ABSTRACT
In ensuing novels Iris Murdoch works on a much less symbolic plane, and indeed in the next work, An Accidental Man, skilfully imposes the idea of the accidental on a largely concealed but insistent structure of pattern and ideas. As the opening novel in a series dedicated to the varieties of human failures and defeats, An Accidental Man is utterly without amelioration, and even its most positive characters fail to achieve any ideal they might set for themselves. A Word Child is separated from An Accidental Man by two other novels, The Black Prince, in which Murdoch’s central and, for her fiction, definitive examination of art takes place, and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, a complex and savage novel. Murdoch is by a masterly projector of first-person narration, and as in The Black Prince all the perceptions are uniquely attached to the character who projects them.
