ABSTRACT
The courage to insist on the almost intolerable demands of excellence is lamentably missing in most contemporary fiction, but it is towards these demands that Iris Murdoch’s best work strains. One of Murdoch’s insistent themes involves attention, even though she knows, as do her characters that in the artistic as in the moral life one will be misjudged. Murdoch tends in interviews to speak slightingly of the tricks and games of fiction, and often refers to the fact that the novelist is always making jokes. All Murdoch’s characters are world-immanent beings that, in spite of an inclination towards ideals and knowledge, are forced to concentrate on ordinary action in a realistic world where muddle reigns. The quality of thought in Murdoch has produced alienation in some readers, but it is the most tantalizingly serious aspect of her novels and must be examined as such.
