Conflicts of Good and Evil

The Time of the Angels (1966), the novel which follows The Red and the Green, sets a more sombre tone than most of its predecessors, with the possible exception of The Unicorn. The group of novels which it introduces —The Nice and the Good (1968), Bruno’s Dream (1969), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) and An Accidental Man (1971) — though still funny, often farcical, are deeply concerned with the problems of Good and Evil. At times they are infused with a palpable, almost demonic evil, coupled with a negation of the existence of God. ‘If one does not believe in a personal God there is no problem of evil, but there is the almost insuperable difficulty of looking properly at evil and human suffering,’ Murdoch commented in 1969, in the essay ‘On “God” and “Good”’.1