The nice and the good

by Iris Murdoch

Hardcover, 1968

Status

Available

Publication

New York, Viking Press [1968]

Description

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, The Sea comes a story about revenge and reconciliation, and the difference between being nice and being good.   John Ducane, a respected Whitehall civil servant, is asked to investigate the suicide of a colleague. As he pursues his inquiry, he uncovers a shabby, evil world of murder, blackmail, and black magic. He begins to feel more trapped than trapping.   In contrast to a stagnant summer in London, Octavian and Kate Gray's adoring community on the Dorset coast seems to offer Ducane refuge, but even here the after-effects of violence poison an atmosphere already electric with adolescent quarrels and intrigue. After a swim into the underworld, Ducane begins to realize that niceness is not enough.   "A feast."--The Guardian… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Sivani
"The unexamined life is not worth living," says Plato. The capability for self-reflection is uniquely human, although I would not go so far as to say that therefore its exercise is imperative and definitive. (If that were the case, several other less savory characteristics particular to humans
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would have to be viewed the same way, just because animals do not indulge in that kind of behavior.)

Self-examination includes the investigation of motives and evaluation of results of actions and beliefs. It is through reflection that the opportunity for growth exists. But it is a fallacy to assume that just because someone reflects on their life that they will improve. The conclusions drawn need to be acted upon in order to effect change.

Iris Murdoch makes this point rather well in The Nice and The Good. The central character, Ducane, endlessly ponders not only the nature of "good" but also his character and conduct -- which he desires to be good; yet he is almost paralyzed by his persistent agonizing, in the end acting in ways that might be nice but certainly are not good.

She also demonstrates that while "nice" is frequently popular, "good" is not necessarily so.

Now, for all of you thinking that "it sounds like a really boring book; I should remember to give it a miss," let me add that it contains two suspicious deaths and an investigation, government secrets and several love triangles, a daring rescue, flying saucers, puppy love, travel to distant countries and magic pagan rituals, not to mention several different mysteries!
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LibraryThing member lauralkeet
The Nice and the Good opens with a suicide in a London government office. The department head, Octavian Gray, asks lawyer John Ducane to investigate the situation and any potential security breaches. Ducane then becomes the axis of rotation for the rest of the extensive dramatis personae in this
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book. Ducane interviews other members of the department by day, and by night attempts repeatedly -- and unsuccessfully -- to break up with his mistress. No one is quite what they seem.

On the weekends, he is often found at Gray's seaside home in Dorset, where he mingles primarily with women: Octavian's wife Kate and their teenage daughter Barbie, Kate's long-time friend Mary and her son Pierce, and recent divorcee Paula and her nine-year-old twins. Rounding out the group are Octavian's brother Theodore and a tenant, Willy Kost. Here as well, everyone has skeletons in their closet: why did Theodore leave India? What happened to Willy during the war? How did Mary's husband die? What are the circumstances behind Paula's divorce? How can Kate and Ducane carry on their bizarre, not-platonic-but-not-romantic relationship right under Octavian's nose, and with his full knowledge?

Murdoch uses Ducane to move seamlessly between London and Dorset, while exploring goodness and morality:
What Ducane was experiencing, in this form peculiar to him of imagining himself as a judge, was, though this was not entirely clear in his mind, one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely, that in order to become good it may be necessary to imagine oneself good, and yet such imagining may also be the very thing which renders improvement impossible, either because of surreptitious complacency or because of some deeper blasphemous infection which is set up when goodness it thought about in the wrong way. To become good it may be necessary to think about virtue, although unreflective simple people may achieve a thoughtless excellence. (p. 77)

