ABSTRACT
Division of any writer’s work into ‘phases’ is, as will have been appreciated already, a notoriously arbitrary task. The Nice and the Good, in atmosphere, treatment and subject matter, marks something of a break with its predecessors. Right from the urbane poise of the opening sentence the reader may sense a new, authoritative stylistic confidence. Occurrences of the word ‘fungoid’ in various contexts in The Nice and the Good suggest a private joke surrounding the relationship between omniscience and individuality, rather as does a reference to the ‘rebarbatively stony nature’ of the beach, which possibly reminds of Toby Gashe’s fondness for ‘rebarbative’ in the earlier novel. Iris Murdoch returns, in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, to a novelistic mode similar to that of The Nice and the Good, both in its relative ‘openness’ and in its use of an enchanter figure.
