The time of the angels [Import] [Mass Market Paperback]

IRIS. MURDOCH (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 235 pages
• Publisher: PENGUIN; 1st THUS edition (1968)
• ASIN: B0000COAVB
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,262,723 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1948 she returned to Oxford where she became a fellow of St Anne's college.

Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year's Honours List. She died in February 1999.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of Murdoch's best--and darkest, June 5, 2006

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Time of the Angels (Mass Market Paperback)

THE TIME OF THE ANGELS is not one of Murdoch's best-known novels, but it is one of her best and most disturbing. Concentrated largely in a London rectory for a church bombed to smithereens during the last war, the novel is concerend, appropriately enough, with the ways in which people can act in the absence of God. The action of the novel--and much of the character's concerns--revolve upon the strange new rector of the church, Carel, who refuses to see anyone other than his daughter, his ward, and his servants in his new station, and who never leaves the house: the novel creates a wonderfully claustrophic atmosphere within the rectory that seems to anticipate that in the toymaker's house in Angela Carter's subsequent little masterpiece THE MAGIC TOYSHOP. (The hazy wintertime in the London streets of Murdoch's novel also act beautifully to counteract the overheated atmosphere inside the rectory.) Although the novel does not end up with as high a body count as some of Murdoch's other works (such as the Jacobean Gothic THE UNICORN), its concluding events are incredibly bleak--though lightened by some final touches of Murdochian humor.

1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars As wierd a novel as you will read this year, July 28, 2005

By 

C. B Collins Jr. (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Time of the Angels (Mass Market Paperback)

This is certainly a wierd story. A dominating, rude, destructive Anglican Priest has become an atheist preaching wild sermons to his disturbed and dissappearing parrishoners. Yet his dominance and control keep a solor system of lesser weakling personalities tied to him. Carel's behavior throughout the book is destructive yet his apologist daughter, Muriel, keeps making excuses for him, even when she finds that her invalid cousin, Elizabeth, is actually her father's illegitimate daughter with his sister-in-law and he is having sex with this young sickly woman that he knows is his daughter.

The parrish and parsonage are full of hidden passages and peep holes so that everyone can spy on Carel's misdeeds.

His brother Marcus continues to make contact with Carel, continually is rebuffed, and then thinks he is enlightened by this process by the wise older brother, Carel, who actually could care less whether his younger brother lives or dies.

Interestingly, there is a beautiful young amoral Russian boy, Leo, living in the parsonage with his father,who is just as amoral and is also forgiven because of his youth and beauty. I found it interesting that Murdoch would have the read be repulsed by the older Carel yet forgive the younger Leo, when they are both birds of a feather.

What an odd book!