![]() The Black Prince is a complicated tale with an unreliable narrator who may or may not be making his story up out of whole cloth. Two people can perceive the same person very differently, a concept Murdoch explores more fully in The Black Prince. Is it marriage that is so depthless? Or is it just that we can never fully comprehend any intimate connection between two people, especially one which has existed for decades? Two people can perceive the same event very differently. ![]() A string of acrimoniously-ended relationships. Often this opinion is espoused by a character who has never been married. Private here is a synonym for inscrutable. Marriages factor heavily in all three stories and there are frequent remarks by one or other characters about what "private" places marriages are. The Sea, The Sea and The Black Prince are both "written" by the main characters, as memoirs at the end of their lives. Letters feature periodically in each of the stories. ![]() Her main characters find their downfall, and sometimes redemption, through their faults. Each of Murdoch's stories is centered around one character with some egregious emotional flaw: selfishness, extravagant insecurity, obsessiveness, misogyny, an inability to see other people as human beings. ![]() The single star rating only applies to The Black Prince. ![]() I did separate reviews for The Sea, The Sea and A Severed Head (which were great!), so this is going to focus on The Black Prince and Murdoch's general style in this review. ![]()
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