Philosopher's Pupil Audiobook By Iris Murdoch cover art

Philosopher's Pupil

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Philosopher's Pupil

By: Iris Murdoch
Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
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When George McCaffrey’s car plunges into a canal with his wife still inside, nobody knows whether George is to blame. Nobody, that is, except an Anglican priest who happened to witness the whole thing. And when George’s former teacher, the charismatic philosopher Rozanov, returns to town, George’s life begins to spin wildly out of control. Set in the English spa town of Ennistone, The Philosopher’s Pupil is a darkly comic story of love, redemption, and the complex nature of the human condition.

©1983 Iris Murdoch (P)2012 Audible, Inc. Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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Gildart Jackson is puré genius.
What a delightful way to reread an old familiar novel.

Murdoch is a l ways brilliant

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Murdoch is in high style in this novel with an engaging story that keeps unfolding against a subtle background of moral philosophy. As in her other books she anchors twisty philosophical issues in a cunning narrative but for anyone with a minimal sense of the subject Murdoch provides both entertainment and enlightenment. For example, it doesn't take much to see that the disheveled, mainly anti-social philosopher of the title is based on Socrates,that the action, mainly set around a second-rate spa in Britain (known as the "Institute") registers the Greek-Roman focus on the town bath as the center of social life. etc. The plot goes a bit off the rails from time to time, and the book is too long for its own good, but I enjoyed it. The reading is very fine.

A Trip Down a philosophical Lane

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I loved this story. The plot and characters were engaging and the narration was top notch.

outstanding

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Very good — not Murdoch’s magnum opus by a mile, but good. The book is at its best when venturing into the catastrophic dialogue that emerges in every instance that the (regrettably VERY realistic) monstrosity of an Analytic Philosopher, John Robert Rozanov, interacts with literally anyone. In such interactions, Murdoch succeeds perfectly in showing how the all-too-common ethic of dispassionate rationalism — which, in principle, is productive of a stoic and placid affect — explodes a swath of emotional destruction across all real-life interactions in which it is actually deployed. The book’s overall story construction flounders, and the book fails to resolve in a way that can be called very interesting. Its pacing meanders sometimes into dullness, and its attempts to venture into themes of the mystical and paranormal fall flaccid under the novel’s ironic voice: it may be due to Murdoch’s own vocation as a philosopher that plot and character details that might otherwise have remained strikingly mysterious are instead simply “explained” — as though Murdoch were a literary critic analyzing her own work while writing it. On the other hand, the particularly tender and beautiful beach sequence taking place midway through the book shines forth free of these flaws. Character psychologies are deep and original, though not as much as those in the Dostoevsky novels Murdoch here seeks to emulate.

Or: The Importance of Not Being A Logical Positivist

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