A scintillating novel of fate, accidents, and moral dilemmas Set in the time of the Vietnam War, this story concerns the plight of a young American, happily installed in a perfect job in England, engaged to a wonderful girl, who is suddenly drafted to a war he disapproves of. What is duty here, what is self-interest, what is cowardice? Austin Gibson Grey, the accidental man of the title, is accident-prone, also prone to bring disaster to his friend sand relations. He blames fate. But are we not all accidental, one of his victims asks. Fate and accidents make deep moral dilemmas for the characters in the long and complex tale. “Iris Murdoch has imposed her alternative world on us as surely as Christopher Columbus or Graham Greene.”—Victoria Glendinning in the Sunday Times (London) Iris Murdoch  (1919–1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy fellow at St. Anne's College for 20 years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than 26 novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry. Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication     PENGUIN BOOKS AN ACCIDENTAL MAN Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, and then worked with UNRRA in London, Belgium and Austria. She held a studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, and then in 1948 became a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she lived with her husband, the teacher and critic John Bayley. Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year’s Honours List. In the 1997 PEN Awards she received the Gold Pen for Distinguished Service to Literature. Iris Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels, including Under the Net, her writing début of 1954, the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, the Sea (1978) and, more recently, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995). She received a number of other literary awards, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her works of philosophy include Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Metaphysia As a Guide to Morals (1992) and Existentialists and Mystics (1997). She also wrote several plays, including The Italian Girl (with James Saunders) and The Black Prince , an adaptation of her novel. Her volume of poetry, A Year of Birds , which appeared in 1978, was set to music by Malcolm Williamson. Iris Murdoch died in February 1999. Among the many who paid tribute to her as a philosopher, novelist and private individual was Peter Conradi, who in his obituary in the Guardian wrote ‘Iris Murdoch was one of the best and most influential writers of the twentieth century. Above all, she kept the traditional novel alive, and in so doing changed what it is capable of ... She connected goodness, against the temper of the times, not with the quest for an authentic identity so much as with the happiness that can come about when that quest is relaxed. We are fortunate to have shared our appalling century with her.’ IRIS MURDOCH IN PENGUIN Fiction   Under the Net   The Flight from the Enchanter The Sandcastle The Bell A Severed Head An Unofficial Rose The Unicorn The Italian Girl The Red and the Green   The Time of the Angels The Nice and the Good Bruno’s Dream   A Fairly Honourable Defeat An Accidental Man The Black Prince The Sacred and Profane Love Machine A Word Child   Henry and Cato The Sea, the Sea Nuns and Soldiers   The Philosopher’s Pupil The Good Apprentice The Book and the Brotherhood   The Message to the Planet The Green Knight Jackson’s Dilemma   Non-Fiction   Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues Metaphysics As a Guide to Morals PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community, Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi — 110 017, India Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa   Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England   First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1971 First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1972 Published in Penguin Books 1973       Copyright © Iris Murdoch, 1971 All rights reserved   ISBN: 9781101495858             The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any