On love: Iris Murdoch made this famous quote: “Every artist is an unhappy lover. I’d say there are three main themes: love – the experience of falling in love and being in love the pros and cons of marriage, and art. And just like The Sea, we have a murder, an attempted murder and a suicide. These include his ex- and he assumes she wants to get back with him, which may or may not be true. He has always ‘used’ women and treated them callously old flames return making theatrical appearances at his door at inopportune times. The similarities with The Sea: we have a just-retired divorced man who has rented an ocean-front cottage.

And just when you get to the end and think you can breathe a sigh of relief, there are FOUR postscripts and then one more for good measure.For fans of the author’s The Sea, The Sea, here’s a great book that has a similar tone and structure. Yes, yes, I know that's how they're supposed to come across, but pleasurable? Not to me.

A third is a wealthy schemer and the fourth a middle aged man's fantasy of a nubile young lover. This is what I mean by reading having changed since the book's publication - as a contemporary reader I found these descriptions offensive, and I hated that two of the main women characters wail about losing their individuality to their husbands and seem to have absolutely nothing else to do. I understand that the treatment of women as perpetually crying with gaping wet mouths while pink flesh puckers through holes in their tights is a POV thing, revealing the protagonist's misogyny and distaste for the physicality of femininity. Who refers to birds as 'feathered songsters', for heaven's sake? Dame Iris's philosophical alter ego is also much in evidence, and we are treated to long disquisitions on art and love which, while emphasising the self-reflexivity of the novel, also contribute to the protagonist 's verbosity and (pace this is an audio book) love of the sound of his own voice. The ponderous literary style, characteristic of the protagonist, is nonetheless so pompous and elaborated that I laughed out loud sometimes - when I wasn't telling him get on with it, we've got the point. The author knows what she's doing, but for me certainly, what she's doing is dated and irritating in the extreme. This is not to belittle the liveliness of the characters' exchanges or the cleverness of the plotting. Perhaps back then we were more tolerant of a self-centred middle-aged man droning on and on about his obsessions, but it makes for tedious listening now. It seems the way we read, and the way fiction is written, have changed a lot since 1973.

The black prince murdoch