The Green Knight
Iris Murdoch's 1993 novel loosely reworks the medieval Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in contemporary London. A strange, possibly supernatural visitor disrupts a family already busy with its own resentments, lusts, and theological quarrels. Lucas Graffe, the novel's chilly center, may or may not have committed murder; what matters more is the moral test Murdoch stages around him. Nobody is likable, everyone is watched.Penguin's edition presents late Murdoch in a compact paperback format, appropriate for a novel that is baggy, intellectually restless, and deliberately unresolved. It is the work of a writer who had long since stopped worrying whether readers would keep up. For readers who do not need to like anyone on the page in order to take the moral test seriously.
