Tangled Web
Murdoch, Iris
Tangled Web THE GOOD APPRENTICE by Iris Murdoch Viking Penguin. 522 pp. $18.95. Reading Iris Murdoch demands attention and patience, efforts well rewarded by insightful character portrayals,...
...It is a sophisticated version of a brooding Bronte novel, haunted by the strangely compatible ghosts of Marcel Proust, Michel Foucault, and Agatha Christie...
...A parallel odyssey, subordinate to but not less important than Edward's, is his half-brother Stuart's search for purity and goodness, seen through the eyes of those who deride him, those who tolerate him, those who love him, and those who are inspired by him...
...And so the bizarre plot spins on, becoming ever more convoluted yet not hard to follow once the characters have been sorted out...
...And pervading the book like the ghost his daughters claim haunts his castle-like domain is Jesse Bal-tram, famous painter and Edward's biological father...
...This is Murdoch's twenty-second novel, and it has been called by British critics "one of her very best...
...Yet Murdoch's tapestry is integrally hers, not a magpie construction...
...After weeks of numbing "recovery" in this odd household, Edward surreptitiously explores the locked tower while the three women are out, and finds Jesse in bed, half-mad, in an upper room...
...In January 1987, Penguin will reissue her books, including this one, in paperback—unfortunately not in time to lighten the load of books you may carry to the beach this summer, assuming you take along this weighty but worthy tome...
...Coincidence plays a great part in this intricate tale—even the medium turns out to be an old friend of another of the characters in the complicated cast...
...Their father (Edward's stepfather), Harry Cuno, is a pragmatically romantic dilettante in love with Edward's aunt, Midge McCaskerville, the chic wife of Jewish-Scottish psychiatrist Thomas, who has taken on the task of helping rid Edward of his paralyzing guilt...
...Jesse had never wed his lovely model Chloe, Edward's deceased mother, who was married in her pregnant state by Edward's adoptive father, Harry Cuno...
...But Murdoch doesn't let us follow a thread so simply in her tangled skein...
...yet all are believable...
...Leaving Mark in an apparently euphoric state of drugged sleep, Edward visits a casual friend by whom he is quickly and surprisingly seduced...
...Dedicated to the "natural" life, the nymph-like women at Seegard with their home-woven garments welcome Edward into the complexities of their simple life...
...Yet there is a mysterious, almost decadent aura about the place, and when Edward asks about his father Jesse, they say only that he will come "soon...
...Edward's apprenticeship is an arduous process of learning to deal with loss, pain, guilt, and the ambiguities and absurdities of life—to "get on with it...
...Reading Iris Murdoch demands attention and patience, efforts well rewarded by insightful character portrayals, intriguing plots, and intelligent discourse...
...The crushed body on the ground below becomes the source of Edward's obsessive self-laceration throughout much of the novel...
...This is a long and leisurely book and, unlike Doris Lessing's "good terrorist" Alice (the young woman of Lessing's latest novel who is embroiled in fringe political activism), Murdoch's "good apprentice" Edward is much more sympathetically and delicately drawn, and has nothing directly to do with politics...
...In The Good Apprentice, these are interwoven with such seamless skill that you may find yourself conversing with some of her fictional characters, cautioning or applauding them about a course of action or simply saying, "Yes, I know, I understand that feeling...
...Murdoch is especially masterful in conveying the ambiguities of human feelings and modern sensibilities, not necessarily confined to the intellectual and artistic upper-class people about whom she usually writes...
...Young Edward's good friend Mark, high on the drug that Edward gave him without his knowledge, falls asleep in Edward's room...
...Returning home later than he had expected, he finds Mark gone and the window open...
...After desperately and furtively consulting a sleazy medium through whom he believes he hears that he must go to his father, Edward coincidentally receives an invitation from Jesse's current wife and sets out for Seegard, the remote and rambling structure near the sea that Jesse Bal-tram designed and lives in with "Mother May" and her two virginal daughters, Edward's half-sisters...
...Edward Baltram's terrible sense of guilt is the starting point of this semi-Gothic tale set in contemporary England...
...The atmosphere of morbid romanticism and eerie eroticism that she creates is partially demystified by the subtle humor of her descriptions and the human foibles she exposes...
...In the case of Midge, his father's mistress who develops her own spiritual crisis, these conflicting perceptions of Stuart vie within her distressingly and at times ridiculously...
...If you do, you'll find that Murdoch intertwines earth-bound wanderings, mystical meanderings, and philosophical wonderings so deftly that even scorners of novels might find themselves caught up in her web...
...There is also Stuart, Edward's half-brother, who has decided to abandon his math studies for a life of meditation and good works...
...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and critic...
Vol. 50 • June 1986 • No. 6
