A Word Child by Iris Murdoch
"A Word Child" by Iris Murdoch is a novel centered around Hilary Burde, a man grappling with the consequences of a tragic accident from his past that altered the course of his life. Two decades prior, Burde's affair with Gunnar Jopling's wife led to her death in a car accident, which not only shattered his personal aspirations but also left him mired in guilt and self-loathing. Living a mundane life in civil service, he is accompanied by his supportive sister Crystal and a few friends, yet he often expresses a pessimistic outlook that complicates his relationships.
The narrative unfolds through Burde's introspective first-person perspective, revealing his struggles with self-identity and his complicated interactions with other characters, including Lady Kitty, Jopling’s second wife, with whom he unexpectedly falls in love. Tension arises as Burde navigates his feelings of guilt, the potential for reconciliation with Jopling, and the dynamics of his relationships, leading to unforeseen consequences. Murdoch's exploration of themes such as love, guilt, and the search for redemption is interwoven with a cast of vividly drawn characters, creating a rich tapestry of emotional complexity. Despite moments of absurdity and philosophical musings, the novel ultimately reflects on the human condition and the intricate web of interpersonal connections.
A Word Child by Iris Murdoch
First published: 1975
Type of work: Psychological romance
Time of work: The early 1970’s
Locale: London, England
Principal Characters:
Hilary Burde , a middle-aged civil servantCrystal Burde , his sisterGunnar Jopling , a former friend of Hilary Burde, now a senior civil servantLady Kitty Jopling , Jopling’s second wifeArthur Fisch , a minor civil servant, in love with Crystal BurdeTommy , a former girlfriend of Hilary Burde
The Novel
Hilary Burde has buried himself in a modest civil service job in expiation for having caused a terrible tragedy some twenty years earlier, which he has kept secret ever since. He lives a life of constant bitterness and recrimination, barely relieved by the love of his sister Crystal and the attention of a few friends who are prepared to put up with his constant, vituperative pessimism. Surprisingly, although not a handsome man, he is capable of eliciting deep affection, sometimes love, from others, while refusing to give much of anything back but constant abuse.
His deep melancholy is intensified by the fact that the tragedy caused by him not only killed the woman he loved but also destroyed his academic career and his ambition to take care of his sister and himself in dignity and comfort. Their mother died while they were young children, and Burde, a troublesome boy, spent most of his early life in an orphanage, separated from his sister. In his teens, his skill for languages was discovered, and he won a scholarship to Oxford and was asked to stay on as a fellow. It was at that time that the disaster occurred.
Some twenty years later, Burde learns that Gunnar Jopling is the new head of the government department in which Burde has a very minor appointment. It was Jopling’s wife, with whom Burde was having an affair, who was killed in the car driven by Burde. Her death caused both men to leave Oxford, after which Jopling became a distinguished civil servant, while Burde buried himself in a job far below his abilities. Now, he has to decide whether to stay on the job and confront the man who hates him, or leave.
Jopling’s second wife, Lady Kitty, encourages Burde to face her husband, telling him that Jopling has spent many miserable years thinking about the accident, so much so that he has required psychiatric help. She thinks Burde might help him and that he might, at the same time, help himself. Burde’s sister thinks that such a confrontation could be dangerous and reveals a long-held love for Jopling which complicates matters further. In a typically wild twist of Murdochian mischief, Burde falls in love with Lady Kitty.
Surrounding the principals are a small group of characters who are also involved emotionally with Hilary or his sister and who insist on being dealt with, despite the fact that Burde is hardly able to decide clearly what he should do about anything and is, much of the time, half of a mind simply to disappear. Lady Kitty, however, has considerable power over Burde, and he tries to deal with Jopling. The first meeting is a failure, yet eventually the two men come to something like a reconciliation; unfortunately, this delicate truce is ruined, in part by Jopling’s suspicion of the man who destroyed his early life and in part by Burde’s dangerous infatuation with Lady Kitty and her response to it. Talk descends to physical attack, and in the confusion, Lady Kitty dies. Burde, for all of his good intentions, has caused the death of a second Jopling wife.
