I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
Today I want to share a passage from one of Iris Murdoch’s novels, A Word Child, to show how she introduces a character in detail without describing who he is, but instead using sensory details to bring us right there with him.
A Word Child (1975) was Iris Murdoch’s 17th novel. She was 56 years old when it came out, so it’s not surprising it takes as its central character, Hilary Burde, someone who is no longer young.
The novel opens with an introduction to Hilary. Murdoch tells us who he is through a description of his bedroom, when he enters with his lodger, Christopher:
We entered our own flat. I picked up two letters which were lying on the floor. We parted company, I to my bedroom, he to his. I turned on the light, revealing my unmade bed, a pile of underwear, dust upon the discarded debris of my struggle with the world. I stuffed the underwear inside the bed and dragged up the blankets, inhaling without displeasure the familiar badger smell. The curtains had remained pulled across the windows since my hurried early morning departure in the dark. It was winter: November, with late gloomy dawns and a cold wind smacking the leaves about on sticky pavements. The season suited me. Even at forty-one it dawns on one that one will not live forever. Adieu jeunesse.
So many sensory details: seeing dust upon discarded debris, smelling the “familiar badger smell,” feeling a cold wind, and the smack of leaves on pavement.
We understand that Hilary doesn’t have a family — he has a lodger and lives in a flat — and doesn’t have much optimism for the future. His room is made to feel like a dingy cave, dank and messy, suggesting that’s what his life might feel like to him.
I haven’t read the whole book and may not. I did enjoy experiencing that passage though.