Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy by Lovibond Sabina;

Author:Lovibond, Sabina; [Lovibond, Sabina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Book and the Brotherhood (1987)

The Book and the Brotherhood, which was apparently a ‘favourite novel’ of Murdoch herself,261 is another massive work with a large cast and a complicated plot. It is especially interesting for our purposes in that the central group of characters comprises both men and women, all linked – at least retrospectively – by a certain shared intellectual life. This group, aged about fifty, have known each other since undergraduate days and have for some years been financing another member of their Oxford circle, David Crimond, to write a ‘long quasi-philosophical book’,262 which will also be a work of political theory: Crimond is a Marxist, an ascetic figure absolutely dedicated to his cause and his work, though by the time the story begins he is ‘the only one of their group who [retains] the extreme left-wing idealism which they had once shared’.263 The friends are collectively pretty well off, have omitted to set a time-limit for Crimond, don’t know how he is getting on, and find it difficult to ask, since they are no longer on the right sort of footing with him.

The composition of the ‘court’ of leading characters in this novel repays further analysis. There is in effect a group within the group, consisting of three men – the brotherhood proper, as it were. These three – Gerard, Jenkin and Duncan – all read Greats at the same college and all got firsts, as Murdoch spells out for us.264 Crimond was at the college too and, we may infer, also read Greats, since we are told later that he ‘retained his Latin and Greek and often opened books of classical poetry’, as well as having been ‘a very able philosophy student’.265 (Unlike the other men, Crimond is known by his surname and Murdoch, who tells this story in the third person, never occupies his point of view.) Then there are two women: Jean, also an Oxford graduate, who read history (though we don’t learn this until some way into the book)266 and is married to Duncan; and Rose, who studied English literature and French at Edinburgh.267 Rose is connected with the group because she went to school with Jean, and because her brother Sinclair was also at the crucial Oxford college and was one of the male group, indeed was the lover of Gerard (who is gay, though that is still not a standard Murdoch word). Sinclair died young in an accident, after which Gerard had a brief (and anomalous) fling with Rose, who has been hopelessly in love with him ever since and has wasted her life on him (or rather: ‘Sometimes she thought, I’ve wasted my life on this man’,268 but we are shown no real reason to disagree). Jean too has a double sexual connection to the male group, since she has a passionate extra-marital love affair with Crimond, comprising one episode which we hear about in flashback and another which takes place during the action of the book.

Murdoch clearly does

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