Again, Burde and Jopling go out into the world: Jopling becomes a politician and a junior minister of the Crown, and Burde, who has learned that life must go on, gets another modest job but seems less self-engrossed and self-pitying than before. His sister gets married, and Burde’s old lover, Tommy, insists that sooner or later she will talk him into marriage.
The Characters
Iris Murdoch’s usual desire to be everywhere and control everything in her novels, via an omniscient authorial voice, is restrained in A Word Child. It is Hilary Burde, as first-person narrator, who tells the story in a rather loose form of a journal, titling the chapter divisions by the days of the week. This is fitting since Burde is not only the book’s major character but also the self-obsessed center of all the action in the novel. He is not, however, so concerned about himself that he fails to see his own limitations, and he reveals considerable understanding of the other characters as well. Moreover, Burde is clearly aware of the fact that he is writing a story, and, as a result, he indulges himself in that richness of detail and background which is a mark of Murdoch’s own style of character exposition.
The manner in which Burde is involved with the other characters is helpful not only in revealing them fully but also in exploring closely their relation to Burde. As much as he possibly can, Burde sequesters his acquaintances, seeing them one at a time on specific days of the week. However rudimentary this may seem out of context, it works surprisingly well as a natural inclination of Burde’s strange personality. He likes to think of himself as antipathetic to human associations, but he is oddly gregarious, if mainly on a one-to-one basis.
The use of the first-person narrator allows for considerable rumination, and much of the novel is taken up with the subject of the self-condemned man who is determined to wallow in his misery while constantly protesting against the injustice of it all. Burde’s constant, tedious whining tends to make him unsympathetic, even when he protests his concern for others, particularly his sister Crystal, but the intrusion of so many interesting characters (including a onetime recording star with spiritual ambitions) alleviates the sense that Burde leads a boring life. For example, two minor characters, a strange pair at the office, Witcher and Farbottom, are a comic bonus seemingly right out of a Harold Pinter play, with their comic turns of inane badinage and their game of musical desks.
It remains, however, to question the credibility of Murdoch’s characters. Often, while they have been well drawn, rounded, believable, their actions take a sudden turn for the unlikely—especially if the scene involves sex. Burde, for example, has been devastatingly caustic about love, when he simply falls into it suddenly and makes a fool of himself in a way that is inconsistent with what is known about him thus far. Other abrupt, arbitrary love affairs in Burde’s life are quite as common, and his dalliance with Lady Kitty’s maid, Biscuit, begun before he met Kitty but continued after, hardly makes sense in the light of his infatuation with Biscuit’s mistress. At times, Murdoch seems unable to take her characters seriously, and sex always has a carte blanche to carry them into unreality.
As a result, her characters are situated half in reality and half in romance, and a reading of their conduct by the usual standards of credibility will often not work, for it is not meant to work. The dramatic tension between Burde and Jopling, however, shows how true-to-life Murdoch can be, when it suits her purposes. Murdoch is also technically deft in ways which may not be noticed: An examination of the use of letters to reveal character is fruitful; Tommy, in particular, is richly revealed in her correspondence with Burde.
Critical Context
The banality of the terrible secret, drawn without apology from pulp romance, does tend to undermine the critical response to this work, and the fusion of Peter Pan (laid on thickly) with subtle philosophical and psychological ideas is not entirely seamless. A Word Child, Murdoch’s seventeenth novel, follows in her tradition of deliberately courting aesthetic failure by taking realistically credible characters and then, without a blink, forcing them through Alice’s looking glass into formulaic patterns of conduct and (as it is said in the novel itself) extraordinary moments when human conduct shoots off at a tangent. A Word Child is a novel which skids about and is sometimes deeply true-to-life, sometimes very wise, and sometimes sheer nonsense, but always engaging.
Bibliography
Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre, 1975.
Bayley, John. The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality, 1960.
Bromwich, David. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXIII (August 24, 1975), p. 21.
Byatt, A. S. Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch, 1965.
Dipple, Elizabeth. Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit, 1982.
Newsweek. Review. LXXXVI (August 25, 1975), p. 66.