ABSTRACT
In spite of the success of Under the Net and the technical excellences of The Bell and The Unicom a general sense of unease progressively settled in among Iris Murdoch readers, who grumbled about tricks and prolificacy. Murdoch’s rather frenetic minor creations like Calvin Blick and Annette Cockeyne work nicely in the ideology of the novel, but irritatingly distract from the reader’s engagement. The Time of the Angels is a novel in process of breaking away from the aggressively stylized patterns that Murdoch gave full rein to for some time after her fourth novel, The Bell. Murdoch has learned to give her characters a natural primacy and to concentrate on cause and effect at the local level of action, so that plot-turns grow directly out of the quality of action of convincingly real characters. Murdoch, talking thus in 1968, the year of publication of The Nice and the Good, gives us a significant key to the change in her work.
