ABSTRACT
As in the case of its predecessor, The Sea, The Sea, Nuns and Soldiers is in relatively small measure about the subject of its greatest area of expansion, in this case the protracted relationship almost tediously rehearsed between Gertrude Openshaw and Tim Reede. This bourgeois surface with its overflow of tears occasionally skirts the domain of women’s fiction in a frenzied concentration which succeeds in deflecting attention from the novel’s centre. Although the simple fundamentalism of the religious sect is not interesting to Tim, the presence of the image of Christ in the midst of organic reality and humble hard work is central to Iris Murdoch’s subtle laddering downwards of the cosmos from vast conceptions to the simple organisms of animals and leaves and weeds. This control of cosmic ideas through the vast, then to the animistic religious, then to the simple uses of nature defines the progress and perhaps the purpose of Nuns and Soldiers.
