Conradi - Iris Murdoch: a life

When Iris was asked which contemporary writers she thought would be read in fifty years, she would wisely answer that we cannot know: during the 1930s everyone had thought Charles Morgan a major writer and Evelyn Waugh minor. Time upset both judgements. The philosopher Charles Taylor similarly wrote of Iris that summing up her contribution is impossible. Her achievement is much too rich, and we are much too close to it. Of all the post-war English novelists she has the greatest intellectual range, the deepest rigour.

Iris studied power as deeply as love, and wrote well on both. She had important things to say about desire in human life and its relationship with goodness. She explored the rivalry between men, and the Oedipal conflict between strong-willed mothers and their Nietzschean offspring. She could capture those moments of startled vision when we see our world without preconception, could describe the ordinary and make it magical. Above all, she kept the traditional novel alive, and in so doing, changed what it is capable of. She made out of a mixture of love-romance and spiritual adventure-story a vehicle capable of commenting on modern society. She was not the heir as she early and wrongly imagined to George Eliot, but to Dostoevsky, with his fantastic realism, his hectically compressed time-schemes, his obsessions with sado-masochism and with incipient moral anarchy. Her best novels combine Dostoevsky with Shakespearian romance and love-comedy: combining myth with realism, these will last. Like all major writers Iris Murdoch invented a unique yet recognisable world, with its own logic and its own poetry.

Plotting in Dickens and Henry James is largely a matter of sentimental and melodramatic contrivance: Iriss life seems more improbably packed with strange coincidence than her own plots, and one aim of this biography has been to suggest how intensely she lived, felt and engaged with the pressures of her age. She wrote Gothic twenty years before Angela Carter, and romance years before David Lodge. She helped pioneer a writing about homosexuality as merely one part of human life. It is typical of her quiet subversiveness that only the gay partnership survives in A Fairly Honourable Defeat the heterosexual relationships all fall apart under the strain of the plot. Few women novelists write with as much conviction from the point of view of male homosexuals, and no other woman writer so well impersonates men.

The posthumous inclusion of one of her poems in an anthology of Irish women poets would have given Iris pleasure. Perhaps the twin and opposed veins of fantasy and of puritanism in her owe something to her Irishness. Being Irish moreover Protestant Irish and relatively poor made of her an outsider. Her novels often picture refugees, and meditate on displacement and uprooting. What are good and evil? What is courage? How is it that a few fanatics Nazis in Weimar Germany, Communists in post-war Europe, the IRA can drive their cultures mad? As with William Golding, and perhaps Muriel Spark, the Second World War made Iris think anew about human wickedness and irrationality. If there is a common influence on both her philosophy and her fiction, it is surely Hitler. Some feeling about homelessness and exile came out of the war and its aftermath in the camps, so that the enchanters and maguses of her fiction belong on an international stage, and have always a political dimension.

Iris kept a debate about human difference alive, through the bad years when fools pretended that it did not matter, or even did not exist. Human difference also meant moral difference. How is it that some human beings are morally better than others? What is it that might make a man good Frank Thompson, or Franz Steiner even in extreme situations? How did it come about that in the epoch of greatest political evil, the century of Stalin and Hitler, moral terms had simultaneously been evacuated of any absolute significance by philosophers?

Her vision of the world as sacred looks forward to ecology and the Green movement. The Sovereignty of Good (1970), The Fire and the Sun (1976) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) have been important to theologians, to aestheticians and moral philosophers, and seem likely to remain so. She could not believe in a personal God demonic enough to have created the world whose sufferings are clear, yet she wanted religion to survive, too. She wanted Buddhism to educate Christianity, to create a non-supernatural religion. God and the afterlife were essentially anti-religious bribes to her. She breathed new life into the oldest philosophical puzzle What is a good life?'; and did so by living one herself.

Philippa Foots obituary notice for Somerville College spoke of Iriss magical goodness', and linked this with the way she combined passion and spontaneity with reserve'. Though living so deeply within herself, Iris was completely present also. She indeed connected goodness, against the temper of the times, not with the quest for an authentic identity, so much as with the happiness that can come about when that quest can be relaxed. We are lucky to have shared an appalling century with her.