Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsBeautiful language, difficult story
Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2012
Iris Murdoch wrote beautifully, although her subject matter often involved difficult or horrible struggles for the characters. «A Word Child» is written and constructed in this mode. A working class boy and his sister hope to find salvation from their horrible childhood circumstances as orphans through the talent for languages that the boy discovers rather late in school. However, this late blooming is not too late to keep the boy, Hilary, from admission to Oxford University, where he performs extremely well and is offered a position. The first year of his fellowship is the highest point of their lives for both Hilary and his sister Crystal. It will not be matched ever again. A violent, angry streak, coupled with a complete void of love in his life except where his sister is concerned, lead to tragedy for the young man, loss of his job, and a life of oblivion in small, mindless positions. The book describes this prehistory in flashbacks, while living in «the present,» where Hilary is a clerk and civil service employee. Hilary is unquestionably odd, with a tendency to cruelties of the minor kind, though these cruelties certainly add up for those on the receiving end. Hilary controls all aspects of his interactions with others in a manner that seems related to mild autism (but I’m not professionally qualified to diagnose the symptoms). His facility for languages is undiminished, but his financial circumstances are not far above dire, and he has no real friends.
The comforting dullness of the life of penance that Hilary has chosen for himself is shattered when the very man whom he betrayed, his former mentor at Oxford named Gunnar, is announced as the new head of Hilary’s Civil Service Department. Gunnar has led a successful life and is financially secure, with a beautiful and wealthy socialite for a wife. However, we learn over time, that Gunnar has been haunted as much as Hilary by the earlier tragedy, though the past did not stop Gunnar from aggressively pursuing a career in business after he, too, left academia.
The attempts at avoidance and reconciliation between the men end up in a second tragedy that parallels the first. I did not find the plot to be fully credible here, but the writing never lost its charm as the train wreck took place, largely in slow motion like the violence in a Sam Peckinpah film Sam Peckinpah’s Legendary Westerns Collection (The Wild Bunch / Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid / Ride the High Country / The Ballad of Cable Hogue).
I’ve not revealed any significant details, in case you want to discover them by reading the book. This is not the most tragic or horrifying story one could imagine, but it is a tale of how old envies from childhood never allow Hilary to fit into any society, the different ways in which tragedy can destroy a man, and how Hilary’s remarkable control over everyone else in his life does not extend to himself. If the plot maintained its early credibility throughout, this would be a five-star book. The language is always five-star. The transfer to Kindle had some major errors of typography, but nothing I couldn’t figure out. It was pleasant to be able to Google text if I needed a translation of a foreign phrase or the origin of a quote.
Highly recommended, but not if you object to reading about the normal components of human existence, like a little sex.
Well it was going to happen, wasn’t it … I’ve found so much more to like in some of my less-favoured Murdoch novels and then, having been looking forward to this one, I was a bit, not disappointed as sucb, but surprised that I remembered such a horrible central character so fondly!
I’ve been away on my hols, hence the rather odd selection of reading matter in the last two reviews, so here you have an image of what I’d call “Extreme Iris Murdoch reading” – sat in the middle of a lava field in Fuerteventura (that’s my husband heading off to look for some birds).
If you’re doing the readalong or even selected books along with me Or some time afterwards, do share how you’re getting on and which have been your favourites so far.
Iris Murdoch – “A Word Child”
(31 December 2018)
So I remembered Hilary Burde as a gente, slightly shambliing, slight figure, for no discernible reason at all, rather than a big bruiser who keeps bashing women and frightening them. Why, I’m really not sure, as all the information is given to us in the book. We gradually come to realise Hilary is a man who keeps to a strict routine and regime in order to stave off madness, caused partly by his accidental – or not – killing of his friend Gunnar’s wife, with whom he was having an affair. So he has different days for different friends, keeps everything compartmentalised, hates his office-mates, worships his sister, tolerates her suitor Arthur, and puts up with his fey lodger, Christopher. Then a mysterious woman called Biscuit starts following him around and he finds out through office gossip that Gunnar is back … with a new wife.
It is a savagely funny book in that the repetitions and echoings and patterns come with a sort of black irony. The office scenes are brilliant and just right and of course I love Hilary’s circlings of the Circle Line (what a true tragedy it is that the platform bars have long gone and you can’t even go right round on the Circle Line any more!). The theme is set on page 4: “There was nothing here to love” – Hilary has no love in his life and rebuffs any that tries to form. This circles back at the end: “I had almost systematically destroyed his respect and affection and finally driven him away” (p. 387)
Is there an enchanter? Is it Hilary himself, with whom Gunnar and Lady Kitty are obsessed, who he admits three women want him to arrange for them to have children, two with him, and who inspires love? Only Christopher seems to escape him. And surely Christopher is our saint, accepting violence with meekness and being kind (although Jimbo is also an agent of positivity and attention with his taxis and presents. Are we saying the young are going to save the world?). He’s described as being Christ-like at one point. Mr Osmund also gives Hilary his full attention so is perhaps a Saint figure, as is patient and unworldly Arthur Fisch, who absorbs Hilary’s terrible story (although Hilary tries not to pass on his second love to Crystal, she’s still bothered by an atmosphere between them, so it clearly hasn’t worked). Arthur’s is also a “muddler” with a lot of lame ducks, reminding us of Tallis and just as humble: “I think we should just be kind to each other” (p. 87) and, later, “I think one should try to stick to simplicity and truth” (p. 290). Hilary describes him as the perfect IM saint:
Arthur was a little untalented unambitious man, destined to spend his life in a cupboard, but there was in a quite important sense no harm in him. He was kind, guileless, harmless and he had had the wit to love Crystal, to see Crystal, to see her value. (p. 287)
Tommy owns the crowded room full of knick-knacks that has to exist in every book. Clifford has a more refined version with Indian miniatures and tiny bookcases. Hilary gives Biscuit a black pebble which she later flings back at him. For water, we have the endless rain and dripping umbrellas, and of course the Thames as well as the Serpentine and Boating Lake. There’s no pursuit in the dark or standing in gardens looking through into houses, but Hilary does chase Biscuit down the Bayswater Road. In terms of siblings, we have Hilary and Crystal, but Clifford also had a sister, who died. Hair isn’t such a big theme but Laura has an unsuitably flowing grey mane, Biscuit a long black plait Kitty sophisticated brown layers and Crystal a frizzy fuzz last seen in “Sacred and Profane”.
