II.
Edward Baltram thinks Mark Wilsden too uptight about mood-altering drugs, which are readily available in their English undergraduate scene. So he slips an alterant into Mark's sandwich, rendering Mark a "helpless victim, giggling and babbling". <1> Edward is quite enjoying his little prank, observing his close friend's "metamorphosis with wicked triumph". The phone rings.
The caller is Sarah Plowmain, a new university acquaintance that Edward finds attractive. Sarah lives in the neighbourhood, and invites Edward over for a drink. Normally, Edward wouldn't leave someone unattended who he has secretly sent on a drug-trip. He gazes at Mark, now blissfully asleep, suggesting he will sleep off the drug. Edward accepts Sarah's invitation.
At Sarah's, Edward is surprised, not unpleasantly, by how Sarah "would immediately undress him and introduce him into her bed". It is during the small-talk following their coupling, that Edward suddenly remembers he should check on Mark, just in case. In the afterglow of his romantic adventure, Edward runs back to his room, "levitated several times upon the glittering pavement."
III.
III.
Mark is gone from Edward's upper floor room. He has fallen from the opened window, past the street, down into the basement level. Mark Wilsden is dead.
The inquiry into Mark's death clears Edward of any criminal culpability. Small comfort to Edward, as grief and guilt overwhelm him. He obsesses that his negligence in leaving Mark in a drugged sleep has led to his death. Mark's mother is more direct. In her grieving rage she writes Edward, accusing him of murder. "You are a murderer. You killed my beloved son, blackening for ever my life and the life of his sister. I wish my hatred could kill you."
IV.
Iris Murdoch's <2> overarching theme in The Good Apprentice is not death, or grief. The theme is eros. Murdoch writes of Edward's eros in his present state. "Sexual desire had left him, he could not conceive of feeling it again"; fallen as Edward has into a deep depression; "the blackness that covered everything, blinding his eyes and annihilating space and time."
In Edward's circle of family and acquaintances, there is the psychiatrist Thomas McCaskerville. He agrees to take Edward on as a patient, and during a session with him, Edward relates a dream he's had. "'I dreamt last night that there was a beautiful enormous butterfly in my room...Then it lighted on my hand...I shook my hand gently to make it fly. Only it didn't fly. It just fell down onto the floor with a thud and lay there dead.' 'Psyche is a butterfly,' murmured Thomas. 'She is loved by Eros.'"
We learn that eros has been making complications in the lives of other main characters in the novel. Midge McCaskerville, for example, is having a secret affair with her husband's friend Harry Cuno. Harry's son Stuart meanwhile has decided to become chaste, renouncing eros altogether. Stuart is an apprentice to redemption, even as Edward's grieving trauma has him an apprentice to atonement.
V.
The novel requires its length to encompass a layered plot, and the treatment of philosophical and religious <3> matter. For all its density the writing is vigorous, and often bears resonant passages. The reader might find themselves turning the pages quickly, so absorbed by Iris Murdoch's The Good Apprentice.
__________
<1>Murdoch, Iris. The Good Apprentice. Viking, 1986.
<2>"Book Learning". BMT, May 2014.
<3>The novel's very first sentence: "I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." (Luke 15:18-19)
In Edward's circle of family and acquaintances, there is the psychiatrist Thomas McCaskerville. He agrees to take Edward on as a patient, and during a session with him, Edward relates a dream he's had. "'I dreamt last night that there was a beautiful enormous butterfly in my room...Then it lighted on my hand...I shook my hand gently to make it fly. Only it didn't fly. It just fell down onto the floor with a thud and lay there dead.' 'Psyche is a butterfly,' murmured Thomas. 'She is loved by Eros.'"
We learn that eros has been making complications in the lives of other main characters in the novel. Midge McCaskerville, for example, is having a secret affair with her husband's friend Harry Cuno. Harry's son Stuart meanwhile has decided to become chaste, renouncing eros altogether. Stuart is an apprentice to redemption, even as Edward's grieving trauma has him an apprentice to atonement.
V.
The novel requires its length to encompass a layered plot, and the treatment of philosophical and religious <3> matter. For all its density the writing is vigorous, and often bears resonant passages. The reader might find themselves turning the pages quickly, so absorbed by Iris Murdoch's The Good Apprentice.
__________
<1>Murdoch, Iris. The Good Apprentice. Viking, 1986.
<2>"Book Learning". BMT, May 2014.
<3>The novel's very first sentence: "I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." (Luke 15:18-19)
