Iris Murdoch, a novelist for now.

Art should not console, she thought, but shock you out of yourself.

This is the piece I wrote for last week’s Prospect culture newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. It has many good short reviews of books, films, and music, every Thursday.

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“I think I am sexually rather odd… a male homosexual in female guise,” wrote Irish Murdoch in 1967. She had, by that time, been married to the literary critic John Bayley for over a decade, who once wrote that sex was “objectively ridiculous”. Murdoch, who died 25 years ago, wrote 27 novels reflecting her unconventional life and psychology.

Many of her plots involve adultery, repression, incest, transsexuality, voyeurism. She wrote openly and sympathetically about homosexuality before it was legalised, and she took seriously those characters who appeared in drag, including in a novel set in a conservative town in the 1980s. As well as the full range of sexual preferences, Murdoch wrote about mental health, gender fluidity, aimless youth, and frustrated middle age.

She does not have as cultish a following as Martin Amis does among his generation, but Murdoch’s strange, eccentric, philosophical novels have a strong, growing audience today. Her interest in the full range of human experience is what makes those books so engrossing. Although her first novel Under the Net was published 70 years ago, she is a true novelist of our times.

Not a modernist (she had little time for Woolf and less for Ulysses, though she loved Proust), Murdoch wrote novels modelled on the great 19th-century European tradition of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot. Her subjects were modern, but her aims were classical. Murdoch often wins the praise of those who agree with her that art should entertain.

And her novels are page-turning, eye-popping, whistle-inducing swirls of misadventure. For the last few weeks, I have immersed myself in Murdoch’s work, unable to drag myself away from the fascinating darkness of The Philosopher’s Pupil, the hectic delights of A Severed Head, the darkly Shakespearean narrators of The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea. Whether in a romance such as The Sandcastle, a large moral novel such as The Good Apprentice, or in the short, intense Bruno’s Dream, Murdoch always works a page-turning plot.

But her aim was bigger than entertainment. Murdoch believed art was about the battle of good and evil. In her novels, people secretly slip drugs into their friend’s food and then leave them alone, resulting in the friend dying; her characters show indifference to the suicidal tendencies of their friends and family; they drive their wives into canals and then, having dragged them out, kick them in the ribs. Murdoch is interested in the despair and depression of love’s failures. Darkness and uncertainty are everywhere in her works.

It is often said that love is her subject, but that isn’t quite right. Murdoch is a novelist of the good. Inspired by her hero Plato—and his philosophy that Eros can lead us to goodness through an appreciation of beauty, and of the beauty within the people we love—Murdoch designed her novels, even the entertaining capers, to show us that the surface of life is a trap: lust, ego, ambition, greed, selfishness all capture us and make us prey to what she called the “fat unrelenting ego”.

What really matters, Murdoch is constantly saying, is the “otherness of the other person”. We must get outside ourselves; go through the difficult, wrenching realisation of what it really means for other people to exist. The fantasy lives in our head are morally dangerous, Murdoch warns. We must get out into the world, to other people.

Little wonder, then, that she was ambivalent about therapy. Her characters often say that therapy cannot help anyone. If they are therapists, they will often be useless or, in the memorable case of Thomas in The Good Apprentice, have lost their faith in psychotherapy altogether. Philosophers, too, are treated with suspicion, more likely to cause destruction than anything else.

Life, in all its detail, is what matters. Life is how we will be redeemed. On Murdoch’s account, therapy and philosophy pay too much attention to what we feel, to the drive to be right. Instead, to escape the “fat relentless ego”, we can turn to beauty, to love and to art. There are so many moments in Murdoch’s fiction when a character trapped by their own misery is suddenly transported—by art, by making love, by beauty—and is able to see the world beyond themselves and to start the journey to goodness.

To read Murdoch is to see the world anew. So much modern discourse seeks consolation and reassurance, two things Murdoch was opposed to. Art should not console, she thought, but shock you out of yourself.

Murdoch was more than the other writers of her time: more profound, more aware, more knowledgeable, more philosophical, more engaging, more interested in life. That is why she is such a writer for now—in a culture interested in questions of sex, self, gender and the search for meaning, few novelists can be as entertaining and enlightening as Iris Murdoch.

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This is the piece I wrote for last week’s Prospect culture newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. It has many good short reviews of books, films, and music, every Thursday.