Bonus discipulus

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish novelist and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.  In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

During the 70s, 80s, and 90s I read several of Murdoch's novels and then I found new authors and moved on.  It is only with my self-appointed challenge to read the entire Booker Shortlist that some titles unread by me have come to my attention.  The Good Apprentice, her 22nd novel published in 1985,  is one such.

Edward Baltram, a college student living in London, gives his best friend Mark a sandwich laced with a hallucinogenic drug for a joke. After Mark, still high, falls to his death from a window, Edward is wracked with guilt and depression — worsened by daily letters from Mark's mother cursing him as a murderer.  All this action takes place in the first chapter and is a memorable  opening.  I am reminded of the opening chapter in Enduring Love where a devastating and irrevocable event changes the course of personal histories.

In search of his father, Jesse, Edward sets off for Seegard, the family home, away from the harsh reality of London. As Edward progresses through the novel, he revives somewhat, thanks to the love of his eccentric father and his extended family of supportive women. He eventually finds, however, that he must come to terms with Mark's death.

Meanwhile, Edward's stepbrother Stuart Cuno decides to give up his studies and goes in search of the "pure" life of an aesthete, to his family's bewilderment.   He abandons a promising academic career and takes up celibacy and chastity.  Interfering friends and relations question his sincerity, his sanity and his motives.  Stuart has a close bond with thirteen-year-old Meredith, the son of Thomas and Midge McCaskerville.

While Edward in order to become Good seeks redemption and sometimes contemplates suicide, Stuart seeks salvation, and Midge is having an affair with her husband's best friend, Harry Cuno - stepfather to Edward and father to Stuart. Her passionate love affair comes to a head after two years when she is disgraced publicly and falls unexpectedly in love with Stuart. Left with a difficult decision, Midge turns to Edward for support.

A convoluted web of complicated family relationships.  This is the stuff of Murdoch.