PRIZES to win! PROMOTIONS
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1948 she returned to Oxford where she became a fellow of St Anne's college. Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year's Honours List. She died in February 1999.
Iris Murdoch, who with John Wain and Kingsley Amla formed a trio of bright talent brilliantly received in England at the time of publication of their first novels, continues on this rather unclassifiable comic offbeat. Certainly there is no clear intent-unless it might be the dispersion of accepted codes of conduct and the assemblage of a group of unpredictable people who pursue an unexpected course. There is Annette Cockeyne who summarily leaves school to take up the business of living- preferably with older men; the indecisive Hunter who has inherited a suffragette paper which Mischa Fox, a malevolently attractive figure, wants to buy; Rosa, Hunter's sister, and Fox' quondam mistress, who is now shared equally and equitably by two Polish refugee brothers; Peter Saward, a historian attempting to decipher the Kastanic script, whose love for Rosa is also academic; Reinborough, an emasculated middle-aged man in a government job whose amatory reach usually exceeds his grasp; etc., etc. All these people, while only casually and momentarily associated, form a capricious coterie of non-conformists. For some it may be an amusing abstraction; for others a taste for the bizarre they are unready to dequire. (Kirkus Reviews)
