I don't know if I've been a bit off recently, or if it's the book, but I just didn't enjoy this novel at all. Usually I love Murdoch's books (though I do like her earlier stuff better than her later), but this one didn't work for me at all. I didn't care in the least about any of the characters, all their dialogue just seemed totally wooden and their actions senseless. The long debates about morality and philosophy were too abstract and went way over my head. I kept waiting for it to get better, but it just didn't, I got more and more annoyed with the novel up until the very end. It does have the distinction (for me) of being one of the only English novels I've read that actually mentions the Holocaust (most English fiction tends to focus on World War I, and if it remembers the second one at all, it's usually about the bombing of London). But I just disliked the characters and didn't find the writing at all inspiring, I'm not sure why it didn't catch my interest, but it just felt really muddled up and unfocussed and like it asked a bunch of really difficult questions, and didn't even get started on trying to answer them. The only thing that stands out to me as good was one of the central characters, Alfred Ludens, and his constant state and anxiety and jealousy (which is basically my everyday condition), and the way it's increasingly eating into his life.
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