In a recent interview, Iris Murdoch reported that she regards her latest novels as her best because they most closely resemble the novels of the nineteenth-century English and Russian masters. I think she is quite correct in that judgment. Certainly her novels of the past decade, The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), and The Message to the Planet (1989), along with her new novel, The Green Knight, represent her most ambitious work. Reading these novels can indeed sometimes approach the experience that a character in her Nuns and Soldiers (1980) reports while reading Little Dorrit: “[I]t was amazing, it was so crammed and chaotic, and yet so touching, a kind of miracle, a strangely naked display of feeling, and full of profound ideas, yet one felt it was all true!”
Murdoch’s mature novels, which date from The Nice and the Good (1968), are moral tales of the English educated classes that in most cases imitate the structures of Shakespearean comedy and romance. And the novels of the past decade are also portraits of powerful “magicians” in the form of extraordinary artists and philosophers. The Green Knightis not entirely a modern reworking of themes and characters found in the medieval English poem about Sir Gawain, but one of the chief characters of the novel, Peter Mir, does correspond in important respects to the powerful and magical Green Knight. To criticize the lack of realism in a novel with