Iris Murdoch; "The Black Prince" & Other Tales

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Wow! I just finished rereading "The Black Prince". I realised after about half a page that I had read it before, years ago, before I knew about aspergers.

Has anyone else read any Murdoch?

Reading "The Black Prince" I was stunned over and over again by the perfect precise depiction of my aspie reality/experience.

I'm sure she was aspie. Even "The Bell" and "The Unicorn", which I read recently too, have similar qualities, ways of describing human relationships, reactions to events, delayed emotional responses, overwhelm, detachment, naivety, hyper-analytical treatment of incidents, attention to detail obscuring the whole, etc.

Astonishing and inspiring and moving, and funny too.

What do other people think of her books?

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I've read the Philosopher's Pupil and Nuns and Soldiers maybe a few others. I read so much I forget what I read. She was an excellent writer. I'll have to read her again and see if I can pick up on an Aspie perspective. It's been years since I've read one of her books. Did you see the movie Iris?

No. I like both the actresses that are in it, ( Kate Winslet and Judi Dench ? ) , but think I'd rather read a couple of the biographies first so as not to be too misled. I definitely think she is aspie though.

I just read "The Sea, the Sea". Yikes! Brilliant but quite hard/difficult emotionally, because of clear reflections of my "self" which were quite disturbing to see rendered so precisely. I read it once before, aeons ago, ( long before AS discovery ) and I think I read it "straight" as a "romance"/adventure, ( like Andrea Dworkin says most people read "Wuthering Heights" like Isabella ), and didn't understand where he was going wrong all the time in his analyses etc ( or even that he was so totally at sea about people ).

This time it was scary, almost painful, reading my own way of thinking exposed on the page like that ( even worse than "The Black Prince", which is significantly kinder/gentler, because it suggests that the protagonist may well have seen clearly and be a "better" person than everyone else ).

In "The Sea" the total inability to "see" other people, the tendency to make up dramatic stories about people, and "dramatic" ways of being with them, because don't have the faintest idea how to react to the "real" human beings they are, is alarmingly obvious, ( was this time anyway! ), and rang very big bells for me, though I'm better than I used to be, a lot, ... and there too the book is amazing, because it manages to show how, without any intention on the protagonist's part, he starts thinking/"seeing" slightly/subtly but definitely differently by/at the end as a result of a lot of data, and a change of "role"/position.

Something I also loved about this book and "The Black Prince" was how the chief protagonist is always thinking to himself, ( or writing to himself ), that he is going to do x, y, and z, and then doesn't do them, over and over again.

I love how both in "The Black Prince" and "The Sea" the protagonists spend hours agonising over their actions/events/their relationships, trying to work them out, to understand what was/is going on, and how they calculate painstakingly how to approach the next encounter, etc, and how they are then totally thrown by a few words, someone's actions, which they simply hadn't imagined, and so don't know how to respond and go blank/paralysed, robotically polite, silent, or run away, etc.

I'm waiting for "The Word Child" and another one to arrive.

PS. I enjoyed her meticulous descriptions of his meals in "the Sea".

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