The Good Apprentice

By: Iris Murdoch

Narrated by: Christopher Cazenove

Length: 20 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

Stuart Cuno has decided to become good. Not believing in God, he invents his own methods, which include celibacy, chastity, and the abandonment of a promising academic career. Interfering friends and relations question his sincerity, his sanity, and his motives.

©1985 Iris Murdoch (P)1994 Phoenix Books

Critic reviews

"[T]he reader's involvement with the huge cast never diminishes, nor does attention to their wit and philosophical exchanges flag.” (Publishers Weekly)

"Iris Murdoch at her most artful, juggling philosophy and farce with knowledge and ease." (Economist)

"Murdoch works with an intellectual daring most writers only dream of." (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Tiresome and plotless, but beautifully written

Any additional comments?

I adore Iris Murdoch's writing, but after listening to and loving the Philosopher's Pupil, I listened to this book, and it seemed to drag on endlessly with tiresome characters who were endlessly and pointlessly navel-gazing, with next to nothing really going on. Still, I listened to the entire book, with hopes the whole time that it would pick up, but it never did. However, her prose is so delectable, I continued to listen, hope and grumble, and couldn't bear to not listen.

Brilliant!

I loved this book- her characters and their minds and feelings - all are fascinating and make for compelling listening.
The narration is the best I have ever heard. Christopher Cazenove is utterly brilliant - what a great loss to us all that he died so young.

A Squabble of Smartypants

Aging Artists and Models, Intellectuals, adulterers, and their children, make for an interesting series of critical and complicated situations. Read brilliantly by Christopher Cazenove, 'The Good Apprentice' follows a tragic death's trail through a wonderful group of characters playing at life in their search for meaning. Fun, serious and sometimes just strange, it is a story that surprises throughout and ends as it should.

A very entertaining book

This is a brilliant, psychological treatment of personal problems, arising from situations, that normal people can control but people with immature emotions find difficult. There’s a clear distinction between how normal people react to personal problems compared to how abnormal people behave. A great book that puts personal problems and family issues into perspective.

Perhaps as hard to read as it was to write ....

I did read (listen to) it all. I'm not entirely sure why, but it held a puzzling fascination for me. If you are interested in the interior workings of a mind losing it, this novel is instructive. ...a bit threatening to the reader's self in spots, as in a 'Crime and Punishment' or Edgar Allen Poe manner. The side story, which might have been the main story, was a rather artificial fantasy plopped into an otherwise straightforward and interesting novel. Requires mental juggling.

Loved it!

I'm glad to see Audible is getting some Iris Murdoch books, she's one of my favorite authors.

Scenes from the human comedy

Murdoch was a prolific novelist but, as a professional philosopher, her inclination always seemed to be to use the same frame of reference. Read one and you will not be surprised by the others.

In this case she again sets up a comfortable world of characters from the English upper middle class. They live the London life in houses where dinner parties are common, money is not discussed and ideas are bantered about at arms length. But the author then sets a series of troubling disruptions in motion and we witness the anguish and contortions that follow. The human comedy is ever present and no puppet may call the tune.

So, not a short novel and it seems to take quite a time to get going but, once it does, it becomes absorbing and, by the end, there is a sense of loss as it concludes. All of the best fiction is like that, but Murdoch's rarified and now, perhaps also a little dated, world will not be to all tastes. However, if you accept the terms of engagement, this is a satisfying, literate and very well narrated entertainment.