Well, that's all a bit abstract. If I had been in a more deeply philosophical mood as I read this, I might have formed some profound thoughts about morality. Instead, I just enjoyed the twisting plot and the gradual revelation of secrets. This was philosophical, too, but in a different way: Murdoch's style inevitably involves a lot of personal reflection and talking things out. The denouement was neat and satisfying, with a bit of high drama, characters getting exactly what they deserved, and an air of hope.
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LibraryThing member jtho
I love the first sentence: "A head of a department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the nearby and undubitable sound of a revolver shot." As with most of Murdoch's novels, there are many characters and various intertwined
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relationships, so it can be a bit hard to follow, but it's worth the slow read. There's humour with a touch of darkness.
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LibraryThing member murunbuchstansangur
Darkly delightful. A wonderful, heady concotion of farce, foul play and illicit fun in a long, hazy summer of love in London and Dorset, where the characters shuttle back and forth between their memories and each other at dizzying speed - and where somehow the loose ends do all get tied up at the
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eleventh hour, in a most gratifying way. Wilful decadence gives way to sadder and wiser men (and women) and to a miraculous resurge of redemptive optimisim and the final yearned-for triumphing of goodness. An exhilerating trip, with some dicing with death and a happy ending. Only Murdoch could make you believe it!
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LibraryThing member CharlotteN
** SPOILER ALERT **

"Theo had begun to glimpse the distance which separates the nice from the good, and the vision of this gap had terrified his soul".

Here, on the second page from the end, is the sentence which really sums up the whole book. Throughout, we see characters trying to be good yet
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feeling unfulfilled, and characters trying to be 'nice' and failing to be good. Set against the backdrop of a Whitehall thriller, mixed in with murder and the occult, you have 'The Nice and the Good'.

The message is not perhaps particularly inflammatory, yet what Iris Murdoch does is to highlight a group of people and explore how each individual struggles with the conundrum of being 'nice' or 'good'. Some choose to be simply 'nice' - entertaining, pleasant company but ultimately shallow and self-centered - while others attempt to be 'good'. Often they fail, and suffer in the attempt, but they come across ultimately as much more sympathetic.

All the characters, moreover, are fully-formed and believable people. Even the dog and the cat have distinct personalities.

I would definitely read this book again and recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading. It is not too hard a read, nor is it swamped by its message, but it remains with you long after the last page.
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LibraryThing member jmoncton
I picked up this book because Iris Murdoch has a few titles on THE 1001 LIST and I've never read anything by her. The book was light and fun, a little bit of mystery combined with humor and social farce. The book centers around an odd group of characters who are loosely related through work and
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social ties. By the end of this book, every character, except for the twin children, has had a fling or started a relationship with another character. It reminded me of those old 60's movies where everyone ends up with a different partner by the end of the movie. Entertaining and easy to read. Not sure if I missed some deeper significance to this book (i.e. why it was 'list' worthy??). I wouldn't give it rave recommendations, but ok for a light read.
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LibraryThing member aitastaes
The central narrative of the novel is set in motion by the death of Radeechy, a civil servant who has apparently committed suicide in his office at work, but without leaving any suicide note. Since Radeechy had access to classified information, the head of the office, Octavian Gray, assigns his
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subordinate John Ducane to investigate the death, and confirm that there is no security risk. Ducane is a talented, dedicated man, but one with a streak of “strict low church Glaswegian Protestantism,” which left him with “a devil of pride, a stiff Calvinistic Scottish devil, who was quite capable of bringing Ducane to utter damnation” (78). Of course, Radeechy’s suicide will turn out to be a complex matter, and the plot is quite engaging. Several times while reading I spontaneously muttered “Oh no,” out loud. But this is really a novel of characters, driven by the web of personal relationships that radiate out from Ducane and Octavian. As in any great novel, the characters just seem “right.” They are more real than real people, the way Sherlock Holmes or Michael Corleone seem to us. There is no easy way to summarize the cast of characters without sounding breathless, so bear with me for a moment.

