An Accidental Man Read Free Page A

material world of motor-cars and evening appointments.’ The ordinary never altogether lacks a beauty in Iris Murdoch’s novels, but here that charm comes extraordinarily overlain with selfishness and triviality – especially the bourgeoisie’s round of ‘evening appointments’.
    The novel ends with one of several ‘evening appointments’, a drinks party at Gracie and Garth’s place, the last of Murdoch’s party-pieces done as drama – a Pinteresque torrent, a heteroglossia of overheard voices, trivial, insincere, gossipy, distorting truth and the real into mere rumour and fantasy. The bourgeois, shallow Tisbournes are rampant. Evil Austin is there looking ‘gorgeous’ and prating of his good-looking family. The bad novelist Garth is being congratulated all round on his ‘lovely’ reviews. Proley Mary Monkley, one of the several low-life characters Iris Murdoch has brought into this novel – perhaps in some endeavour to meet her complaining critics and widen her usual exclusive social clientele of dons, philosophers, civil servants and people who know their Sophocles – the rare proletarian is tippling sherry like some Dickensian gargoyle in her apparently appropriate place, on the social margins, in the kitchen. Kierkegaard is ‘parked outside’. The moral worrier Matthew and the conscientious American Ludwig (he who objected to Gracie that what she called ‘an ordinary life’ was ‘for most people . . . an extraordinary one’) are both far, far away. The trivially minded crowd possess the good words, but these are provokingly empty of ethical content. Good night, Good night, Good night , they chorus, repeating, without knowing it, the farewells of TS Eliot’s lowlife immoralists in the pub scene in The Waste Land , ‘Good night sweet ladies’, words which were themselves a parody of Ophelia’s farewell words in Hamlet . Here’s a parody of a parody. Hamlet , a piece of the world’s greatest literature, one of the most life-changing literary myths of the western world, itself of course a drama about the anguished ways of the Protestant moral conscience, has come down in the world, and for a second time in modern times. The touch of farce in the Eliot scene is, of course, as befits this novel, by no means absent from Murdoch’s recall and replay of The Waste Land . But as ironically downbeat endings go, it would be hard, I think, to find a more despondent one than this. And it’s utterly par for this novel’s course.
    VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM
    2003

‘ GRACIE DARLING , WILL darling, will you marry me?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    Ludwig Leferrier stared down into the small calm radiant unsmiling face of Gracie Tisbourne. Was it conceivable that the girl was joking? It was. Oh Lord.
    â€˜Look, Gracie, are you serious?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜But I mean —’
    â€˜Of course if you want to back out of it —’
    â€˜Gracie! But — but — Gracie, do you love me?’
    â€˜Can you not infer that from what I said just now?’
    â€˜I don’t want inferred love.’
    â€˜I love you.’
    â€˜It’s impossible!’
    â€˜This is becoming a rather stupid argument.’
    â€˜Gracie. I can’t believe it!’ argument.’
    â€˜Why are you so surprised?’ said Gracie. ‘Surely the situation has been clear for some time. It has been to all my friends and relations.’
    â€˜Oh damn your friends and relations — I mean — Gracie, you do really mean it? I love you so dreadfully much —’
    â€˜Don’t be so silly, Ludwig,’ said Gracie. ‘Sometimes you’re just a very silly man. I love you, and I’ve done so ever since you kissed me behind that tomb thing in the British Museum. I never thought I’d be so lucky.’
    â€˜But you expected