The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (Penguin Books)

After recently seeing the movie "Iris" (don't know WHY I didn't see it back then, but missed) I remembered how much at one point I loved to read Iris Murdoch books. This one some people claim was her best. Her style is so formal that it sometimes makes me almost literally say 'come on come on what happened????', but I keep reading. This book is something of a moral touchstone. I felt strangely stirred by several of the characters, and some were stunningly 'modern' (like 'mean girls', or almost famous women) - Personally, I found the story a little bit depressing, but the ending somewhat fitting - but also illuminating the fact that life is just FULL of injustice.

I'd first read Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" and was already a fan of her work. My second selection was the provocatively titled "The Sacred and Profane Love Machine". This is a darkly comic, somewhat fanciful story about what occurs when a charlatan of an analyst is 'outed' for his double-life with two families. One family, his traditional, stable and 'respectable' professional family- the other an erotically charged but since-gone-stale relationship with a woman from a less fortunate background and pathetically poor and terminally envious of his 'other' life. The cuckolded wife is perhaps the most comic character in the novel as she futilely tries to control the situation. In Murdoch's standard style- she has rendered a rich cast of well-developed characters who are each imperfect in their own unique ways. This book is a wild ride of a read that does not disappoint- I was left panting with exhileration as the novel came to a close and I was released from this captivating tale!

Stay with this one because it’s still Iris Murdoch and eventually I could not put it down.

Like her novels "The Black Prince" and "A Word Child", I found this one utterly gripping and unique.Psychoanalyst Blaise Gavender is trying to hold together his double life as a respectable husband to his wife Harriet and as lover to his mistress Emily, but his secret relationship is turning sour under the compromises it forces upon Emily.Ultimately all the numerous characters are suffering or will suffer under the strain of trying to obtain security through a loving relationship as these relationships fail to match each character's heart's desire or inevitably change.Murdoch shows us the beauty and ecstacy of love along with the agony, desperation, and deceit that often accompany it, leaving me alternately admiring, envious, horrified, and pitying.

A volume that speaks of love at every page, adumbrating on love's lights and shadows, but always appealing to love's sense of self-destructiveness and the incessant need of redemption. After reading the novel, one is left with a sense of revolt believing that love is more than a mechanism of self-preservation and and an antidote for sanity. In the end, one wonders which love is sacred, which love is profane. If humans are mere clockwork of love, then we simply succumb to the inevitability of fate.

A magnificent novelist who creates humming throbbing worlds.

This book is a lesser Murdoch work. The plot is a convoluted spin, and the characters are detestable. The protagonist is a hollow and shallow man that brings ruin and destruction to two families. The book starts off promising, but the ending is so problematic and troubling it leaves a very sour taste in the reader's mouth.

Iris Murdoch exposes many hypocrises, ironies, rationalizations, and absurdities that go along with just normal life, apparently, for some. Much of the book is riotously funny. The writing is enjoyable and accessible. I just couldn't think the philandering husband could get any less clued in or more self-centered, but he continued to to the end.

Old copy, quite yellow.

Another really strange book. I enjoyed the various characters' dreams and a lot of the dialogues, but in the end everyone's neverending crises got a little on my nerves. And all these terribly dependent female characters! Pinn was the only one I liked at times, I think.

Great