ABSTRACT
Many reviewers of The Philosopher’s Pupil noted the Karamazovlike relationship between, and personalities of, the George McCaffrey brothers, and Dostoevsky seems to lie behind the larger structural preoccupations of this novel. Tolstoy may have been invoked in more local details such as the passage in which a page or so of the action of The Philosopher’s Pupil is presented through the consciousness of a small dog. The plot of Henry and Cato is so expressly binary that it functions almost as a diptych, and the visual metaphor may reflect the pervasive presence of Max Beckmann in this most painterly of Iris Murdoch’s novels. Murdoch’s very novels demand that the reader should remain relaxed in the face of their complexities. This seems related to her emerging sympathy–evident also from The Fire and the Sun–for the non-acquisitiveness of eastern religious thought in contrast to its western counterpart.
