andamu

Travels with my Aunt

The Nice and The Good

The Counterlife Travels with My Aunt was published in 1968, the same year as The Nice and The Good. This and the fact that they are both novels by highly regarded British authors should allow one some levels of comparison.
When I started Travels with My Aunt I had no idea that I will be reading the Iris Murdoch next, because I had not yet stumbled across the book group. This meant that I had paid far less attention to the questions of "What is good?" and "Who is good?" than I might have done otherwise.
On this point alone the book begs a second reading. An ultra-conventional retired bank manager is swept up into the unconventional lifestyle (and morals) of his aunt, and slowly finds himself valuing less and less his earlier state.
It is not a comedy, but it is peppered with highly comical - at times farcical - situations that are immediately funny, and ironies that more slowly tickle one on a different level, such as his idea that "travels" with his aunt would consist of pleasant outings to seaside towns which is suddenly overturned by her announcement that they are going to Istanbul on the Orient Express.
Of course, much of the travel is a personal journey, discovering his own history, and exploring his life.

A favorite quote:

"One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books."

Travels with my Aunt is far more tied to the era than the Murdoch, although not in a deliberate way; it is merely true that many of the details were unique to that period, such as the airport arrangements, the details of the Orient Express, the regulations, the shape of the world, and even the precise expression of the situations.
The Nice and The Good on the other hand does not seem to belong to any particular era, apart from the fact that the Second World War was in the recent enough past that the adult males all had seen some service in one way or another.
The Counterlife, set in 1978 was published in 1986. This is more difficult to classify, since parts of it are inextricably tied to the period around 1978, and others are universally valid.
Reading it as I did immediately following The Nice and The Good, I automatically latched onto the theme of "Good," but there are a great number of additional themes and situations that seem relevant too. This is where I wish that there were a group where everyone was reading everything synchronously, so that I could run around with my finger closed in the book crying "Look what I've found!"

From The Counterlife:

"Contrary to what you thought, I was never so disdainful of the restrictions under which you flourished and the boundaries you observed as you were of the excessive liberties you imagined me taking."

"[Henry] amazed that he is not in any way guilty or tormented by being so joyously unfaithful to Carol. He wonders how someone who tries to hard to be so good, who is good, can be doing this so easily."

- and my personal favorite:

"He was somehow not quite coarse enough to bow to his desires, and yet not quite fine enough to transcend them."