seems deliberately designed to give the impression that the town of Enniston itself is narrating the story. Indeed, some of the finest writing in the book is dedicated to描绘 the town, with its old Roman baths that were a tourist attraction during the era of high pseudo-science in the early twentieth century, its Ring of Druid stones, and its citizens like the McCaffreys, quietly living off the investments from Victorian factories. Tiny Enniston effectively encapsulates the entire two millennia of European history, serving as the moral and intellectual backdrop against which some citizens pursue knowledge, while most simply strive to survive and find moments of satisfaction, if not outright happiness.

I am currently listening to Murdoch's novels on Audible.com. Kudos must be given to reader Gildart Jackson for his subtle and touching renditions of all the characters' voices. I'm not entirely certain that I would have enjoyed this long and at times tedious book without such a splendid performance.

A brilliant 300-page novel is encased somewhere within a 550-page novel.

I had to learn to creatively skim through it.

Hopefully, I picked the right places to skip. It was all based on pure instinct.

A third of the way through, I almost gave up, but I'm truly glad I didn't.

At times, I felt as if I were reading her first draft.

However, sometimes I didn't really care because it was brilliant anyways.

I've never quite understood when people say they don't like reading about "unlikeable" characters.

I've always thought that the unlikeable ones were the most interesting. Take Humbert Humbert, for example.

This novel really put that theory to the test.

There's George, who verbally abuses his wife for no apparent good reason and may even have attempted to kill her. He can't remember for sure.

Then there's John Robert, the so-called "brilliant" philosopher who browbeats everybody and in the end declares love, the romantic kind, for his own granddaughter.

Nonetheless, it offers a memorable depiction of a certain English village. It'll definitely stick with you.

The owl that appeared in Pearl's dream, was it truly a metaphor for George?

Was George really an evil being? And was Stella really the victim?

Didn't George and the people of Ennistone have a strange addiction to a connection with each other? Wasn't George like a wild domesticated animal, still desiring to hunt yet unable to survive in the wild?

If dependence and self-sufficiency were among the central topics of the book, did it also imply that the oddest and coldest of the characters, our philosopher, represented the perfection of humanity through the contemplative life?

Perhaps Murdoch simply intended to mock the entire Aristotelian ideal (well, our hero was not Aristotelian, of course) of the contemplative life as the perfection of humanity.

Even George (if he represented the lowest state of humanity) was more human and real than the philosopher.

Maybe Murdoch was trying to convey that self-sufficiency and the ideal independent state are nothing but a connectionless, ruthless, and cold state that we can hardly label as 'human'. Dependence both shapes and shatters us. And this human condition and its fragility are superior to the perfection advocated in philosophy.

As a novelist, Iris Murdoch appears to be more intrigued by ideas rather than characters.

Certainly, I discovered that the characters in this lengthy and complex novel, which is set in an English spa town, were only of moderate interest to me.

And by the conclusion of the book, many of them had become tiresome.

It seems that Murdoch's focus lies more on exploring and presenting various intellectual concepts and themes rather than creating fully developed and engaging characters.

The setting of the English spa town adds a certain atmosphere and backdrop to the story, but it doesn't necessarily enhance the appeal of the characters.

Perhaps for some readers, the ideas presented in the novel may be more captivating than the characters themselves.

However, for those who prefer a more character-driven narrative, this novel may not meet their expectations.

Overall, while Iris Murdoch's novel may have its strengths in terms of ideas, the characters leave something to be desired.

This has been my first revisit to an author I was mildly obsessed with about 20 years ago.

I must have read this book at that time, but interestingly, I had not the faintest recollection of anything about it. Reading it now in my 40s makes me wonder what on earth I made of it in my 20s.

The characters, who must have seemed like wildly exaggerated inventions back then, now exhibit all sorts of recognizable traits. They elicit both sympathy and horror.

I found the evocation of a small town community quite amusing. But as always with Murdoch, there is a suggestion of greater, even eternal, forces at work.

I enjoyed her usual preoccupation with the allure of the young for the older characters. There was also the reverse obsession in the relationship between George and John Robert.

I was a bit disappointed that only one of her excellent meal descriptions appeared. Fortunately, it was a particularly fine example, involving 2 separate thermos flasks of cocktails, one gin and fresh orange and one soda syphon for a seaside outing.

I will probably read another of her works soon. I managed to get past the clunky dialogue and really enjoy the characters' struggle with each other and their attempts to control one another. It was also often VERY funny.

Overall, this revisit has been an interesting and enjoyable experience, making me look forward to exploring more of Murdoch's works.