Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
London : Vintage, 2000.
Subjects
Original publication date
1983
ISBN
009928359X / 9780099283591
Local notes
inscription: I first discovered Quakers through this CAE Book Discussion book in 1990. Prior to this date I had not known of Friends. Presented to Victoria Friends Centre by Carol Holden 2017
Description
In the English town of Ennistone, hot springs bubble up from deep beneath the earth. In these healing waters the townspeople seek health and regeneration, rightousness and ritual cleansing. To this town steeped in ancient lore and subterranean inspiration the Philosopher returns. He exerts an almost magical influence over a host of Ennistonians, and especially over George McCaffrey, the Philosopher's old pupil, a demonic man desperate for redemption.
User reviews
LibraryThing member LizzieD
What to say? What to say? I absolutely decline to follow IM's tantalizing paths through philosophical, symbolic, thematic wildernesses in The Philosopher's Pupil. A person could get lost. I do look forward to discussions of this book, my favorite Iris Murdoch, in the biographies that I plan to
Told by an observant narrator, N who steps into the story from time to time, the book is set in Ennistown (Get it?), an English village with a restructured circle of standing stones and a very active hot spring. The whole town is crazy for swimming, and this is a very watery book. If people are not swimming at the baths, they are at the ocean or it is raining or about to rain or the rain is just stopping. There are suggestions of baptisms of one kind and another and one rescue from drowning and one death, maybe. Tom, the archetypal Fool, goes underground to find the Source of the springs and returns to the surface a man able to act decisively. And there you have a hint of the complexities that I refuse to follow one step further.
Well. The story revolves around the McCaffrey family: brothers George and Brian, their wives and mother and their half-brother Tom and Brian's son Adam. George is a wild man whose attempted murder (or maybe not) of his wife Stella opens the book; Brian, something of a nonentity, is married to Gabriel, who is fascinated by George. Into this seething mix of relationships returns John Robert Rozanov, the philosopher of the title, who has ruined George's life by ending their teacher-student relationship. Alex, their mother, would like to explore a relationship of her own with John Robert, who had married her college friend to her own great disgust. John Robert rents the Slipper House, a sort of live-in folly on the McCaffrey property, but to Alex's disappointment he plans to install his granddaughter and her companion there rather than live in it himself. The companion, Pearl, is sister - or is it cousin? - to Alex's own companion and servant Ruby and George's mistress, Diane (originally Diamond).
This begins, and only begins, to describe the widening net of characters who twine and intertwine in a mosh of emotions and intellect gone mad. IM must have had so much fun writing this. The plot twists are over the top; I shrieked, "Oh NO, you didn't!" more than once before dissolving in helpless laughter. On the other hand, as always, IM is examining the nature of Good and religion and non-religion, so this has to be a serious work, right? Whatever it is, it will bear rereading and thinking on. I'll do both.
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read. I might even pick up some general criticism.Told by an observant narrator, N who steps into the story from time to time, the book is set in Ennistown (Get it?), an English village with a restructured circle of standing stones and a very active hot spring. The whole town is crazy for swimming, and this is a very watery book. If people are not swimming at the baths, they are at the ocean or it is raining or about to rain or the rain is just stopping. There are suggestions of baptisms of one kind and another and one rescue from drowning and one death, maybe. Tom, the archetypal Fool, goes underground to find the Source of the springs and returns to the surface a man able to act decisively. And there you have a hint of the complexities that I refuse to follow one step further.
Well. The story revolves around the McCaffrey family: brothers George and Brian, their wives and mother and their half-brother Tom and Brian's son Adam. George is a wild man whose attempted murder (or maybe not) of his wife Stella opens the book; Brian, something of a nonentity, is married to Gabriel, who is fascinated by George. Into this seething mix of relationships returns John Robert Rozanov, the philosopher of the title, who has ruined George's life by ending their teacher-student relationship. Alex, their mother, would like to explore a relationship of her own with John Robert, who had married her college friend to her own great disgust. John Robert rents the Slipper House, a sort of live-in folly on the McCaffrey property, but to Alex's disappointment he plans to install his granddaughter and her companion there rather than live in it himself. The companion, Pearl, is sister - or is it cousin? - to Alex's own companion and servant Ruby and George's mistress, Diane (originally Diamond).
This begins, and only begins, to describe the widening net of characters who twine and intertwine in a mosh of emotions and intellect gone mad. IM must have had so much fun writing this. The plot twists are over the top; I shrieked, "Oh NO, you didn't!" more than once before dissolving in helpless laughter. On the other hand, as always, IM is examining the nature of Good and religion and non-religion, so this has to be a serious work, right? Whatever it is, it will bear rereading and thinking on. I'll do both.
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LibraryThing member LyzzyBee
Bought 30 Dec 1994
Iris Murdoch is at the height of her powers in this wonderful portrait of Ennistone, the spa town that goes a bit mad every now and then. Full of linked characters and families (making it reminiscent of Middlemarch in my opinion) and with the excellent invisible narrator N, this
Iris Murdoch is at the height of her powers in this wonderful portrait of Ennistone, the spa town that goes a bit mad every now and then. Full of linked characters and families (making it reminiscent of Middlemarch in my opinion) and with the excellent invisible narrator N, this
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is my favourite IM novel still, I think. I have re-read this one a number of times and remembered it well, wlthough I had events in a slightly different order. Show Less
LibraryThing member MiserableLibrarian
John Robert Rozanov is a philosopher from the small town of Ennistone, an English town noted for its healing hot spring and spa. The McCaffrey family is connected in strange ways to the eccentric philosopher, and George is the obsessed former pupil of Rozanov. It’s a bit of a rambling tale, as
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the McCaffreys and Rozanov dance around their shared issues of love and family and admiration. As the somewhat omniscient narrator, N observes that “we are mostly narcissists, and only in a few, not always with felicitious results, is narcissism overcome (broken, crushed, annihilated, nothing less will serve) by religious discipline or psycho-analysis.” Show Less
LibraryThing member hugh_ashton
Re-read this book for the first time in a couple of years. The setting is a slightly fantastical one, slightly not of the world we live in – a middle-class community with its own fads and fetishes, where everyone knows everyone else. The plot is excellent, if a little contrived at the end.
