Metaphors for Life

The four novels to be discussed in this chapter were published at roughly yearly intervals: The Black Prince (1973), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), A Word Child (1975) and Henry and Cato (1976). Following the novels of the late 1960s with their deliberate exploration into the demonic, their third-person narration and their carefully structured form which, except for An Accidental Man (which we may perhaps see as a ‘bridging novel’), divides them into accessible chapters, these of the early 1970s break out of the more overt formal restraints. They are generally longer, they have dispensed with the containment of chapter divisions as a formal structural device and their philosophical viewpoint is far more complex. Yet, despite the apparent formlessness of such works, there is a consuming interest in the art of novel-writing and in the general philosophy of art, The Black Prince particularly devoting considerable discussion to it. Though there are no chapters as such, there is an overriding formal structure, breaking the novels into parts and smaller segments and, in the case of A Word Child, into daily diary entries. They may also, as a group, be seen as some of the easiest of all Murdoch’s novels for the general reader to come to terms with.