Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch
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| Book: | Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch |
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| Author: | John Bayley |
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| Publisher: | Abacus Uk |
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Reviews
Amazon.com
“Like being chained to a corpse, isn’t it?”
This is a memoir, not a biography, with obvious resonance. John Bayley, former Professor of English at Oxford, and Iris Murdoch, philosopher and author, have been married for more than 45 years. She has shown the degenerative effects of Alzheimer’s Disease for the last four years. The words quoted above were not, needless to say, his. He chronicles a shared experience that can no longer be shared except with those outside of it, and as such is vital for him as he copes, rather than grieves. He purposefully blurs the boundaries of past and present as he describes the marriage of two brilliant intellectuals, determinedly unworldly and collegiate, mixing wine and water (they are serial dippers) throughout Europe as they serenely move “closer and closer apart”.
When Iris’s intellect deteriorates her dependency inevitably increases, and they are “sailing into the dark” (her words) until the end of the book, when Bayley contends that the voyage is over, and they have both arrived somewhere. It is the spiritual answer to her perpetual question: “When are we going?”, and provides a quietly uplifting resolution. John Bayley has written a magnificent paean to their love. Without underplaying the realities of living with someone with Alzheimer’s, he writes in a moving and dignified way, without sentimentality, of a woman rather than a condition, who is still every bit his wife, if even more his dependent. He believes that their marriage released the child in Iris; now they watch Teletubbies together, wordlessly secure. —David Vincent
Related works
Iris: Music from the Motion Picture
James Horner was faced with an unusual challenge when he composed the score for Iris, a film about Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease. In the movie, two actresses play the role of Murdoch, and scenes constantly shift between those showing the novelist as a young woman, played by Kate Winslet, and as an old, dying woman, played by Judi Dench. Horner solves the musical continuity problem of jumping backward and forward in time by writing solo violin parts that echo Murdoch’s emotions and tie the past and future together. Joshua Bell does an…
