One of the Murdoch novels that I have enjoyed the most. One reason is the manageable number of characters. Another is the theme which Murdoch pursued through many novels, the nature of goodness. What especially happens when goodness is expected to exist in a world in which God has been left behind?
Disaster ensues when Carel, the priest who has lost his faith and has been shunted to a parish without a church, disintegrates mentally, morally and fatally, bringing down all those around him. They are left with remnant lives from which some form of reconstruction may be possible.
Fascinating writer of books that make a reader eager for another of her novels.

I've left it too long to write about this one, and the details are blurred in my head. Its the usual Murdoch fare of a bizarre group of people semi-isolated together and performing a strange dance of changing connections and conversations. It's not one of my favourites, but its all relative - I've not read a bad Murdoch novel yet. ( )

Dark claustrophobic novel with philosophical overtones about an Anglican priest, Carel, his brother, daughter, niece, and household staff. It is set in a post WWII bombed-out rectory. Carel has lost his belief in the existence of God. He has isolated himself and told his staff not to allow anyone inside.

There are only a handful of characters. There is no overarching storyline. The characters represent the spectrum of good and evil, with most falling somewhere in between. Carel represents evil. His niece, Elizabeth, an innocent sheltered girl, represents goodness. His brother, Marcus, is an atheist who is writing a book about morality. Marcus wants to reconnect with Elizabeth but his brother will not allow it. Readers eventually find out why.

It has a gothic feel and may be read as an allegory. Iris Murdoch was obviously a deep thinker. It appears to me to be an examination of morality and how it changes without religion in the picture, which was becoming more prevalent after two world wars. I found it mentally engaging but emotionally distant.
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If you are seeking something serene or comforting to read, steer clear of [a:Iris Murdoch|7287|Iris Murdoch|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1238673382p2/7287.jpg]. She will take you into a philosophical quagmire and bring you, breathless from the struggle, out the other side. In [b:The Time of the Angels|1272539|The Time of the Angels|Iris Murdoch|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266760353l/1272539._SY75_.jpg|1044622], Carel Fisher is a priest who does not believe in the existence of God. He lives in a rectory that has no church, with his daughter and niece; a black woman, Pattie, who is his housekeeper and his sometime mistress; a Russian custodian, Eugene, who lives in the basement room with his adult son, Leo, a pathological liar. Only Pattie and Eugene are even remotely likeable, and even they are doomed by the godlessness around them.

The innocence which she had prized in Eugene before she knew him well shone round him in glory now. He was a man without shadows. He loved her, simply, truthfully, and offered her a life of innocence. He offered her to, and she had felt it, smelt it, this morning, happiness.

One of Iris Murdoch’s strengths is the sense of place she gives us. I could feel the deserted air of the rectory, surrounded by the ruins of the church not rebuilt from the bombings during the war; the oppressiveness of the fog that lingers and constantly obstructs the view of the river from the six people trapped inside this crumbling structure, preventing anyone from seeing any avenue of escape; and the closeness of the basement room with the ancient boiler, where Eugene is isolated with the icon he has saved from his past and his memories of another, somewhat better, world. Murdoch does this, so often, with few words, but vivid imagery.

The snow filled the air, not seeming any more like separate flakes, but like a huge fleecy white blanket which was being gently waved to and fro outside the window.

But, what buzzes at the heart of Murdoch’s writing, is her eternal debate about the nature of God and man, and whether morality exists if God does not.

”I don’t understand you. People may disagree about morals, but we can all use our reason--
“The disappearance of God does not simply leave a void into which human reason can move. The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible.”

I found myself thinking of Graham Greene. Like Greene, Murdoch spares us no quarter when it comes to religion, but she comes to it from such a different place than Greene’s Catholicism. She invites us to question ourselves, our God, and our nature. She wonders if there can be good if there is no God, and whether absenting God merely opens the doors and windows of the soul to the evil which is His opposite. If God is dead, must He not have once lived? If God never lived, then isn’t His death, like His existence, something we have done? Either way, who is to blame for the absence of good, only ourselves. This book is dense and heavy; its story is dark and reflective. I closed its pages wondering why anyone would want to shut God out when there is so much evil to be let in in His stead.

Another theme I find coursing its way through Murdoch’s work is the idea of individualism as an isolating factor. Can we ever know another human being? Throughout this novel, the characters misunderstand each other entirely. Often what one is thinking is the direct opposite of what another character believes about them. They mistake motives, actions, feelings. They misread one another, and they fail to see the truth, until confronted with it directly and cruelly. They stumble upon each other, as if they had been groping about in the dark and someone suddenly lit them a lamp. But the light is not the light of God, hope or love; only the harsh light of reality, and it carries revelation without understanding.


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I have been struggling adequately to capture my thoughts about this novel. Iris Murdoch was one of the most prolific British literary novelists of the twentieth century, and at different times I have considered several of her novels to be among my favourites.

Her characters are invariably divorced from reality, existing in closed circles, often featuring intellectually self-sufficient (and, let’s be honest, self-satisfied) cliques. She may have begun her career as a writer in the 1950s, at the same time that the ‘Angry Young Men’ were making themselves heard, but hers are not kitchen sink dramas. Neither are they comparable to the later literary phenomenon of aga sagas.

She was, of course, a highly accomplished academic as well as a novelist, lecturing in philosophy in Oxford for many years. While she always maintained that her novels did not reflect her philosophical ideas, that claim is sometimes hard to accept, and many of her most successful novels positively ripple with philosophical byplay.

Sadly this novel does not ripple at all. Many of her characteristic features are here: isolated young women, raised is unconventional circumstances, a man (in this case an ordained priest) troubled by a sudden loss of faith in ideas that had previously formed his principal raison d’etre, and essentially inadequate or unfulfilled onlookers troubled by the main protagonist’s anguish. Here the central figure is Carel, a priest and father who, as the novel opens, has been relocated to a parish in East London. He lives with his daughter Muriel, who has meandered through life without significant challenge, and his niece Elizabeth, who suffers from an unspecified illness which has left her physically dependent upon the rest of the household. Carel’s household is looked after by Patricia (Pattie), who had been raised in an orphanage after her seemingly feckless mother had been compelled to give her up. We are, therefore, even from the opening pages, in a fairly typical Murdoch setting of rampant dysfunctionality.

In many of her other novels, Murdoch has fused such unpromising characters into a scintillating brew, igniting the reader’s attention and firing their empathy. Sadly, there was no such dazzling writer’s performance here, and at no stage did the seventh cavalry come over the brow of the hill to bring succour to the embattled reader. This novel was simply hard work, with no dazzling denouement or relief on offer at the end.

I was also struck by the change of attitudes. The novel is liberally strewn with casual racism and sexism of a sort that now seems especially repellent, especially as the characters making such ghastly remarks would probably have congratulated themselves on their liberal views. As the BBC often cautions when broadcasting a work set in less enlightened periods, the novel reflects attitudes that were prevalent at their time.

Iris Murdoch’s books are always interesting, and this contained some intriguing passages, especially those in which Carel discusses his crumbling faith, but it was not one of her better works. ( )