Volume 10, Number 7 · April 11, 1968
Nice But Not Good
By Bernard Bergonzi
The Nice and the Good
by Iris Murdoch
Viking, 378 pp., $5.75
Orchestra and Beginners
by Frederic Raphael
Viking, 533 pp., $6.95
Gone a Hundred Miles
by Heather Ross Miller
Harcourt, Brace & World, 240 pp., $4.95
Iris Murdoch's annual novel now seems to have become an established British institution: in private it may be derided or dismissed, but in public it gets the respect customarily given to venerable traditions. Some such theory, at least, is needed to account for the fact that reviewers tend to receive her novels in an awed and intimidated fashion, and critical comment is restricted to a narrow spectrum of remarks, ranging from uneasy approval to mild and nervous dissent. The review in the Times Literary Supplement was a case in point: at the end of a long and unenthusiastic piece, which accurately pinpointed the faults of The Nice and the Good and of Iris Murdoch's fiction generally, the anonymous reviewer felt obliged to say, in words which betrayed extreme critical discomfort and evasiveness, 'Despite a conclusion which is not far from being soppy, The Nice and the Good remains oddly undismissable,…unusual if often recklessly trusted power of imaginative invention, and a serious, generous, and indefatigable attention to the problems of the moral life.'
Review, 2238 words
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