Plot:
Bill Mor is married to Nan, although whether it’s happily is debatable. They have two children, Donald and Felicity. Bill teaches History and Latin, although he is thinking of going into politics – against Nan’s wishes. So far, so boring. When his friend and the former headmaster of the school Demoyte contracts a young painter, Rain Carter, to paint his portrait, Bill is amused at first – and then in love, head over heels. This throws his entire life and that of his family in disarray.

The Sandcastle is beautifully written, but I struggled a lot with its subject matter. It has something of a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl Vibe (although it preceeds the naming of this trope by several decades) and I had trouble sympathizing with Mor and believing Rain’s response.

Read more on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2023/01/28/the-sandcastle-iris-murdoch/ ( )

Darkly witty and with Murdoch's driven prose, this story reflects embedded southern Englishness - the protagonist is an English schoolteacher who cannot escape his own destiny due to his own cowardice or self-restrictions. An easy, quick and enjoyable read. ( )

After all, he thought, I can be guided by this. Let me only make clear what I gain, and what I destroy.

My very first Murdoch exceeded all my expectations. I frankly hardly know where to start, or even what I want to say. Funny, suspenseful, a loud, relentless hymn of creation and destruction. Rarely does one see such brilliant harmony between plot, character development, and hard work on developing the underlying themes. (The word "themes", naturally, said in Stephen Fry's voice)

There are so many things, subtle and not so subtle, that contribute to the way the story is put together perfectly...it feels like an extremely human, emotional text and an arcane treatise on wishing impossible things, both at the same time. In this way the book is much like a painting itself.

I thought of the plot as a bit of a landslide - the worlds of adults, of children, the private and the public, rolling, sliding towards the point of no return, colliding, changing.

Perhaps it is rather that we feel our own face, as a three-dimensional mass, from within - and when we try in a painting to realize what another person's face is, we come back to the experience of our own.

Art and its creation (the debate on how to paint a face) are juxtaposed with the forces that make and break the life of the individual (how to treat other people, love, religion, scruples). Rain is to leave after she finishes the portrait - so decisions are to be made on both counts. Just like the commissioned portrait must be finished, so must the protagonists decide how they are to leave the stage and how much they are prepared to leave behind.

Beautiful, descriptive, thrilling - a stroke of genius.


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Continuing my attempt to read all the Murdoch novels in chronological order, this is her 3rd book. It is more local and domestic than the previous two, but still has elements of magic. It is set in a school and is really just the cliched tale of a teacher falling in love with a young artist. But it's told so well, I love the characters, the situations and the balance between seriousness and farce. ( )

My favorite Murdoch so far. There was an incessant current of vitality in the novel, even the henpecked and the discarded found itself surged and embraced. That's a feat in itself. ( )