( 5 reviews )
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Posted: Sep 22 2007
One of the best books by one of the best novelists of the 20th century. The story of the heinously bitter and unreliable Bradley Pearson is rich with complexity of character and situation. Between the bitterness and the self-justification, answers to the questions about "what really happened" become almost unknowable- the only "truth" in the book is emotional truth, which rings from every sentence. I want to reread the book now because once I understood what the main text really "was" I felt like I needed to go back and look at it all again in a completely different light
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Posted: Jan 1 2007
Try this hypothesis: the Black Prince's several authors -- Bradley Pearson plus the others who offer commentaries at the end of his work -- are all Bradley, writing as separate personalities of a full-blown psychotic. Under this hypothesis, the back-story of the novel would be that Bradley's personality was too fragile to sustain even the relatively mundane life he had built for himself. That life falls apart before the action of the novel starts: his well-adjusted wife leaves him, he retires from an orderly job at a relatively young age, he feels blocked in his attempts at writing, and he is traumatized over the approaching end of his sex life by a disappointment with a much younger woman. Under the impact of these blows, Bradley's personality cracks, and his new, multiple personality sets about doing what Bradley couldn't: writing. The novel itself -- the book that you and I read -- is what the psychotic Bradley writes. As a psychotic, he obviously can't interpret the back-story that led to his insanity: he can tell us that he lost his job and wife, etc., but he can't tell us why. Nonetheless, in his novel he starts sketching his friends and family. With his psyche out of control, however, these personages rapidly fall out of character and start acting out Bradley's conscious and unconscious wishes, sometimes to the embarrassment of this still reserved man. Nonetheless, Bradley is happier and more in control in his new world -- a world of which he is, after all, the author. So, he ultimately kills off his old self by writing about the murder of his alter ego, Arnold Baffin, a real writer who Bradley envies. (Although the narrative initially portrays Bradley as only having discovered Arnold's body, Bradley subsequently accepts responsibility for the murder when prosecutors show that he is the only logical perpetrator. Perhaps in the back-story to the novel, Bradley actually did kill Arnold as his first act of full schizophrenia.) Having killed himself off, Bradley then takes up full-time residence in the fictionalized personalities that his writer-self has adapted from real life, and he starts writing commentaries from their points of view on what he has just finished writing as Bradley. He ends his days in the prison of his own mind, and possibly in the real prison he writes about. The clues that lead to this hypothesis are both external and internal. Externally, there are the absurd, self-incriminating commentaries that end the novel and that provide the Fowles-like multiple perspectives on the narrative facts. Internally, I couldn't help feeling that all the characters speak with Bradley's voice. His skill as a writer differentiates the characters' external traits, but somehow they all become philosophers using Bradley's own erudite language to unravel the central puzzles of Bradley's own life. Too much revolves around him. Supposing that something like the above hypothesis is right, then Murdoch's task was, in a way, easy: she just had to put herself in the place of a mad ventriloquist -- Bradley. This should be no great trick for an experienced novelist! Easy or not, she pulled it off, or something much like it.
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( 3 of 10 found this review helpful ) Posted: Dec 21 2005
The Black Prince is a curious piece of work. It is completely fiction, but it uses this device in that the "publisher" is a friend of the "narrator" who has written most of the book. There are epilogues by other characters in the story and by the publisher himself at the end. Now about 90% of the book is "written" by the narrator, who obviously is a flawed man. He is immature, pompous, selfish, and probably a little mad. And on top of it, he is a flawed writer as well. He has longwinded asides about everything under the sun, and rationalizes and over-explains all his behaviour to the nth degree. Now come to think of it, I'm sure Iris Murdoch intended this to be so, ie. she intends the reader to figure out that the narrator is a flawed and pompous man and writer. But my question is, does that make a good book? It brings to mind the old one-liner: if a book that teaches failure does badly, is it a success? If the author makes the narrator a bad person, well and good, but when he is made a bad writer as well, one must howl something is amiss. This is really why the book did not work for me: I thought Murdoch's device, although very original, was snobbish and intellectual. At some point I had to stop putting up with it and say "narrator = writer => Murdoch = pompous + flawed". Now I felt Murdoch does have mastery over language and characters, so perhaps another book of hers might be really good (this was my first Murdoch). "The Black Prince" though, I thought was all very good in maybe a creative writing classroom, but not out of it.
