[In The Philosopher's Pupil], as always with reading Iris Murdoch, there is much that is entertaining, things which—like the discussion of a Mallarmé poem between a homosexual priest and Rozanov's young female ward—would be beyond the abilities of most novelists. She has lost none of her ability to describe places and houses and the physics of things generally. But the human aspect of it all seems woefully absent, even as compared with A Severed Head, which in its focused concentration on the first-person narrator, Martin Lynch-Gibbon, had cumulative force even if it didn't go very deep. The Philosopher's Pupil has neither depth nor cumulative power; it diffuses itself rather, wandering among endlessly proliferating details. As just one instance of this, what does one do when, after 340 hefty pages have been traversed, we are taken on a picnic attended by the major characters at which the food and drink are described in detail—who brought what and what kind of Yugoslav Riesling or Double Gloucester cheese it was. All this information is presented in sentences which open in parallel manner: "The drinks before lunch had been as follows …" "The food at lunch had been as follows …" Why should we know these things, and why should they be enumerated to us by a faceless narrator who strives for no distinction of language in the rendering? The Murdoch operation, so hugely professional in one sense, is also (as the students now say) quite impossible to suspend disbelief in, and as the August days rolled by, with me still reading, troubled thoughts surfaced about the worth of it all. What, other than finishing the novel, was the purpose of continuing? For all her intelligence as a critic and theorist of fiction, this writer seems quite passive and unthoughtful about the accumulation of words, of novels—increasingly automatic and self-propelled—that is her literary career. A very strange case indeed. (pp. 748-49)