The Iris Trilogy

Synopsis: This volume brings together John Bayley's books dedicated to the memory of his wife, Iris Murdoch. Bayley's account of his long and loving marriage to the great novelist Iris takes us from their love affair's comical beginnings in Oxford in the early 50s (Bayley courted Iris on account of her unchallenging plain looks and their first date consisted of a revolting dinner followed by a disastrous dance when Iris sprained her ankle) through its slow and painful closure when Iris developed Alzheimer's 40 years later, to a searching analysis of the condition of bereavement and how he built a life for himself after Iris's death. As Bayley charts the gradual dissolution of Iris's remarkable intellect side by side with the detail of their gloriously eccentric and profoundly satisfying life together, what emerges is the complex portrait of an enigmatic and brilliant woman and of a marriage of quite extraordinary, unforced happiness, and an insight into the mysterious symbolism of Iris Murdoch's novels.

Review: Continuing with my obssession of all things Iris, these are the beautiful memoirs written by her husband John Bayley. The first book is called 'Iris' and in it John looks back to when he first met her .. or first saw her pedalling past his window at St Antony's College, Oxford University .. 'she was looking both absent and displeased. Maybe because of the weather, which was damp and drizzly. Maybe because her bicycle was old and creaky and hard to propel. Maybe because she hadn't met me yet?' ... They were soon to meet at a party given by a senior member of the English Faculty and though John wasn't particularly attracted to her physically (although nearly everybody else was.. male and female) he was incredibly drawn to her. It's as they're bicycling home that Iris asks John if he writes novels, he thinks it an odd question, but she soon tells him that she has written one and it's soon to be published .. but she says 'you mustn't tell anyone .. I don't want anyone to know' .. to be in her confidence makes John feel very happy indeed. Iris of course was extremely bright, an intellectual (but genuinely modest), she had many friends as well as lovers, she had already written works on philosophy and was to go on to write twenty six novels, several of them highly acclaimed. She was serious but had a sense of fun that was totally in tune with John's .. in a way you feel that when they met two pieces of a puzzle came together.

But that was then, the Iris in the present is very different and she has no memory of having written anything. Iris has at this stage of John's writing been suffering from Alzheimer's for several years and John is both her loving husband and carer. Communication is a problem, Iris asks a lot of questions but they're not often clear or comprehensible, she's a chatterer too .. chattering away like the 'Weatherbys' (their nickname for the swallows that used to sit on the telephone wires outside their bedroom window twittering away.) There's bafflement but there's also jokes, humour has survived Alzheimer's .. or it has at this stage anyhow ... their little in jokes, silly rhymes and quotes can still make Iris smile. Thankfully, Iris, always the most placid of people, has not changed all that much in temperament. Aggression, which can be a side effect hasn't affected her. John spends most of his early mornings now in bed with Iris snoozing and making her little cooing noises beside him as he types away on his trusty 'Tropical Olivetti', she finds the noise reassuring. In the old days she would have taken herself off to her study to start work. This ability to sleep like a cat is a godsend because daily life can be a mix of anxiety and confusion. Getting Iris in or out of her clothes is a problem, washing too, she's developed a penchant for picking up litter .. anything she see's basically, old coke cans, cigarette butts, silver paper .. and she hoards it all in piles and now she's watering the indoor plants to death. They never had a TV before but now Iris is comforted by morning children's TV especially 'Teletubbies', they trot about not doing anything much and somehow this attracts and engages her.

In the next book of the trilogy 'Iris and the Friends', Iris's condition has worsened, she's much more anxious now and confused and their daily routine, such as it is, has become more of a trial. There are more silent tears, more desperate rattling of the locked doors and more frequent escape attempts (some sucessful.) She doesn't respond to jokes anymore, or not as easily, and is refusing food. This book however is less about Iris and more about John, he finds strangely that as Iris's memory disappears his sharpens and in a way it's a comfort to him, an escape from some of the anxieties of the day. During quiet times, when Iris is asleep or calm, John wanders away down memory lane, re-living his youth and finding solace in recollections and daydreams.

The last book is entitled 'The Widowers House' where John talks about Iris's last days in the nursing home and her eventual death. I blubbed my way through it, I could hardly see the pages. I was thinking that perhaps now John at least would be able to get some sense of calm and order back into his life, he was after all in his seventies and had, practically single handedly, looked after Iris during the last few years of her life which must have been an awful physical and mental strain but no, he's besieged on all sides by well meaning friends and finds himself getting into all sorts of scrapes concerning the ladies (honestly this could have been a plotline in one of Iris's novels .. so bizarre were some of the occurences.) I found myself feeling quite anxious for him ... 'widowers don't lead lives. They wait for something to happen: and when something does happen it becomes a muddle from which they at once have to try and escape.'

This is a long but very readable book. It's peppered with references and little insights into Iris's work and literary anecdotes and quotes in general. There's plenty here about their early life together as well as their later struggles and it's written with such love and honesty. John doesn't shy away from uncomfortable truth's .. sometimes detailing his occasional frustration with Iris, during the worst stages of her illness, and his rants and raves .. not everyone would have been so honest as to recount this but I imagine it's how anybody would react in the same situation. It's like a safety valve, to stop you from completely cracking up. It's truly sobering too to read about the effects of Alzheimer's on one of the most brilliant minds of the 1900's.