Iris Murdoch Saw Through Us All — And We Still Haven't Caught Up

Twenty-seven years ago today, Iris Murdoch died — a woman who had already lost herself to Alzheimer's before the world lost her. The cruel irony is almost too novelistic: the philosopher who spent her life dissecting the ways humans deceive themselves was robbed of the very mind that did the dissecting. But here's the thing that should unsettle you: her novels are more disturbingly accurate about human nature now than they were when she wrote them.

Let me put it bluntly. If you haven't read Iris Murdoch, you're navigating modern life without one of the sharpest maps ever drawn. Not a map of geography or politics — a map of the lies you tell yourself every single day. That was her territory: the vast, swampy interior landscape of self-deception, obsession, and the grotesque comedy of people trying to be good while being utterly selfish.

Take "The Sea, the Sea" — her Booker Prize winner from 1978. Charles Arrowby, a retired theater director, moves to a seaside house to write his memoirs and live simply. Within pages, he's stalking his childhood sweetheart, manipulating everyone around him, and constructing an elaborate fantasy in which he's the hero of his own life. Sound familiar? Murdoch wrote the definitive novel about narcissism decades before we had a word for "main character syndrome." Every influencer, every self-mythologizing memoirist, every person who curates their life into a story where they're always the victim or always the savior — Charles Arrowby got there first, and Murdoch made sure we saw the monster behind the performance.

Or consider "Under the Net," her debut from 1954. Jake Donaghue is a young man in London who drifts through life, borrowing flats, borrowing money, borrowing other people's ideas, and assuming he understands the world far better than he does. He's essentially the first literary slacker — decades before Seinfeld, before "The Big Lebowski," before the entire genre of stories about charming men who coast on wit while producing nothing. But Murdoch didn't just invent the type. She X-rayed it. Jake's problem isn't laziness; it's that he lives inside a net of language and theory that prevents him from actually touching reality. He talks about life instead of living it. In 2026, when we process every experience through tweets and stories and hot takes before we've even finished feeling it, Jake Donaghue is less a character than a prophecy.

And then there's "The Black Prince" — arguably her masterpiece, and the book I'd hand to anyone who thinks literary fiction is boring. Bradley Pearson, a blocked writer in his fifties, falls catastrophically in love with the twenty-year-old daughter of his literary rival. It's obsessive, it's inappropriate, it's described with such ferocious intensity that you feel genuinely uncomfortable — and then Murdoch pulls the rug out from under everything with a series of contradictory postscripts that make you question every word you've just read. She published this in 1973 and essentially invented the unreliable narrator thriller that writers like Gillian Flynn would later ride to bestseller lists. Except Murdoch did it while also meditating on Shakespeare, Hamlet, the nature of art, and whether erotic love can ever be anything other than a sophisticated form of delusion.

Here's what makes Murdoch different from almost every other "serious" novelist: she was actually fun. Her books are stuffed with Gothic absurdity — people falling into rivers, dogs being kidnapped, bizarre love triangles and quadrilaterals and shapes that geometry hasn't named yet. Characters behave with the overwrought intensity of soap opera stars while thinking with the precision of Oxford dons. Because Murdoch understood something that too many literary writers forget: humans are ridiculous. We are messy, horny, contradictory creatures who philosophize about goodness while plotting petty revenge. She didn't judge us for it — much. She just showed us, with a kind of horrified affection.

What people tend to forget is that Murdoch was a genuine philosopher, not in the casual "she thought deep thoughts" sense, but in the published-serious-works-of-moral-philosophy sense. Her book "The Sovereignty of Good" remains one of the most important ethical texts of the twentieth century. Her central argument — that true morality requires "attention," the patient, ego-free contemplation of reality as it actually is, rather than as we wish it to be — threads through every novel she wrote. It's a devastatingly simple idea. And it's devastatingly hard to practice. Every Murdoch protagonist fails at it. Most of us fail at it daily.

This is why she matters in 2026, perhaps more than she did in her own lifetime. We live in an age of curated selves and algorithmic mirrors, where technology has perfected the art of showing us exactly what we want to see. Murdoch spent twenty-six novels and several philosophical treatises arguing that this is the root of all moral failure — not malice, not cruelty, but the simple human tendency to see what we want instead of what is there. She called it "the fat relentless ego." Social media didn't invent that ego. It just gave it a ring light and a comments section.

The biographical details are well known by now, partly thanks to Richard Eyre's 2001 film "Iris," with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet. The brilliant student at Oxford, the affairs with both men and women — including a passionate entanglement with Elias Canetti — the long, unconventional marriage to John Bayley, and the devastating final years of Alzheimer's that stripped everything away. Bayley's memoir of those years is almost unbearable to read: the greatest mind of her generation reduced to watching Teletubbies. But even that horror carries a strange Murdochian resonance. She had always written about the destruction of the ego, the stripping away of pretense. Alzheimer's accomplished literally what her philosophy advocated metaphorically — and proved, with terrible clarity, that the ego's destruction without wisdom or choice is not enlightenment. It is annihilation.

So what do you do with Iris Murdoch twenty-seven years after her death? You read her. Not as a duty, not as an exercise in canonical box-checking, but because she wrote the funniest, strangest, most psychologically violent novels in the English language — and because every single one of them will make you catch yourself in the act of being exactly the kind of self-deceiving fool she spent her life anatomizing. That uncomfortable recognition? That's not a bug. That's the whole point. Murdoch didn't write to comfort us. She wrote to make us see. And if you can finish "The Sea, the Sea" without a small, cold shock of self-recognition, then congratulations — you're either a saint or you weren't paying attention.

Twenty-seven years gone, and the fat relentless ego is fatter and more relentless than ever. Iris Murdoch is still the best doctor we've got — even if the diagnosis always hurts.