Customer Reviews

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

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The Sacred and Profane Love Machine describes the spectacular unravelling of two families at the hands of Blaise Gavender. The first family is his own "legitimate" one, comprising his wife Harriet and son David. The other is his lover Emily and their son Luca. A weary and cynical novelist,the newly widowed Montague Small, is the unwilling observer and intermediary of this melange. We see a recurring exploration of the meaning of love when the faults of the lovers suddenly become overwhelming and the only options are forgiveness or alienation.As in her other books, Murdoch's characters are complex, their motivations tangled by alternating emotional currents of elation, despair, and futility.

I'd first read Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" and was already a fan of her work. My second selection was the provocatively titled "The Sacred and Profane Love Machine". This is a darkly comic, somewhat fanciful story about what occurs when a charlatan of an analyst is 'outed' for his double-life with two families. One family, his traditional, stable and 'respectable' professional family- the other an erotically charged but since-gone-stale relationship with a woman from a less fortunate background and pathetically poor and terminally envious of his 'other' life. The cuckolded wife is perhaps the most comic character in the novel as she futilely tries to control the situation. In Murdoch's standard style- she has rendered a rich cast of well-developed characters who are each imperfect in their own unique ways. This book is a wild ride of a read that does not disappoint- I was left panting with exhileration as the novel came to a close and I was released from this captivating tale!

Iris Murdoch's books aren't for everyone: they are for sensitive, intellectual, and introspective readers. I read this one a few months ago, and was very impressed with the quality of the writing, the complexity of the characters' personalities, and the pervasive exploration of their different viewpoints and feelings as the story unfolds. Not only is this book intelligent and insightful, it is also entertaining, and never slow-going. My only criticism concerns the two somewhat "fabulous" accidents which take place near the end. An excellent novel nevertheless.

A volume that speaks of love at every page, adumbrating on love's lights and shadows, but always appealing to love's sense of self-destructiveness and the incessant need of redemption. After reading the novel, one is left with a sense of revolt believing that love is more than a mechanism of self-preservation and and an antidote for sanity. In the end, one wonders which love is sacred, which love is profane. If humans are mere clockwork of love, then we simply succumb to the inevitability of fate.

No sex, no violence, but pornography in the highest artistic sense: it is about the irredeemable. The worthless, the evil, the basest and most foul, while simulteneously exalting the pure aspects of love, even as it denigrates them.

If you can keep yourself from shuddering while Pinn speaks to Monty in his bedroom, then you need serious mental attention.