She’s dry, and wry, and seems to be modelled on Murdoch herself. He’s married to a handsome – if increasingly wrinkly and eccentric – older woman, and he’s shagging a shaggable younger woman with a brain the size of a house. What’s happened? The first-person narrator, smugmeister Martin Lynchbogget is blissful. It feels like Waugh without the wit: some of the conduct is just as preposterous, but somehow, reader (and the narrator sometimes has to appeal to the reader in just this way to plead for the truthfulness of his bizarre behaviour), we’re left bemused and wondering why the people of Planet Murdoch are so weird. The attitudes – to feminism, to booze and fags, to just about everything in fact – seem like a throwback to the 30s.

But this book is 47 years old and feels like a curiosity now. Literate, educated people, usually comfortably off and living in nice houses, fuck things up for themselves and each other. The more I’ve read, the more I’ve realised that without Murdoch there would probably never have been Ian McEwan. To email * Your name * Your email * Comment Please tick the box below *I’m just over half-way through, and it’s a long time since I had such a sense of characters as puppets or chessmen, being moved around by a rather cynical author. The same way that Sartre and de Beauvoir are. Protect their own philosophy from attack and judgement? Murdoch dismisses the notion that she is a philosophical writer in ‘it is always a significant question to ask of any philosopher: what is he afraid of?’ or, what barriers do philosophers erectto In her 1969 essay ‘On “God” and “Good”’ Murdoch says, The Kantian notion of freedom residing in attention towards moral law. Of discussion is Freudian psychoanalysis in regard to moral decline and progression indeed, it goes beyond this by reversing

It replaces, to an extent, Murdoch's early concerns with Plato and returns, in part, to Sartre. This is not to say that the novel does not exhibit philosophical ideas, farįrom it. Move from a fictionally mediated philosophy, in Under the Net (1954) and The Bell (1958), to an introspective moral psychology. Before we begin to examine the philosophical beginnings of A Severed Head (1961) we should first turn to Murdoch's later essay ‘On “God” and “Good”’(1969) to understand exactly what caused her to

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch