A word child / Iris Murdoch

I. Murdoch

"...Hilary Burde is an illegitimate, outcast child, filled with rage against the universe: a rebel, with the rebel's "I will not serve." Changed by the discovery that he can control words -- though he has only a grammarian's familiarity with them, and reads even poetry for the grammar -- he gains academic honors and starts on a career at Oxford. But the structure of things can bear only so much ordering: his university job ends disastrously, with an adulterous love affair that is indirectly responsible for two deaths. The novel opens 20 years after this, with Hilary at a dull bureaucratic post, just when his past is coming back to haunt him. His effort to console and, in effect, give reparation to the man he betrayed leads to another heroic try at imposing order on life-in-general, again with disastrous results..."