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Dark Dreams: Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

© Pamela St. Clair

I’m sitting here in a contemplative mood, invoked partially by my ruminations of Iris Murdoch’s strange but engaging novel The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and partially by the first spectacular thick snow fall of the winter season. When else is a gray bleak day so beautiful and soothing? Winter would be my favorite season if every day dawned so magnificently. Soft piano music tinkers away in the background and the candles are lit as the falling snow provides a white gauzy curtain outside. If there were any better atmosphere in which to read and write, I cannot think of what it might possibly be. The only thing I’d rather be doing, perhaps, is skiing. But here I sit, warm and content with a mug of coffee in hand and books by my side.

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is the age-old adultery story: married man falls for younger woman, deceives wife for many years, and in the end, wants to have his cake and eat it too. Wouldn’t it be ideal and so understanding of everyone involved, Blaise Gavender bemoans, if he could stay with his lover and still visit his wife and older son on occasion when it suited him best? Although it may seem like an odd leap from last month’s Elizabethan Othello, both works address questions concerning love and relationships and both provide dark, almost sinister, answers.

I became interested in Murdoch through my studies of A. S. Byatt , a long-time admirer of Murdoch’s work. From what little I have read of Murdoch, similarities between the authors’ works are apparent. Both authors appear as literary heirs of George Eliot in that their novels are chock full of ideas and of numerous characters and their psychological complexities. In that vein, Murdoch considered herself to be somewhat of a realist. Yet, aside from cars and trains, modern culture is strangely absent from Murdoch’s works. Television is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Fast food restaurants do not dot the landscape. As a result, there exists an artificiality about the atmospheres she evokes that distances her characters and their concerns from those of everyday folk so that one would be hard pressed to attach the tag of realism to her work. There is an eccentricity about her characters augmented by their moral and philosophical dialogues. (Photographs or Murdoch imply an eccentricity about the novelist herself with her unkempt hair and rather distant preoccupied stare.) What is it, then, that charms the reader and maintains her interest? For me, it’s Murdoch’s stunning ability to get inside the head of all of her characters, both major and minor, to present them starkly and completely without any authorial intervention or judgment. She offers the quirky neighbors you would love to eavesdrop on from over the fence.

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