In Carey, Murdoch gives us a strong, kind, moral and complex protagonist whose dedication to her younger sister is particularly heart-wrenching.
Like many of the stories in the book of Acts, this one operates with a rather simplistic moral vision: its protagonists are miraculously preserved and its culprits easily defeated.
For all that she is protagonist and moral center of her story, Kate is curiously indistinct.
On the other, the moral stink of our protagonist William Rackham: a failed writer cum feckless perfume-empire scion with a well-developed nose for parental handouts.
Each novel brings us back to that same dark room: to the stuffed furniture of another age, the polite repression of the protagonist, the moral codes of yesteryear.
As fizzing with hormonal curiosity as 45 Years is wearied of desire, Marielle Heller's The Diary of a Teenage Girl (eOne, 18) is fast, funny and more of a landmark than you might guess: a brave, vivid articulation of adolescent female sexuality that imposes no teacherly moral judgment on its protagonist's most reckless erotic urges, even finding a kind of empowerment in error.
The most poetic, with a double allusion, comes from John F. Andrews, president of the Shakespeare Guild, who suggests the Great Fall, based on Humpty Dumpty, who had one from his seat on a wall, as in Wall Street: "The moral implicit in the protagonist's fate (with its suggestions of both cluelessness and hubris) is peculiarly apt".
The protagonist and moral compass of the group, she's determined to find her missing son Peter, who she insists throughout the series has survived the pandemic.
Rather than focusing on the twists and turns of the plot, however, the novel foregrounds the mental and moral struggles of the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, and Shelley imbues the text with her own brand of politicised Romanticism, one that criticised the individualism and egotism of traditional Romanticism.
