What do You think about The Sandcastle (2003)?
Interesting story for Murdoch. Mor is a teacher and housemaster at St Bride's school. His wife Nan is a carping, controlling woman who has beaten her husband down with a superior attitude. They have a teenage son who attends St Bride's and a pubescent daughter at another private school. Because I have read Harry Potter, I am familiar with this English school scene. A young female painter arrives at St Bride's where she has been commissioned to paint the portrait of the former headmaster. Mor falls in love with her, wants to throw away his marriage, and Nan must find a way to hold on to him. Because this is Iris Murdoch, there are plenty of hilarious, silly, and nail-biting scenes. I hadn't quite noticed this before in her novels, but I see it now. Murdoch is no feminist. She is as hard on her female characters as she is on the men. She finds the absurdity in any human endeavor and tromps hard. But she also makes it clear how dearly we all hold to our purposes and our ways of life. I am just blundering along in my reading of mid twentieth century English literature by women and so just beginning to glimpse what is going on. The major similarity I see between them (Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, etc.) is a dedicated attempt to use intellect and philosophy as a means of going more deeply into human relations. To my thinking, that is a worthy aim.
—Judy
I am always positive about Iris Murdoch's books simply because of the detailed character descriptions, insight into motivation and clever storytelling. The prologue to the edition I read said there was very little to tie the title to the actual story except with reference to the Bible passage about the man who built his house on the sand and saw it washed away. The book is a tender portrayal of a man whose life has become dull and who rediscovers his own capacity for love through an artist and her art. Memorable in its word pictures, if not in its plot.
—Leanne Hunt
After all, he thought, I can be guided by this. Let me only make clear what I gain, and what I destroy.My very first Murdoch exceeded all my expectations. I frankly hardly know where to start, or even what I want to say. Funny, suspenseful, a loud, relentless hymn of creation and destruction. Rarely does one see such brilliant harmony between plot, character development, and hard work on developing the underlying themes. (The word "themes", naturally, said in Stephen Fry's voice)There are so many things, subtle and not so subtle, that contribute to the way the story is put together perfectly...it feels like an extremely human, emotional text and an arcane treatise on wishing impossible things, both at the same time. In this way the book is much like a painting itself.I thought of the plot as a bit of a landslide - the worlds of adults, of children, the private and the public, rolling, sliding towards the point of no return, colliding, changing.Perhaps it is rather that we feel our own face, as a three-dimensional mass, from within - and when we try in a painting to realize what another person's face is, we come back to the experience of our own.Art and its creation (the debate on how to paint a face) are juxtaposed with the forces that make and break the life of the individual (how to treat other people, love, religion, scruples). Rain is to leave after she finishes the portrait - so decisions are to be made on both counts. Just like the commissioned portrait must be finished, so must the protagonists decide how they are to leave the stage and how much they are prepared to leave behind.Beautiful, descriptive, thrilling - a stroke of genius.
—Viktorija