A new theme coming through seems to be the quest, which Hilary talks of on p. 200: “I now had a task. I was like a Knight with a quest. I needed my chastity now; I needed my aloneness”. The feeling of feuds and owing, when Hilary says, “I owe Gunnar a child” reminds me of “The Green Knight” and brings the patterning into sharp relief. There’s one of IM’s horrible prefigurings when Hilary is talking to Kitty on the jetty – “I felt now as if I were plunging around in the mud” (p. 243) and one that could be from “A Severed Head”: “Powers which I had offended were gathering to destroy me” (p. 323).
The humour is there, but savage as I said: “Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best” (p. 16) feels like a good example. IM is funny about Christopher’s happenings and has Hilary be hilariously vile about Tommy’s knitting, which she does because he once said he liked it, but makes him want to vomit.
In echoes with other books, there’s yet another set of telephone entrails (“The Black Prince” and “A Fairly Honourable Defeat” have them and I’m sure there are more in “The Book and the Brotherhood”). The parks of London of course echo several other books, as does the leap into the Thames at the end. Hilary’s three women demanding babies, echo Edgar’s three women planning to visit at he end of “The Sacred and Profane Love Machine”.
What will become of Hilary at the end? Without a set of fake epilogues to contain him, this latest first-person narrator seems to drift away from us in this stranger than I remember book.
Is it shocking that Hilary is only 41? Yes, a bit: this is the first time I’ve been older than quite a few of the characters I’ve always known as being older than me, and maybe this has reduced my tolerance. The sense of place, though, is as I remembered, and eminently traceable. I’ve been noticing bits of running in the books and here we have Hilary in the parks, “I ran, and was cleansed of myself. I was a heart pumping, a body moving. I had cleaned a piece of the world of the filth of my consciousness” (p. 26).
Please either place your review in the comments, discuss mine or others’, or post a link to your review if you’ve posted it on your own blog, Goodreads, etc. I’d love to know how you’ve got on with this book and if you read it having read others of Murdoch’s novels or this was a reread, I’d love to hear your specific thoughts on those aspects, as well as if it’s your first one!
If you’re catching up or looking at the project as a whole, do take a look at the project page, where I list all the blog posts so far.
PS I should have added this – this was also read for Reading Ireland Month as IM identified as being of Irish descent and Cathy always lets me include her (read about it at 746 Books here).
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Recommendations from our site
“This novel comes from her most renowned period, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, when she was producing almost a novel a year. All of them were very well received and very well reviewed. A Word Child is not unlike The Black Prince in the sense that it’s based around this one rather odd man called Hilary Burde, a repressed creature who we find out has had a difficult childhood, but has a brilliant mind.” Read more…
The Best Iris Murdoch Books
Miles Leeson,
Literary Scholar
There is an inescapable air of casuistry about Murdoch’s plots: it’s not hard to imagine her as a 17th-century Jesuit or…
A WORD CHILD
by Iris Murdoch
‧
RELEASE DATE: Aug. 18, 1975
There is an inescapable air of casuistry about Murdoch’s plots: it’s not hard to imagine her as a 17th-century Jesuit or Jansenist, settling suppositious moral hashes with the most enviable certainty. Here, in one of her rare first person narratives, she gives us Hilary Burde, a fortyish civil servant whose rages and obsessions stem partly from the hideously deprived Calvinist childhood he escaped through a talent for languages, partly from the inexpiable horror of having caused the death of another man’s wife—an event which ended his promising Oxford career and sent him into a decade of grotesque self-thwarting. Gunnar, the wronged widower, reappears remarried but as paralyzed as Hilary by the events of twenty years ago. Through the agency of an unfathomable half-Indian servant, Gunnar’s second wife begins an equivocal intrigue with Hilary on the pretext of getting Gunnar to come to terms with his feelings about Hilary and Anne’s death. The moral imperatives of the developing situation are perceived in contradictory terms by Hilary and his small circle of confederates: a persistent, half-wanted mistress; a placid co-worker and his effusively solicitous wife; a rancorous homosexual friend; the beautiful and mysterious servant; his unpresentable but adored sister and her humbly devoted fiance. Murdoch gives us all the machinery, and then some, for a casus conscientiae of the most perverse, contradictory, and surreal complexity—in a subjectively perceived, post-Christian universe where moral impasses obstinately continue to exist and to have consequences, but no canon law can help us predict them. The familiar Murdochian materials are all here, but the sum total is less than a resounding triumph. One can see themes and motifs being applied to events like traction to an elbow; the first person narrative often seems like a have-your-cake-and-eat-it compromise between limited fictional point of view and free rein for desired stylistic effects. (On the other hand, Hilary’s compulsion for scheduling gives the book a neat, obvious, and effective structure.) Murdoch cannot be less than maddeningly challenging, but one puts this down feeling that only some of the goods have been delivered.
Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1975
ISBN: 1453201114
Page Count: —
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: N/A
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1975