as an editor in London publishing is Alice Thomas Ellis (1932–2005). Her work was
often compared to that of Muriel Spark, in that its life-and-death sense of humour
is not for the faint-hearted. Novels by writers who are Catholics do not have to have
a black sense of humour, as Piers Paul Read (1941– ) has demonstrated in an
accomplished series of novels of European scope, from Game in Heaven with Tussy
Marx(1966) to Alice in Exile(2001). He also writes sardonically on contemporary
British life in The Misogynist(2010) and useful non-fiction, from Alive(1974) to The
Dreyfus Affair(2012).
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch(1919–1999), author of valuable essays in moral philosophy and
aesthetics, was another novelist who dealt with serious moral questions in a mode
touched by fantasy, though without Spark’s economy. Born in Dublin and educated
in Bristol, she lived in Oxford. Her first novel,Under the Net (1954), is a beguiling
exploration of love, touched with the philosophical issues that preoccupied Jean-
Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. In it the narrative enchantment of romance
contains her strong intellectual impulse. This stylish balance between spirit and
intelligence is sometimes strained in the twenty novels that followed, in which
ingenious and arbitrary set-up situations, involving permutations of sexual relation-
ships, act as a code for the mysterious operation of free will. Iris Murdoch’s intellec-
tual verve and personal charm made her the darling of an intelligent audience, but
the novels are more sophisticated than satisfying.
Some members of the jury will dispute this judgement, and its implied preference
for a more solid realization of character and event. The paradoxes arising from the
differences between fiction and fact, realism and reality, have come to fascinate crit-
ics and some writers. But novelists who dispense with imaginative human engage-
ment with character, and who interrupt what Coleridge called ‘that willing
suspension of disbelief ’, run the risk that the reader may not care what happens to
their characters. The author’s ideas have then to be very interesting indeed – as, with
Iris Murdoch, they often are. But it is difficult to predict that she, or Angus Wilson,
or the South African Doris Lessing, will be read in future with the interest which she
aroused during her career.
Other writers
A fine ifconventional novelist of the post-war period is Elizabeth Taylor(1912-
1975), now somewhat neglected. She published from 1945; her last novel was the
posthumous Blaming, 1976. She became known through Mrs Palfrey at the
Claremont,made into a film, for Angel and A Wreath of Roses.In a Summer Season
(1961) is set, as are most of her books, in an upper middle-class Home Counties
milieu portrayed with knowledge, skill and human feeling. Kate, the literary and
middle-aged widow of a stockbroker, has married feckless young Dermot. The novel
begins with a memorable interview between Kate and her Kensington mother, a
woman of wonderful vanity. Kate’s teenage children are, like their mother, helplessly
in love. A muted tragicomedy plays itself out in a conventional, good, godless,
humane, civilized, sad world.
The early novels ofJohn Fowles(1926–2005) mesmerized a readership which
expanded with The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), a neo-Victorian romance
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