FROM THE PUBLISHER

John Bayley began writing Iris and Her Friends, a sequel to the New York Times bestseller Elegy for Iris, late at night while his wife, the beloved novelist Iris Murdoch, succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease. In a Proustian irony, as Iris was losing her memory, Bayley was flooded with vivid recollections of his own.

Avoiding the gloom associated with his family tragedy, Bayley luminously brings to life in Iris and Her Friends the remarkable story of a philosopher whose novels celebrated the goodness of everyday existence. In bursts of vivid, lyrical reverie, Bayley also recreates the unforgettable scenes of his youth: being born to a civil servant in colonial India; his epiphanic childhood vacations at the seaside English resort Littlestone-on-Sea, which gave him his first, important glimmers of adult consciousness; his discovery of the power of literature, especially the work of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Bowen, and Marcel Proust; and of course his long romance with Iris and its heartbreaking end.

SYNOPSIS

In this sequel to Elegy for Iris, Bayley (English, New College, retired) recounts his upbringing as the son of a civil servant in colonial India, his education at Eton and Oxford, his marriage to philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, and her eventual decline from Alzheimer's disease. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Sunday Times

This is a beautifully, lightly written and generously entertaining book about the worst experience of anybody's life.

Sunday Telegraph

With these three books, Bayley has written a minor masterpiece for the confessional age...

Publishers Weekly

Bayley scored an unexpected hit with last year's eloquent and deeply affecting Elegy for Iris, in which he spoke of his life with the celebrated novelist Iris Murdoch, both before and after she developed the Alzheimer's disease that finally, after five long years, killed her in February 1999. This new memoir appears in the wake of Murdoch's death and takes brief note of it, though much of it had been written by Bayley, while propped up beside his sleeping wife, in their last, desperate months together. As before, the details of how a loving mate deals with a complete mental withdrawal are at once horrific and touching, and blessed with Bayley's awkward grace. There is nothing much new to add to Elegy in the writing about their strange togetherness in the face of utmost adversity, however, and the title is more than a little misleading. What is new is the flights of memory that prompt Bayley to feel his way back to his own childhood and army days. The closeness and delicacy of his recall is almost hallucinatory--he brings long-forgotten prewar English landscapes and ways of life back with astounding vividness--and his accounts of wartime and peacetime life in the British army are as hilariously observant as the best of Evelyn Waugh, though quite without the undertone of bitter rancor. Bayley is a splendid memoirist, who has now said all that needs to be said about Murdoch. How about a new volume that is just about him? If this is anything to go by, it would be as compelling in its way as Angela's Ashes. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In a world awash with bad memoirs, here comes Bayley's new book to remind us of the luxuriant and absurd possibilities of language and living together. Bayley follows his remarkable Elegy for Iris with more memories of his own life and his time with his wife, Iris Murdoch, who was living through the final stages of Alzheimer's disease as he wrote this. Bayley's eye for what is not obvious glimmers. He drifts through boyhood on the golf links along the English coast, his escapades as a young soldier in war-torn Germany, and a stammering romance at Oxford. He revisits favorite books, places, and people, exposing the human scale of the courage it takes to keep to the demands of a home. How rare it is these days that a reviewer gets to write, "This book succeeds with every sentence"--and this book does. Graceful and insightful, it balances modesty with generosity. Recommended for all libraries.--Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Times Literary Supplement

In...Iris, A Memoir, [author Bayley] left the reader taking some comfort in the continuing warmth and closeness of their marriage, despite the damage inflicted on Murdoch's brilliant mind by Alzheimer's disease. In this book, the picture is indeed bleaker, as he shows how her condition worsened until he had to accept that he was soon to lose her. In fact, Bayley has written not just a sequel but a companion volume to the earlier book, which will be enhanced as well as extended by it.Read all 6 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING