Name: The Italian Girl
ISBN: 9780099285236

Iris Murdoch

Edmund has escaped from his family into a lonely life. Returning for his mother's funeral he rediscovers the eternal family servant, the ever-changing Italian girl, who was always "a second mother."

The Italian Girl

Evil is a sort of machinery. And part of it is that one can’t even suffer properly, one enjoys one’s suffering. Even the notion of punishment becomes corrupt. There are no penances because all that suffering is consolation. What one wants is not suffering but truth: and that would be a kind of suffering one can’t even imagine now.

a pale dreamy face in which the innocent radiance which I remembered shone like a surface mist above the firmer features of a grown-up. Her face had that pure transparent look which we suddenly notice in the faces of young girls when they are no longer children.

Emmett

The themes in Murdoch's fiction are intellectual and moral, but its qualities and its hold on the reader are more often emotional. The problematic knot makes itself felt in registers of agony and terror. Murdoch's characters flail and struggle in the hold of oppressive situations and decisions, oppressive because they are painful, because they require sacrifices that are difficult to give, requiring a pound of flesh from their ossified selves, identities they've worked so hard to keep, to defend, to shore up against past griefs and trauma. Under her pen which is keen as a knife, their passions show, bright as blood. Her characters seem drawn from paintings (rather than the moderate currents of real life), figures experiencing a moment of heightened sensation and experience, dramatically illuminated. They live in the realm of melodrama and psychodrama, between literary fictions and soap operas - where a tormented wife opens her blouse to bare her trembling breasts to her brother-in-law and intruding strangers approximate mythological usurpers. They are theatrical but real, the surge and crash of emotion wiping out the misery of real life - or restoring it to its full and terrible colours.

Unfortunately, The Italian Girl is not one of her best. Its length and impact is similar to The Time of the Angels, which I did not like much either. The characters were strange (which is entirely expected in her novels) but not intriguing enough - I would use 'unrealistic' but it would be inappropriate, perhaps the problem was not convincing enough. There were some beautiful lines and finely crafted scenes, but that could also be said for her better fictions.