ABSTRACT
Iris Murdoch’s generosity in thinking about her characters means that they all – except for a few real demons – are given some hold on good, some access to truth. Her allegiance to the rigours of reality means that the novels are populated by the generally imperfect, egotistic and even demonic characters of our contemporary bourgeois world. Murdoch’s realism embodies the small but very real opposing power of good, not in the mythological aggrandizements of Christ’s divinity, but in an honest depiction of what the good man devoid of myth might look like in and to the world. In interviews, Murdoch has pointed to a fairly obvious allegory of Christ, Satan and the human soul, in which Tallis plays Christ to Julius King’s powerful Satan and Morgan’s horrible human soul. Brendan Craddock is an interesting device, as are all of Murdoch’s ‘good’ characters, a sort of background against which the larger generality of human failure and attempt can be set.
