![]() Mor exists in a land of motorways and identical houses in which the local woods give a safe flavour of bucolic abandon but are still surrounded by ‘the fanned-out lines of the great main roads out of London: the region where the escaping Londoner … says a little doubtfully, “Now at last we are really in the country.”’ ![]() ![]() There is a terrible grey sense of being slightly away from the capital’s beating heart and equally slightly away from its rural wilderness. ![]() The location is tightly controlled, at once uneasily claustrophobic and ordinary, sitcom-like: St Bride’s school, the surrounding commuter-belt streets and countryside, Mor’s unappealing family home on a housing estate and the former headmaster Demoyte’s somewhat grander, older house. The set-up is simple, even banal in its familiarity: a Surrey schoolmaster called Mor, who’s married to a woman called Nan, falls in love with an artist called Rain Carter who’s visiting to paint a portrait of the school’s retired headmaster, Demoyte. Iris Murdoch’s sprightly early novel The Sandcastle, first published in 1957, is a suburban satire and a domestic tragedy, a playful glimpse into the faded dreams of a provincial marriage and a warning about the price of romanticism. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |