The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch

First published: 1957

Type of work: Philosophical romance

Time of work: The mid-1950’s

Locale: The counties of Surrey and Dorset, England, and London

Principal Characters:

• Bill Mor, a middle-aged schoolmaster
• Nan Mor, his wife
• Donald Mor, his son, who is in his last term in the school at which Bill Mor teaches
• Felicity Mor, his teenage daughter
• Rain Carter, a young portrait painter of some reputation

The Novel

Bill Mor, vaguely dissatisfied with his life, is faced with possibilities and choices which he could not have expected. The novel begins, appropriately, with Bill in verbal combat with his wife, Nan Mor, over his future and the future of their children. Mor wants to run for Parliament; Nan does not want him to do so. He wants his children to go to the university; she sees it as a waste of money. It is clear that Nan usually wins such arguments, and that Bill usually backs down and apologizes. He is determined, this time, to have his way.

The matter is complicated by the arrival at the school of Rain Carter, an attractive young woman with a budding career as a painter. She has been commissioned to paint the portrait of the recently retired headmaster, Mr. Demoyte, a close friend and mentor of Mor. Carter and Mor, who are naturally brought together in the closed community of St. Bride’s school, fall in love.

Both of Mor’s children become aware of their father’s infatuation and disapprove of their father’s conduct. Felicity, who believes that she possesses mystical powers, and who has an ambiguous, almost surreal connection with a gypsylike figure who is always crossing the lovers’ path, sets out to break the amorous spell by improvising her own mystical ceremonies. Her brother, less interested in and committed to imaginative flights but not entirely unbelieving, spurns his father and withdraws to carry out a plan that he has made with a friend to commit a serious school prank as a last farewell to the school.

The novel becomes a battle between Mor, his family, his friends, and some acquaintances for, in a sense, possession of his life. He is willing to give up his past and his present responsibilities, even his ambition to run for office, in order to go away with Rain Carter. She is willing to take him, despite the difference in their age. Nan, who in the past has always been abruptly dismissive of his needs, now starts to think seriously about their life together. Demoyte, his old supporter, urges him to escape, but Bledyard, the school art master, who may also love Rain, brings him up sharply to his Christian and family duties.

While the battle rages, the Demoyte picture is finished, and at the presentation ceremonies, Nan suddenly announces that Mor is to run for office. Rain Carter has never heard of this and is so distressed by it that she flees, just as the news comes that two boys, climbing the school tower, are dangerously stranded. One of them is Donald Mor. They are rescued, but only just, and Donald also disappears and does not return until his chance of sitting for university entrance has passed. Mor is saddened, but Donald is not, since he had no desire to go to college.

Ultimately, Mor accepts his fate. He will stand for office, his son will apprentice as a jeweler, and his daughter, who does want to go on with her education, will be allowed to do so. Rain Carter has gone off to France and presumably a career of high reputation; Bill Mor will go to Parliament; and the best of a bad job will be made of the peculiar period of high and dangerous adventure by all concerned.

The Characters

Iris Murdoch tends to be very conservative in the manner in which she develops characters. She eschews subtle ways of providing information in favor of full-faced histories of her major figures, outlining their background, education, gifts, liabilities, desires, and failures in rather barefaced passages of exposition, usually as early in the novel as she can. Her characters are thus, in a sense, fully known from the beginning; then she quickly begins the business of testing them in action.

Bill Mor is the central figure, and the third-person narration sticks close to him. In the main, it is his point of view which prevails, a technique which works, since the novel is primarily about him, and he is relatively uncomplicated, sensible, and keenly sensitive not only to his own problems but also to those of others. Occasionally, the point of view will shift, if only for short periods. Nan’s reaction to this sudden change in her husband is generously explored as she tries to deal with it (and with the concomitant realization that Bill’s best friend, Tim Burke, is willing to take her on if Bill abandons her). Murdoch, however, pulls away from her before she has fully worked out her plan to fight back, perhaps because Murdoch (and this is not unusual for her) is determined to keep an aspect of the plot a secret until she can use it dramatically. In short, occasionally in Murdoch’s work, depth of characterization must give way to plot. There is some intimation of high dramatic interest with Felicity in her unhappiness over her father’s affair, and her ceremony of exorcism is lovingly detailed, but again it is only a fleeting connection.

The other characters are teasingly sketched in; there is only a dim sense of Rain Carter, perhaps sufficient to understand why Mor is attracted to her and her life of artistic creation and freedom from social and financial obligation. Yet how she feels, what she is really thinking, particularly at the end, is not worked out. Three other characters are quite three-dimensional in potential but are only used as foils in Bill Mor’s dilemma: Demoyte has all the force and power of an older man who knows more than he cares to say; Tim Burke, the jeweler friend and manipulator of Mor’s political life, a sensitive artisan in his elegant, intriguing shop, suffering his hopeless, honorable love for Nan, is teasingly interesting, and Bledyard, who carries the ethic of the novel, has dramatic weight which is very rarely exhibited. Yet Murdoch often peoples her novels with characters who in themselves are larger than their function. In other novels, less modestly confined, she gives these secondary characters much more to do and is usually obsessively concerned with one character.

Critical Context

The third novel of Iris Murdoch’s career (which began in the early 1950’s), The Sandcastle is much simpler than most of her work. The novels preceding it had stronger leanings toward the bizarre, which Murdoch likes to mix into realistic materials, and later novels can indulge in extravagant mixes of several, seemingly unmatchable genres. This work is so close to that of paperback romance that it is the least admired of her stories. What Murdoch brings to it is her deft way with narrative, her peculiar capacity for turning the innocent into wild adventure (as in the car and stream incident) and for building crisis into slowly mounting, fastidiously detailed excitement (as in the rescue from the spire). What saves Murdoch from falling into pulp fiction is the way in which she can fuse serious ideas (in this novel, on the matter of personal freedom versus responsibility to others, and, to a lesser but interesting extent, on the nature of art and its relation to reality) with that which makes popular fiction so seductive: its blatant manipulation of narrative, in which anything can happen at any moment and usually does.

For all its modesty, The Sandcastle opens up, in a manner which had not been done before in Murdoch’s first two novels, the theme of the family, which will become a major concern for her in future novels. Mor’s family is rather tidily handled, primarily because it is Mor’s problems which predominate here. Donald may make the gesture of going right up in the air and then running off when he is rescued, and Felicity may retreat into her vaguely sinister imaginative world to assuage her grief, but it is Mor himself who is the primary focus of the novel. The potential for wider range, however, is there, and in later works much more will be made of the problems of other family members.

What is also in a barely sketched shape in this work is the way in which the family nucleus may be extended to include others. In novels such as Bruno’s Dream (1969), the family retainers will be quite as important, quite as independently interesting as blood relatives. Tim, for example, with his love of Nan and his deep personal and political commitment to Mor, is just on the edge of gaining an independent life in the five-finger exercise in which Murdoch engages. There is a whole line of narrative and thematic interest in him and his relation to the Mors which is, rather infuriatingly, warmed up and then arbitrarily closed down.

In later novels, this almost Dickensian use of the extended family will be met and manipulated with great success.

Bibliography

Allen, Walter. The Modern Novel in Britain and the United States, 1964.

Byatt, A. S. Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch, 1965.

Dipple, Elizabeth. Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit, 1982.

Wolfe, Peter. The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and Her Novels, 1966.