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The Sandcastle: Vintage Classics Murdoch Series Paperback – July 4, 2019

by Iris Murdoch (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars 240 ratings
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VINTAGE CLASSIC MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BIDISHA

‘It’s all dry sand running through the fingers.’

When Bill Mor falls in love with Rain Carter he discovers a new way of being and a new joy in the world and his surroundings. To be with Rain he must abandon his prosaic life as a schoolmaster, his domineering wife Nan and his troubled teenaged children. He must draw on the powers of selfishness, hatred and anger in order to make the final break. But what love could survive all that violence?
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  1. Print length
    368 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Vintage Classics
  4. Publication date
    July 4, 2019
  5. Dimensions
    5.04 x 0.87 x 7.01 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1784875171
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1784875176
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Classics (July 4, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1784875171
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1784875176
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.5 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.04 x 0.87 x 7.01 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 out of 5 stars 240 ratings

About the author

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Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch

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Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was one of the most influential British writers of the twentieth century. She was awarded the 1978 Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, won the Royal Society Literary Award in 1987, and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987 by Queen Elizabeth. Her final years were clouded by a long struggle with Alzheimer's before her passing in 1999.

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Kaleidoscope
    5.0 out of 5 stars Iris, the Movie and Sandcastle
    Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2014
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    Iris Murdoch was a brilliant, yet deeply tormented novelist...If you like English novels, her work is teriffic. In the modern sense, may may find it slow reading...but so is Moby Dick. If you are studying the Brisitsh novel, her work is seminal.
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  • Manfred E. Wolff, Ph.D.
    4.0 out of 5 stars Love and the Mysteries of Existence
    Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2015
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    I am really torn in writing this--on the one hand, the author is one of Britain's greatest post-WWII philosophers and novelists--on the other hand, I wish some of this text had been handed over to a good copy editor. The novel starts out very well--the English "public" school and its faculty and students and the classroom of teacher "Mor" where student "Carde" translates the Latin text of one of the elegies of Propertius urging not to neglect "the joy of life...if you shall have given all your kisses, you will give too few...and for us, who now as lovers hope for so much...perhaps tomorrow's day will close the doom". And this is the story line of the book in which the middle-aged family man Mor and the much younger artist "Rain" fall in love. It's a great story to read in terms of the mysteries of existence, and it's a great love story on any basis. But, dare I say it, the text gets clunkier and clunkier as the many chapters roll on, and I did put the book down for a while. But I finally did finish it, and recommend it to all age groups from high school to old age.
    5 people found this helpful
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  • J C E Hitchcock
    5.0 out of 5 stars The House Upon the Sand
    Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2010
    The last novel by Iris Murdoch which I reviewed for this site, "An Unofficial Rose", has a particularly complex plot, detailing a complicated web of emotional entanglements among a large group of characters. "The Sandcastle", published a few years earlier, is also a psychological study of love and desire, but with a much simpler plot and a much smaller cast of characters.

    The central figure is William Mor, a middle-aged schoolmaster at a public school in Surrey, who is considering standing as the Labour candidate for the neighbouring constituency at the next election. (It is described as a safe Labour seat, although in reality Surrey is, and was even in the fifties, a stronghold of the Conservative Party). He is married with two teenage children, but the marriage is not a happy one; Mor's wife Nan is a cold, domineering personality who is fiercely opposed to her husband's political ambitions. Mor meets, and falls in love with, Rain Carter, a young painter who has come to the school to paint a portrait of Demoyte, the school's former Headmaster, and discovers that his feelings for her are returned. He therefore needs to decide whether to leave his wife for Rain, knowing that if he does so this is likely to spell the end of his career at the school and of his ambitions to enter Parliament.

    The significance of the book's title becomes clear in a scene where Rain is telling Mor about her childhood. She grew up in the South of France, where she attempted to build a sandcastle on the beach, as she had seen children doing in pictures of England. The Mediterranean sand, however, proved too dry, and her sandcastle collapsed in a heap. This image can be seen as symbolic of the relationship between Mor and Rain, whose dreams of future happiness together might prove to be built out of equally unpromising materials. There may also be an intended reference to the passage in St Matthew's Gospel about the "foolish man, which built his house upon the sand".

    Images of moisture and dryness are important in the novel. Rain's Christian name has obvious symbolic connotations; she is like rain falling into the parched desert of Mor's life. Water plays a part in a number of key scenes. In one early chapter Mor manages to drive Rain's car into a river, and the scene, about halfway through, in which they realise their love for one another takes place against the background of a thunderstorm. This storm marks the end of a long, dry summer heatwave which has dominated the first half of the book; again the symbolism is quite clear.

    Besides Rain and Mor there are several others who play an important part in the story. Nan's marriage may not be a very happy one, but she is implacable and determined to use every weapon at her disposal to try and save it. The children Donald and Felicity have both, in different ways, been marked by the marital discord between their parents. Donald is a headstrong, rebellious young man; it is an act of reckless bravado on his part which precipitates the novel's final crisis. Felicity is a strange, fey girl, in thrall to her own private superstitions. She is convinced that she has occult powers and that she can communicate both with the ghost of the family dog, who died two years earlier, and with a supernatural being whom she names Angus. On holiday by the sea (another water image) she performs a bizarre ritual designed to divide her father from Rain.

