The Red and the Green is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1965, it was her ninth novel. It is set in Dublin during the week leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916, and is her only historical novel. Its characters are members of a complexly inter-related Anglo-Irish family who differ in their religious affiliations and in their views on the relations between England and Ireland.
The novel combines a thoroughly researched account of the events leading up to the Easter Rising with a complicated sexual farce. It received mixed reviews on its publication.
The novel is dedicated to Philippa Foot.
Plot
The novel is set in Dublin during the week leading up to the Easter Rising of 1916. All the characters are members of a complexly interrelated Anglo-Irish family. As the story begins Andrew Chase-White is a young Second lieutenant in King Edward's Horse, spending a leave with his family in Ireland before accompanying his regiment to France. Murdoch, though born in Dublin to Protestant parents, left Ireland as an infant and spent her life in England. She undertook extensive research into Irish history in preparation for writing the novel. There is considerable debate and discussion about Irish history and nationalist politics throughout the novel, chiefly carried on by Christopher Bellman and Pat and Cathal Dumay.
Incest is an important theme in the novel, and a common topic in Murdoch's fiction, in which a "quasi-incestuous competition of members of one family for a single beloved is ubiquitous" as are actual incestuous relationships. Besides going to bed with Andrew, who calls her "Aunt Millie", and trying to seduce her nephew Pat, she claims to have had a sexual relationship with her half brother, Andrew's father.
The novel has been characterized as part of Murdoch's "romantic phase" in which she was concerned with "the responsibilities, impositions and ties of marriage, or, in the case of The Red and the Green, of religious vocation". In this case Barney Drumm, while pining for Millie and resenting his virtuous wife Kathleen, is unable to give up his dream of a religious calling, and feels himself to be "by vocation a failed priest". The reviews were mixed, with several critics finding that the "bedroom farce aspect" centred on Millie was "fatal to the book".
In the New York Times, John Bowen also characterized The Red and the Green as a "mechanical novel" in which "contrivance is piled on contrivance", in a manner unworthy of "a novelist of this stature". Another New York Times reviewer disagreed, calling The Red and the Green a "brilliant and entertaining" novel with a "magnificently wayward heroine" in Millie Kinnard and a "style that somehow blends the methods of Sartre and Stendhal". The Time reviewer was unimpressed by the novel, calling it "neither her best book nor her worst". The review praised her descriptive writing but called her characters "sexually confused, tortured by unexplained feelings of guilt, and totally ineffectual and unbelievable as human beings".
Murdoch's biographer Peter J. Conradi notes that the Irish reviews were "generally good", including one by Seán Ó Faoláin in the Irish Times. Benedict Kiely recommended it to American readers as a guidebook to "the English and the Irish" characters and praised Murdoch's ability to discriminate, "with scholastic precision ... between English rain and Irish rain".