Iris Murdoch was a true 20th century great.

From a 1975 review published in Kirkus:
"There is an inescapable air of casuistry about Murdoch's plots: it's not hard to imagine her as a 17th-century Jesuit or Jansenist, settling suppositious moral hashes with the most enviable certainty. Here, in one of her rare first person narratives, she gives us Hilary Burde, a fortyish civil servant whose rages and obsessions stem partly from the hideously deprived Calvinist childhood he escaped through a talent for languages, partly from the inexpiable horror of having caused the death of another man's wife--an event which ended his promising Oxford career and sent him into a decade of grotesque self-thwarting. Gunnar, the wronged widower, reappears remarried but as paralyzed as Hilary by the events of twenty years ago. Through the agency of an unfathomable half-Indian servant, Gunnar's second wife begins an equivocal intrigue with Hilary on the pretext of getting Gunnar to come to terms with his feelings about Hilary and Anne's death. The moral imperatives of the developing situation are perceived in contradictory terms by Hilary and his small circle of confederates: a persistent, half-wanted mistress; a placid co-worker and his effusively solicitous wife; a rancorous homosexual friend; the beautiful and mysterious servant; his unpresentable but adored sister and her humbly devoted fiance. Murdoch gives us all the machinery, and then some, for a casus conscientiae of the most perverse, contradictory, and surreal complexity--in a subjectively perceived, post-Christian universe where moral impasses obstinately continue to exist and to have consequences, but no canon law can help us predict them. The familiar Murdochian materials are all here, but the sum total is less than a resounding triumph. One can see themes and motifs being applied to events like traction to an elbow; the first person narrative often seems like a have-your-cake-and-eat-it compromise between limited fictional point of view and free rein for desired stylistic effects. (On the other hand, Hilary's compulsion for scheduling gives the book a neat, obvious, and effective structure.) Murdoch cannot be less than maddeningly challenging, but one puts this down feeling that only some of the goods have been delivered." ( )

The best Murdoch I've read so far. Hilary Burde falls victim a second time to a precedented catastrophe.

A strange book focused on a strange self-obsessed central character who is our narrator. Do we empathise with him, or laugh at his obsessions? We certainly pity those who enjoy / endure his weird fix patterns of seeing this person on a Tuesday, that person on a Thursday.. Do we ponder on what will happen next as the book so suddenly ends without a clear resolution - almost as though Murdoch has herself got tired with her character and seeks a way to stop writing about him.
Whatever. Having struggled to get into the book I became fascinated to know what comes next and - from time to time - laughed out loud. ( )

Only Iris Murdoch can take what is basically a melodramatic soap opera and mold it into a serious drama. The first person narrator is an unpleasant , lonely,, socially inept, single, middle aged man botches and mangles multiple love relationships both with and between other characters. He eventually learns some painful lessons. I like Murdoch's writing quite a bit. Very good read. ( )

Not all stories have happy endings, but I'm hard put to think of a novel whose beginning is so depressing in its particulars as "A Word Child." Hillary Burde is an unhappy, isolated man working at a low-level position in an anonymous government department. Although he's a survived an unhappy childhood and is an unlikely Oxford graduate, he's also not the kind of unhappy character you're likely to feel a lot of sympathy for. An admitted bully with a drinking problem, he's controlling, self-involved, an obsessed with a very terrible mistake he made in his past. In a day when lots of novels read like slightly fictionalized self-help books, Murdoch's decision to make Hillary as unlikable as he is seems almost an act of courage.

The easiest reading of "A Word Child" is that it has to do with Hillary's past and how he copes with it when characters that know of his mistakes suddenly reappear in his life. I tend to think of it, however, as sort of a literary lab experiment to see what the lack of love and affection might do to a human being over time. Hillary's life isn't just unhappy, it's downright bleak, and the novel's setting -- a grey, cold foggy London winter -- fits it perfectly. He's a sort of case study in alienation, his emotions so starved that he doesn't much resemble a too many other literary characters I've met. Suffice it to say that if you find yourself identifying too closely with him, you should probably seek out professional help.

Alienation tends to be thought of as a fairly modern condition, but there are ways in which "A Word Child" is rather old fashioned: it was published, after all, right before personal computers became commonplace. All the big themes of English literature: class, love, revenge and marriage, have a big role to play, and it's slightly disorienting to see how much of the action takes place via personally delivered letters. Hillary, an "examination success story" is allowed to forget that he's always something of a curiosity when he meets with the people he used to know at Oxford. It's also, as I mentioned above, something of a classic London novel: Hillary rides the Underground obsessively and knows the city's streets better than some of its taxi drivers probably do. Much of the novel takes place in Whitehall in the very shadow of Big Ben. Even if they're not particularly interested in its thematic content, "A World Child" might find fans among Anglophiles and Londoners in exile.

Lastly, I should stress that while the world is full of unhappy people, Hillary's better educated and more articulate than most: he's the result of a bright future gone terribly awry. Murdoch's not afraid to write him, either. Her prose is dense, searching, erudite and yet perfectly flowing and balanced. I suppose it's a style that might be out of fashion now, but the book makes plain how finely the author honed her craft. It could, I suppose, be shorter, but why should it? Hillary is, by his own admission, a product of words, and, as the novel goes on, Murdoch shows him becoming increasingly aware of how his own choices -- the constraints that he has placed on his own life -- have made him and the few people he knows very unhappy. This is easy to say, but these realizations take time, so it seems appropriate, sometimes, that Murdoch take four hundred leisurely pages to do it.

In short, "A Word Child," though it offers some crumbs of absurd humor, is not a happy book about happy people. Murdoch, truth be told, never aims to give it the sort of resolution that might offer happiness as a prize to be sought. But it's a impressively wrought study in painful self-containment, a clear-eyed description of, as the saying goes, some people build for themselves. It's less overtly philosophical than I expected, but still a wholly admirable novel. I'm off to read something a bit more cheery now, thanks. ( )