Octavian and his wife Kate are wealthy, with a small estate in the countryside outside London. Ducane is, in addition to being Octavian’s subordinate at work, a family friend, so he often visits the Gray household, which supports a menagerie of people. (One of the aspects of the novel that makes it intriguing for American readers is seeing a mode of life that we have no analogue for, and that perhaps no longer exists in England either.) A family friend, Mary Clothier, lives at the house and helps out, almost like a servant. She is a widow, and is in love with Willy Kost, a Holocaust survivor who lives in a cottage, away from the main house. However, Willy seems too emotionally damaged to reciprocate Mary’s love. Mary’s son, Pierce, has grown up in the house. Pierce is infatuated with Barbara, the daughter of Octavian and Kate. She has just returned from finishing school in Switzerland, having blossomed into a nubile young lady, but she treats Pierce with callous disdain. At some level, Barbara realizes that she is being cruel to Pierce, but she is having trouble navigating the loss of innocence that becoming an adult entails: “When I was younger, when I read in the papers and in books and things about really nasty people, bad people, I felt so completely good and innocent inside myself, I felt that these people were just utterly different from me, that I could never become bad or behave really badly like them. …I’m afraid it’s all turning out to be much more difficult than I expected” (63). Another frequent visitor to the Gray household is Paula, a brilliant classicist who has a pair of preternaturally bright, pre-pubescent twins, Edward and Henrietta. Paula is divorced from Richard Biranne, who works in the same office with Octavian and Ducane. Biranne is known to be a rake, so everyone assumes that Paula divorced him. In fact, Biranne’s vices were part of his appeal to Paula: “Chaste Paula, cool Paula, bluestocking Paula, had found in her husband’s deviously lecherous nature a garden of undreamt delights” (147). The cause for the divorce was actually Paula’s affair with another man, Eric Sears, which ended so disastrously that Eric fled the country. But Eric has written that he is coming back. Paula does not want him to return, and she is now in a whirlwind of uncertainty about how to deal with him.

Ducane himself is pursuing a relationship with Kate Gray. This relationship is not an affair as we would think of it, though. It is more like a Platonic love in the truest sense of that term, and the two never do more than kiss: “The wonderful thing about Kate was that she was unattainable; and this was what was to set him free forever” (104). Moreover, Octavian is fully aware of Ducane’s relationship with his wife. In fact, we learn that Kate and Octavian are titillated by her flirtations with other men, so much so that discussing it is part of their foreplay. Ducane’s relationship with Kate is complicated by the fact that Ducane himself has been trying to end a relationship with Jessica, an art teacher much younger than himself. Jessica’s “integrity took the form of a contempt for the fixed, the permanent, the solid, in general ‘the old’, a contempt which, as she grew older herself, became a sort of deep fear. So it was that some poor untutored craving in her for the Absolute, for that which after all is most fixed, most permanent, most solid and most old, had to express itself incognito” (84). Ducane became for her that Absolute, and she loves him to the point of idolatry. However, Ducane does not reciprocate her love. Ducane himself is, in many ways, a good man, but he faces “one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely that in order to become good it may be necessary to imagine oneself good, and yet such imagining may also be the very thing which renders improvement impossible either because of surreptitious complacency or because of some deeper blasphemous infection which is set up when goodness is thought about in the wrong way” (77). Well, that will do for now. There are more characters, but the preceding are most of the important ones, and the others I cannot explain without giving away plot points.

As its title suggests, one of the themes of the novel is the distinction between being nice and being good. Ironically, even though the setting of the story is so quintessentially English, this particular theme is an especially important lesson for us Americans to learn. Someone once said that the true religions of the American people are optimism and denial. We so often confuse being “positive,” “nonjudgmental,” “easy to get along with” – in a word, “nice” – with being a good person. But the two are not in any way the same. Kate is very nice, but that niceness has an intrinsic element of falsity. Ducane says, “Her idea is that our relationship is to be simple and sunny, and simple and sunny I must faithfully make it to be” (138). If the Devil exists, he is no doubt very nice: all the better to seduce us into wrongdoing. Good people, in contrast, are sometimes gruff, sometimes blunt, sometimes cruel in order to be kind. (Contrast the television characters House and Chase. Which is a nicer person? Which is a better person?) Murdoch also teaches us that to be good is not to be perfect. Willy Kost rebuffs Barbara’s request to tutor her: his motive is good, but it is good because he is aware he must protect her, and himself, from other motives that are not good (182-185).

