Boring old good and evil

The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch (1966) struck me as very similar to her novel A Fairly Honourable Deafeat, in that it's also very overtly about the struggle between good and evil, and it also has two male centres to represent the two ideals, with all the women and some beta-male types traveling between the two poles (pun intended) to create the action of the novel. It's impossible to miss, even if you tried: they're compared at some crucial moment as being one white and innocent, the other black and threatening. We are given no psychological insight into the evil man, he is learned through glimpses caught by others. He is very sexual, and uses sex variously for control, for revenge, for otherworldly communication. There is a bit more exposure to the good man and his thoughts, although as a person he is strangely undeveloped. His biggest characteristic is that he suffered a lot (concentration camps, refugee camps, then abject poverty in England) after having had a glorious and uber-privileged early childhood. By his own account, he stopped really living a long time ago -- he only tried to survive in a little corner, without possessions or purpose other than bringing up his son, who he isn't close to and who has no respect for him. 


The Time of the Angels (1966) is probably my least favourite of the four Iris Murdoch novels I've read, and I'm not usually a huge fan of hers anyway. I like the easy-read-but-not-empty feel of them. But they lack feeling and psychological depth. Murdoch seems to set her characters up as symbols for ideas, which makes them very artificial representations of human beings. She's very good at detail and complexity that makes things come alive, but all the characters are too much one way or another, too self-conscious and too-frequently philosophical in their conversations and in their desires.