Bruno's Dream by Iris Murdoch
"Bruno's Dream" by Iris Murdoch is a novel that centers on the final days of Bruno Greensleave, an ill man grappling with guilt over his past relationships, particularly with his deceased wife, mistress, and estranged son, Miles. As Bruno seeks reconciliation before his death, the narrative explores the complexities of familial bonds and the haunting effects of past decisions. Miles, dealing with his own grief from the loss of his first wife, is caught in a web of interrelated relationships with other characters, including Danby, his sister-in-law Lisa, and the housekeeper Adelaide. The story unfolds as a farce, laden with both comedic and serious undertones, as characters confront their regrets and desires, leading to unexpected resolutions.
Murdoch's characters are vividly developed, reflecting eccentricities that challenge conventional portrayals of human relationships. The interplay of love, loss, and forgiveness forms a core theme, inviting readers to consider how the characters navigate their emotional landscapes. While the novel employs elements of farce, it simultaneously grounds its narrative in tangible details that create a rich, immersive experience. Overall, "Bruno's Dream" offers a thought-provoking exploration of the human condition through the lens of complex interpersonal dynamics, highlighting the absurdity and poignancy of life.
Bruno's Dream by Iris Murdoch
First published: 1969
Type of work: Psychological farce
Time of work: The mid-1960’s
Locale: London, England
Principal Characters:
Bruno Greensleave , the terminally ill owner of a printing business, a minor scholar and an expert on spidersMiles Greensleave , Bruno’s estranged son, a middle-aged civil servantDanby Odell , Bruno’s son-in-law, the manager of the printing businessDiana , Miles’s second wifeLisa , her sisterAdelaide de Crecy , Danby’s housekeeper and mistressNigel Boase , Adelaide’s cousin, who nurses Bruno in his illnessWill Boase , Nigel’s twin brother, an out-of-work actor in love with his cousin Adelaide
The Novel
The novel revolves around the last period of Bruno Greensleave’s illness, in which his bad conscience about the way he treated his long-deceased wife, his dead mistress, and his son is made the center of everyone’s life and eventually precipitates difficulties which must be met and solved not only in order that Bruno may die in peace but also to allow the others to live with some chance of making sense of their lives. Bruno’s determination to set things right with his son, Miles, whom he repudiated years ago when Miles married an Indian woman, is made most difficult because Miles, although remarried, still mourns for his first wife, who was killed in a plane crash. Father and son are both looking back into their past unhappily, and that matter is coincidentally complicated by the fact that Bruno’s son-in-law, Danby Odell, has never entirely got over the death of his wife, Gwen, who drowned some years before.
Miles, at least, has the consolation of a second marriage to Diana, whom he loves, although not with quite the same intensity that he felt for his first wife. His sister-in-law, Lisa, who was once in Catholic orders, lives with them. Danby, always skillful at living on the surface of life, and involved unwillingly in bringing Miles and Bruno together, has avoided deep emotional connections since the death of his wife and keeps his housekeeper, Adelaide, who loves him, as a mistress but is not unhappy about starting up an affair with Diana and then falling surprisingly and desperately in love with Lisa. Miles, protective of his sister-in-law and recognizing Danby’s enthusiasm for her, suddenly realizes that he, too, is in love with her, quite as deeply as he had been with his first wife. As though that were not enough to start trouble, Adelaide is distressed by Danby ignoring her, and Will Boase, her cousin and the twin brother of Bruno’s nurse Nigel, is determined to rescue her for himself and punish Danby for his past attentions to her. Finally, Lisa reveals that she has always been in love with Miles.
While all this is going on, Bruno is trying to make his peace with everyone and ultimately with his Maker. The result is a farce which, however serious it may seem to all concerned, appears to the reader as a quite preposterous if wittily comic set of circumstances. In the end, as is the nature of farce, all comes right, if bizarrely so. Will gets Adelaide, Miles and Diana stay together (despite the fact that they both realize how deeply Miles was touched by Lisa, and Lisa by Miles), and Lisa begins a relationship with the frivolous womanizer, Danby, which looks as if it will eventually tame him.
Bruno, so physically repellant in his illness, is consoled in his last stages of life by Lisa and finally by Diana. Having learned that forgiveness and love are not forbidden him, he dies in peace, and Diana learns that love makes some sense of the muddle of life.