If there is any flaw in this jewel of a novel, it is that its ultimate conclusion is perhaps overly sanguine. This might sound like a strange critique of a novel so focused on human frailty in the face of temptation. The novel is filled with dalliances. Sometimes they have catastrophic consequences, but one is left with a sense that this is inevitable, and everything will turn out fine as long as we forgive each other: “All we can do is constantly notice when we begin to act badly, to check ourselves, to go back, to coax our weakness and inspire our strength, to call upon the names of virtues of which we know perhaps only the names. We are not good people, and the best we can hope for is to be gentle, to forgive each other and to forgive the past, to be forgiven ourselves and to accept this forgiveness, and to return again to the beautiful unexpected strangeness of the world” (198-199). We humans are just as weak, and forgiveness just as beautiful as the novel suggests, but one wonders whether these truths have become rationalizations that are ultimately enervating. As Willy warns someone, “…in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell” (283). (Murdoch’s own personal life perhaps illustrates this danger. See the moving film Iris [2001].)

One of the wonderful things about Murdoch was her openness to religious traditions as sources of spiritual inspiration, whether one is a believer or not. So it is not out of place to end this review by recalling that Jesus saves the adulteress from being stoned to death by challenging the crowd, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” (the forgiveness that comes with love). But let us also not forget that his final words to her are, “Go, and sin no more” (the strictness that comes with the law).
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LibraryThing member quondame
What a slog. Kate and Octavian have collected at their home in Dorset Theo, Octavian's older brother, Mary Kate's school friend who looks after the house, Paula Kate's school friend divorced from one Octavian's co-workers, John who works for Octavian and is in love with Kate, Willy who lives in a
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cottage remote from the house and is broken from his time in Dachau. Livening the place up are Paula's twins, and glooming about is Mary's son Pierce pining after the just returned from finishing Barbra, Kate and Octavian's daughter. During a long hot summer they sort themselves in a tedious pavane. Love, good, and evil are mentioned constantly equally with regard fooling about killing pigeons over naked whores and routine sexual peccadilloes and really at the end one feels it could go on forever with the readjusted alignments, but in the rain rather than the sunshine.
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LibraryThing member arubabookwoman
First line: "A head of department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the nearby and indubitable sound of a revolver shot."

Last line: " Hand in hand the children began to run homeward through the soft warm drizzle."

"He saw himself
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as a little rat, a busy little scurrying rat seeking out its own little advantages and comforts. To live easily, to have cosy familiar pleasures, to be well thought of."

I always feel I should read more Iris Murdoch than I have. I've started and abandoned more books by Iris Murdoch than I care to remember, though I'm not sure why. And for a while, it looked like this one was going to be another abandonment. It probably took me close to a month to read the first 150-200 pages, and I was having to force myself to pick the book up. But then it took hold of me (finally!), and in the end I quite enjoyed it.

The book was described as being one in which a senior civil servant is given the task of investigating the death of another senior civil servant to determine whether it was actually a suicide as it appeared to be. This description intrigued me, and perhaps I was expecting the book to be more plot-driven, more of a mystery. However, this investigation mostly takes place in the background.

After the opening scene with the gunshot (See First line above) the setting moves to the Cornwall coast to the estate of the head of the department, Octavian. There are so many residents there, many of them females, including friends of his wife who came to visit and stayed on, that Octavian himself often refers to them as his "harem." Octavian's wife Kate is carrying on a flirtation with Duncane, another senior civil servant in Octavian's department who often accompanies Octavian down to Cornwall. Octavian is well-aware of the flirtation, and in fact he and Kate often discuss it. For his part, unknown to Kate and Octavian, Duncane is involved in a love affair with Jessica, which he is tired of and desperately trying to end. Duncane is the person Octavian has appointed to investigate the suicide, and to the extent there is one, Duncane is the central character of the novel.