    Two characters who play lesser, but nevertheless significant, roles in the story are Demoyte and Bledyard, the school art teacher. Demoyte is a close friend of Mor and encourages his relationship with Rain; there is a suggestion that the elderly former Headmaster may be in love with the young woman himself and is using his friend as a vicarious way of fulfilling his own fantasies. Bledyard, on the other hand, urges Mor to remain faithful to Nan; he is partly motivated by his strong religious faith, which tells him that adultery is a sin, but also by a belief that Rain has a vocation as a great painter from which she will be distracted by an unnecessary romantic affair. (Murdoch also uses Bledyard as a vehicle for a debate on the philosophy of art, especially representational art).

    The two most important characters, however, are of course Mor and Rain. Rather surprisingly, given that she was a young woman in her thirties when she wrote the book, Murdoch concentrates more on the middle-aged man than on his younger mistress, who despite her clear intelligence and artistic gifts is portrayed as rather naïve, a girl in search of a father-figure. We learn that Rain's own father, Sidney, who has recently died, was himself a famous painter and a great influence on her life and on the development of her artistic career.

    Mor is, initially, a rather austere figure, portrayed as a man of great integrity with a deep regard for the truth. Although he is a freethinker, who does not share Bledyard's religious views, he nevertheless suffers from guilt over his deceiving Nan- not deceiving her in the sexual sense, for his relationship with Rain is never physically consummated, but deceiving her in the sense that he is concealing the truth from her- and this guilt leads him into a fatal prevarication.

    This was Murdoch's third novel, after "Under the Net" and "Flight from the Enchanter", neither of which are really favourites of mine. "The Sandcastle", however, is in my view her first great novel, in which she admirably demonstrates her gifts for characterisation and psychological analysis.
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Thomas J. Cuddihy
    3.0 out of 5 stars A lively read
    Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2016
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    Give this novel three and a half stars. Four is too generous; three is too miserly. Jim Mor, the protagonist schoolteacher at an English boys’ public school is the prototypical milquetoast, a man dominated by an arrogant wife and nearly always unable to make up his mind about anything of importance in his life. A Labour Party friend encourages him to run for a seat in Parliament which he’s certain to win, but his wife disapproves, and he remains uncommitted. Mor falls hopelessly in love with a very young artist, a girl symbolically named Rain, who returns his love. Much as rain coaxes life to flourish in soil, Rain the artist brings life to the hapless Jim Mor. As he is on the verge of breaking away from his domineering wife, it is she who produces the novel’s final irony. She publicly announces Mor’s candidacy for Parliament, using the ploy to destroy her husband’s relationship with his lover.
    Murdoch has a penchant for including animals and young, innocent children among her casts of characters in many of her novels, and attaching mystical importance to the various things they do. The Sandcastle is filled with dogs having names that signify all kinds of things, and there is a small pet cat with the name Little Bilham, which Murdoch borrowed from a likeable young man who is a minor character in Henry James’s The Ambassadors. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. There is a good deal of mysterious symbolism in all of Murdoch’s novels, though the significance of many symbols strikes me as hard to pin down, if not sometimes, simply playful, as though perhaps Murdoch delights in misleading and confusing her reader with red herrings before steering her story to its end. To her credit, The Sandcastle’s plot is lively, and like many of her other novels, it carries the reader along to a satisfying end.
    But read several of Murdoch’s novels and it becomes clear that as interesting a her stories can be, her characters are largely lacking in flesh and blood. True, many of them are plagued with conflicting emotions, but I find it difficult to believe that the emotions are much more than ideas that describe emotions—love, guilt, envy, disappointment, and what-have-you. Still, ideas are vital to Murdoch. Her characters will keep readers interested to the extent that they signify ideas and perspectives on ideas. We can’t forget that Murdoch was a philosophy don at Cambridge, and despite her disclaimers, echoes of Socratic dialogues are evident in many of her fictions. But in the last analysis, her character are puppets being put through their paces by their author, finally to be put away, lifeless dolls, after we’ve turned each novel’s last page.
    5 people found this helpful
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  • michael cooper
    4.0 out of 5 stars Love Iris Murdoch
    Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2022
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    What can I say, I love Iris Murdoch. Even her average books, such as this, are four star and fascinating to read. If you want to test the waters, though, get 'Under the Net' or 'The Black Prince' both of which are a solid five.
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  • Unautrefemme
    1.0 out of 5 stars Amazon pay attention!
    Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2019
    Amazon get your reviewing act together. Hire an editor. There are two "Sandcastles" under review here, with unintentionally hilarious results.
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  • Arun ganapathy
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in India on October 10, 2016
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    Good
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  • JOHN WHITTLE
    5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful read.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 14, 2018
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    My fifth Iris Murdoch book and the most enjoyable so far. The beautiful setting in terms of time and place engaged me from the first page and the relationship between Mor and Rain was totally absorbing.
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  • ニャン太郎
    4.0 out of 5 stars 便利でよい物でした。
    Reviewed in Japan on September 20, 2015
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    商品は、何の問題もありません。私は、左半身不随のため、ﾍﾟｰｼﾞをめくることに困難が伴います。その為、電子書籍のよさを感じました。
    只、著作権上仕方が無いのかもしれませんが、一部だけでも、印刷ができれば良いと感じました。
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  • Robert G Ellis
    4.0 out of 5 stars Zips along
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 18, 2015
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    I like it. I got a copy that used to be a library book. Interesting looking older edition. It's in good condition for a discarded library book. I sent it to a friend of mine. I'd already read it. I recommended it as a concise, early Murdoch that zips along enjoyably. My friend seems to like the book. I particularly like the first chapter of the book - funny mainly, sad underneath.
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  • Prash
    4.0 out of 5 stars Good
    Reviewed in India on December 10, 2018
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    Good
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