The Characters
In a manner consistent with farce and with her predilection for using characters to achieve a particular effect, to explore certain philosophic propositions, Murdoch has put together what can only be called an eccentric cast of characters. Indeed, much of the pleasure of her novels comes from the richness of her characters, who often provide curious appeal in the things they do or know as well as in the way they exist as simple human beings. Yet they are rarely simple human beings. Bruno, for example, is not simply an old man dying; he is physically a monster, disgustingly reminiscent of the spiders he loves, but this implied comparison goes beyond simple parallelism, since his highly professional knowledge of spiders is slyly used to illustrate certain ideas about life and death. Bruno’s stamp collection is another detail which Murdoch uses to flesh out her character; it functions as a touchstone in the battle of wills which is at the base of the novel’s action and which ultimately must be swept away to allow some of the characters to make sense of their relationships on grounds less warped by financial considerations.
The past haunts Bruno, Miles, and Danby, all three of whom are crippled by the memory of their dead wives and who must become reconciled to the past if they are to be free. The women are also under the spell of the past: Lisa turns away from the cloistered religious life for protection as a kind of injured bird cared for by Miles and Diana; Diana accepts the fact that she is a poor substitute for Miles’s lost love; Adelaide clings to Danby, avoiding the rough, loving urgings of her importunate cousin, Will Boase; and the wild Boase brothers are adrift, failed actors. Nigel has spiritual ambitions and, despite looking helpless, often possesses insights which can be helpful; Will, seemingly a bullying confidence man who, stirred up, can be dangerous, nurses his love for Adelaide, determined to possess her.
If it seems as if characters are handpicked, not simply because they are thematically useful but also because they are pleasing and splendidly engaging in their antics, it is because they are. Murdoch’s world may be that of the English middle classes, but it is never as boringly authentic as reality, and one of the ways in which she breaks out of the confines of simple realism is in choosing characters larger and crazier than life. Their obsessiveness is often out of keeping with the idea of the close exploration of character under the pressure of environment, although it starts there. Danby’s drunken tumble in and out of the backyards in Miles’s neighborhood is quite as much comic nonsense as any legitimate action by a character under stress, and the duel between Will Boase and Danby Odell, however serious it might have been in consequence (although, after the fact, one might suspect otherwise) is in character, especially for Will, and quite beyond it in simple, high-spirited artistic brio.
Trying to take these characters seriously can cause all sorts of skepticism; taking them as counters in philosophic games, as farcical figures, sometimes serious but often wickedly funny and only occasionally “true to life,” can open the reader’s perception to where the novel truly lies: teetering on the edge of incredibility.
Critical Context
Murdoch’s attempt to break away from the narrowness of the realistic novel has never been entirely satisfactory to the critics, primarily because of her strong desire to hold on to realism while breaching it with other literary modes. This novel, her twelfth, is a typical example of the way in which she brings reality into play against farce, slight mystical intimations, arbitrary conduct by characters, and tentative and sometimes unsystematic symbolic structures. It is not quite as wildly imaginative as other works before and after Bruno’s Dream, but it has some of that modal breadth that makes her popular with literate readers enjoying the shuffling of genre, and makes her suspect with critics who demand a more rigorous repudiation of reality. There is something too cozily smart about her work to take her as a full partner with writers of the absurd, such as Samuel Beckett.
What often helps Murdoch in saving her novels from dismissal as sophisticated fantasy is the way in which she develops physical densities, three-dimensional tactilities in “things,” in the normal physical accumulations of everyday life. The squalor of Danby’s home, for example, is realized vividly, and Bruno’s room is a fetid lair reeking with his illness but quite as full of his spiders and stamps, books, old champagne bottles, and rumpled bedclothes, which make for a reality which the character’s surprising conduct cannot dispel.
That same intense, close-up power of description, that sense of almost claustrophobic focus, is used in the description of the flood, and in the hushed, step-by-step, fingertip stealth of Nigel in snaring Will in order to have a little talk with him. On the rational level it is nonsense, but physically it is absolutely right. The same attention to detail charms away any reservations about the crazy duel on the bank of the Thames. After the fact, the critical reservations, so deeply tied to the proposition that characters ought to act consistently and reasonably, may take over, but while Murdoch is building these structures of enchantment, the spell is usually unbreachable. It is a form of literary hypnotism.
Bibliography
Baldanza, Frank. Iris Murdoch, 1974.
Byatt, A. S. Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch, 1965.
Dipple, Elizabeth. Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit, 1982.
Gerstenberger, Donna. Iris Murdoch, 1975.
Grant, Annette. Review in Newsweek. LXXIII (January 20, 1969), p. 90.
Time. Review. XCIII (February 21, 1969), p. 84.