The black prince.

"Really, Bradley, you seem to be living in some sort of literary dream. Everything is so much duller and more mixed-up than you imagine. Even the awful things are."

Bradley can't quite write that important book that he thinks he has in him. He can't quite perform as a lover in the way he imagines he should. He believes art and love and life must be excruciatingly difficult and excruciatingly emotional if they are to have value. He imagines that his thoughts are more profound than those around him, and writes books that don't get published, but nevertheless are truly "art," --unlike those of his bestselling and prolific author friend Arnold--simply because of the time and emotion he invests in his work. Publishing is not the point, right?

Most alarmingly, he imagines at the age of 58 that he is in love with Arnold's 20 year old daughter and pursues (preys on?) her. They escape to a rented cottage by the beach and there is a sexual encounter that seems to be rape: "I strode to her and took her wrist and pulled her into the bedroom and tumbled her on the bed...I put one knee on the bed and began to drag at her white shirt."Wait, wait, you're tearing it!...I began hauling down the black tights dragging them over her thighs...'Oh Bradley, please don't be so rough...' " etc., etc., and afterwards he has no understanding of what he's done. Characteristically he places the act into an unreal literary context and makes it all about himself: " 'What made you like that, Bradley?' 'The Prince of Denmark, I suppose.' ... What had made me like that?...The fury, the anger, was directed to myself through Julian and through myself. Yet of course this fury was love too, the power itself of the god, mad and alarming. 'It was love,' I said to her." And he believes it. With zero concern for Julian or recognition that he had hurt her. It is a hard passage to read.

In fact, the women are generally not treated well by the male characters. The book opens with a call from Arnold to Bradley saying that he thinks he has killed his wife. Only she's not dead, but beaten within an inch of her life. Yet the two men are cavalier about what happened, and even his wife eventually decides it wasn't a big deal. Murdoch was generally supportive of the independence of women, if not an avowed feminist, and I can't get a sense of her purpose in the way she drew her female characters.

This is a challenging book. Murdoch is a very good writer with a philosophical bent and there are long passages about art and love and human consciousness that are brilliant but not easy to absorb. She carefully constructs the story and places a fictional, non-fiction memoir within her novel. There are fictional forewords by the editor and Bradley, and postscripts by several of the characters and the editor again. And despite the dark events and tone there is a subtle humor that is pervasive and makes the narrative a kind of satire, especially of writers and editors.

All of the narrators, both the primary narrator, Bradley Pearson, and his acquaintances who write postscripts after the publication of his book, are astonishingly unreliable. None seem to be self-aware. In fact, it's impossible to discover the truth about any of them. And that I suppose is the point. Murdoch asks what truth is: in art, in love, and in life. She makes it clear that it is often very hard to tell.

It was tough going there for a while, with an unsympathetic narrator who was interested only in himself and might well be shading his memoir to paint himself in the best possible light.  He very much put me in mind of Lolita's Humbert Humbert - an unreliable narrator.  And that was before the Roshomon-like postscripts, where the surviving characters each gave their own version of the events, and you're left to pick and choose which 'truth' to believe.