Others living on the estate include Paula Biranne, an academic and the divorced wife of Richard Biranne, another civil servant in Octavian's department. She, and her 9 year old twins Edward and Henrietta, who sometimes see UFOs, came to stay 4 years ago and are still there. Another friend of Kate's who resides there is Mary, who is a widow. Mary is not a servant (that would be Casie), but she does keep the household on track, as Kate is a bit scatterbrained. Mary's 15 year old son Pierce also lives there when he is not away at school. Barbara, Kate and Octavian's teenage daughter is also resident when not at school.

In addition, Octavian's brother Uncle Theo, who has returned from India under a cloud no one talks about lives there, although he mostly stays upstairs in bed, with the companionship of Mingo the dog. And, in a small cottage on the estate Willy, a European refugee from Dachau lives.

All of these characters, and others, are introduced very early in the book, and they are all talking at, to, and about each other. Perhaps one of my difficulties with the book was keeping track of who was who, because they all sounded pretty much alike, in a British upper crust way. But in the end, there's a lot that happens here, from black mail to black magic to a near drowning, all interspersed between lots of philosophical discussions and musings. Overall, it convinced me that, yes, I do need to read more Iris Murdoch.

4 stars
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LibraryThing member edwinbcn
What makes the early novels of Iris Murdoch challenging to is the abundance of major and minor characters. Moreover, the reader should not only remember who all these characters are, and what is special about them, but also their relations with the other characters in the novel. Meanwhile, these
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relations can be very varied, familial relations, sexual relations across gender and sex, friendship, and these relations existing in all colours and flavours. In many ways, The nice and the good, published in 1968, is typical for its time.

In fact, the plot of The nice and the good is fairly straighforward, although it seems many of the details are open to interpretation and ambiguous. In the end it is very difficult for John Ducane to reconstruct what has happened, and what role was played by each of the people involved in the drama.

At a higher level, the characters in the novel all play out certain roles, and their roles change under given circumstances and the willingness of the other characters to engage. Once the other characters do engage, they adopt changing roles and their perception or experience of the situation changes. At the same time, the play-act in each situation is easily broken when one of the actors refuses to play their role.

As a thinker and a novelist, Iris Murdoch is profoundly interested in Plato. In The nice and the good and important chapter describes an episode in a cave. Earlier in the story, this cave is described as a place of immense potential, possibly a treasure. However, rather than a warm, and safe womb, the cave turns out to be a death trap. This chapter emphasizes that things are not what they seem to be, and the same is true for almost all people and all their relations in The nice and the good. They are not so nice and good, but rather sinister.
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LibraryThing member edwinbcn
What makes the early novels of Iris Murdoch challenging to is the abundance of major and minor characters. Moreover, the reader should not only remember who all these characters are, and what is special about them, but also their relations with the other characters in the novel. Meanwhile, these
Show More
relations can be very varied, familial relations, sexual relations across gender and sex, friendship, and these relations existing in all colours and flavours. In many ways, The nice and the good, published in 1968, is typical for its time.

In fact, the plot of The nice and the good is fairly straighforward, although it seems many of the details are open to interpretation and ambiguous. In the end it is very difficult for John Ducane to reconstruct what has happened, and what role was played by each of the people involved in the drama.

At a higher level, the characters in the novel all play out certain roles, and their roles change under given circumstances and the willingness of the other characters to engage. Once the other characters do engage, they adopt changing roles and their perception or experience of the situation changes. At the same time, the play-act in each situation is easily broken when one of the actors refuses to play their role.

As a thinker and a novelist, Iris Murdoch is profoundly interested in Plato. In The nice and the good and important chapter describes an episode in a cave. Earlier in the story, this cave is described as a place of immense potential, possibly a treasure. However, rather than a warm, and safe womb, the cave turns out to be a death trap. This chapter emphasizes that things are not what they seem to be, and the same is true for almost all people and all their relations in The nice and the good. They are not so nice and good, but rather sinister.
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Awards

Booker Prize (Longlist — 1969)

Language

Barcode

10644
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