Volume 33, Number 10 · June 12, 1986
False Gods
By Howard Moss
The Good Apprentice
by Iris Murdoch
Viking, 522 pp., $18.95
In The Good Apprentice, Iris Murdoch's twenty-second novel, the hero learns one of life's most painful lessons: how the gods of youth turn out to be false. Real gods never make an appearance in The Good Apprentice but we are provided with several self-styled magicians deluded into believing they might be stand-ins. The omission of gods suggests there are none, and by a grand philosophical extrapolation that God doesn't exist either (though he is talked about endlessly). Yet the absence of gods, or of God himself, in no way diminishes their, or His, importance. Miss Murdoch has long held the complicated notion that it is as much a lie to pretend not to need a god as it is to believe in one. Edward Baltram, the young initiate to whom the title refers, travels a great distance between two deities, one whom he creates, and the other who has created him—the first is his friend, Mark Wilsden, and the second his father, the eccentric bohemian painter Jesse Baltram.
Review, 2788 words
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