A Word Child (1975) is Iris Murdoch’s 17th novel. Its setting is 70s London. Hilary Burde, a man in his forties from somewhere in the North, works as a minor civil servant. He lives in a “small mean nasty flatlet” in Bayswater with the younger bohemian and dabbler-in-Buddhism Christopher Cather, and fills his evenings with routine social calls, mostly dinners: Thursdays with the prosperous, gossipy Impiatts, then off to his sister Crystal’s bedsit to see off her fiancé, Arthur; Fridays with his girlfriend Thomasina (“Tommy”); Saturdays with Crystal alone; Mondays with debonair, depressed Oxford colleague Clifford Larr; Tuesdays with dull Arthur. (Murdoch’s chapters are divided by and named after the days of the week.) The idea behind all of this, in Hilary’s words, is that “the patterned sameness of the days of the week gave a comforting sense of absolute subjection to history and time”. Liking patterns a great deal more than the contingent unhappinesses of his early childhood—after his mother’s death it involved a very mean aunt, a caravan, and separation from his beloved Crystal—schoolboy Hilary took to languages, grammar really, and went to Oxford on a scholarship to learn more of them. There something terrible happened which is mentioned early and narrated a little later, and Hilary had to leave. One of the people most involved in this “catastrophe” becomes head of Hilary’s office, as Hilary learns on the first Wednesday of the novel. Hilary will fall in love with the wrong woman, again, find out more of what happened twenty years ago, and try to redeem himself for his part in that affair.
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