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Murdoch manages to get inside the heads of her characters, male and female, to an incredibly detailed extent, and it's possible to believe in them all, though none of them is "normal". The jarring note is the dialogue, which tends towards an over-analytical pedantic philosophical style, even when no philosophy is being directly discussed. Show Less
LibraryThing member NaggedMan
One of Murdoch's best works, the characters, though unbelievable, are real and alive. Nothing much happens but everything matters and one doesn't want it to end.
LibraryThing member thorold
Opening in the spirit of Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? and closing with a kind of pastiche murder-mystery, this late-Murdoch romp is set in a claustrophobically-fictitious small town (think Barchester-Middlemarch-Tilling, but in the 1980s and with a spa) where all social life seems to revolve
Brain-bending and entertaining at the same time, it reminded me very strongly - but anachronistically - of one of my favourite Murdoch-inspired novelists, Patrick Gale. This is so exactly the novel Murdoch would have written if she'd wanted to do a pastiche of Gale: complete with LGBT interest, Quaker meeting, music, and modern art. All that's lacking is a prison and a mention of Cornwall...!
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around Murdoch's favourite pastime, swimming. And, as you would expect, it's populated with larger than life characters who are all locked into terrible existential tangles which the reader is neither allowed to take completely seriously, nor to dismiss out of hand. Brain-bending and entertaining at the same time, it reminded me very strongly - but anachronistically - of one of my favourite Murdoch-inspired novelists, Patrick Gale. This is so exactly the novel Murdoch would have written if she'd wanted to do a pastiche of Gale: complete with LGBT interest, Quaker meeting, music, and modern art. All that's lacking is a prison and a mention of Cornwall...!
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LibraryThing member featherbear
What sucked me in was the opening, first, all dialog, effectively capturing the bitterness and insanity of a marital quarrel between George and Stella McCaffrey, followed by the introduction of N, the narrator-- that authorial sleight of hand, shifting abruptly from Edward Albee to Barchester
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Towers. Some elements that seem of the period (late 70s?) may require some acclimation, however: one could surely read the Stella-George relationship as a classic abuse pattern that does not seem to be acknowledged; and this is Trollope territory, not the multicultural London of Zadie Smith. The only non-Anglo characters of significance are the 3 "gipsy" sisters Ruby, Pearl, and Diamond (Diane), a maid, a companion for a schoolgirl, and a prostitute-- not treated as equals in this society. There's clearly an underlying set of ideas, symbolized by the spa machinery, but unlike Ayn Rand, Murdoch has the ability to create wacky, hilarious Dickensian characters-- the syncretic Father Bernard, the McCaffreys: Brian (George's brother) and Gabriel, Brian's classic British rudeness married to his "wet" wife who's always bursting into tears -- Alex mother of George, Brian, & Tom (callow bisexual youth). Alex has one Flora Finching turn where you see how Dickens influenced James Joyce-- George himself more of a Dostoyevsky buffoon. A virtuoso bit where the POV is from Zed, a Paris Hilton-type dog, with Zed confronting his Other, a fox. The philosopher John Robert Rozanov (who killed JRR?) a sort of loose and baggy monster with a relationship to his granddaughter Hattie (Pearl is her companion) that takes the Dickens father/daughter pattern (the Father of the Marshalsea and Little Dorrit) into something much more explicit but at the same time doesn't overdramatize the situation into a Lifetime special. The author proceeds to entangle the cast in a series of misunderstandings recalling Shakespeare comedies: twelfth night revelry, ambiguous sexuality (echoed by the assignment of "male" names to women and "female" names to men-- Emma, Alex, Gabriel), sudden reversals into aggressive rage, authority turned upside down, marriage and reconciliation, the reconciliation effected by expelling the philosopher from the world of art. A tantalizing loose end: N tells us that there are only two names known outside of Ennistone, the locale of the story: Rozanov and Ivor Sefton, a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist is alluded to throughout, but in the end never plays a part; does N deliberately exclude him by taking over the role of Ennistone's shrink? Possible negative: the amount of descriptive "irrelevant" detail may contribute to the loose and baggy impression (nearly 600 pages), but maybe consider it as part of a dialectic with the Platonic tendencies of the author: the materiality of the world holding the Idea in check, preventing it from bursting out like the boiling hot jets from Little Teaser. Show Less
LibraryThing member ivanfranko
Started reading it in Wellington and finished it in Plovdiv. A cautionary tale about the pitfalls of being a philosopher.
LibraryThing member P_S_Patrick
A novel to be thoroughly entranced and absorbed in. In many ways like Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, but set in a cross between Bath and East Grinstead. Iris Murdoch is one of those valuable rarities – someone who can write unique and momentous novels as well as philosophy, and cross pollinate
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the one with the allurements of the other. Show Less
Call number
AA MUR