The Message to the Planet

...Will the Stone Seekers, a trendy-talking ever-growing crowd of spiritual groupies, damage Marcus, as, hearing of his purported miracle, they switch their allegiance from Stonehenge to him, and encamp claustrophobically on the lawn...

...Will Ludens marry Irina...

...Franca, neither burdened nor leavened with irony, embodies hard-working, self-effacing, honest love, and triumphs...

...as an abbey in The Bell, for example) threats and questions grow...

...They evolve at least as much from the distance Murdoch's compassion and maturity provide as they do from her sense of the ridiculous, and so we are reminded that the frivolous among us are important, too...

...Despite her clues, however, I still don't know exactly what the message is, but it's always-and with this book especially-a joy to zoom around the planet with her...

...Vallar, brilliantly, broadly, and precociously talented, rich but austere, presently celibate, is, to his friends, and later in the book, to acquaintances and strangers, a mythological figure...

...The novel starts, as many of Murdoch's do, with a gaggle of people caught in conversation...

...Lastly, Murdoch announces, in her title and throughout the book, that she is taking a view fit only for a star...

...The larger world and the world of fictional artifice become one...

...It is with a fully drawn serious character that Murdoch best succeeds...

...He joins Rozanov, the tortured and often unappealing, but believably important subject of The Philosopher's Pupil, and David Crimond, the whirling dervish of sex and brains around whom The Book and the Brotherhoodrevolves...

...Some of the characters need clearer, fresher identifications...

...Above all, it's always clear something important is going on...

...Meanwhile, Marcus's daughter Irina, who variously manifests herself as a hellion, a lost child, a tough, and ultimately as an ordinary person, is sure there's nothing miraculous about her father...

...There's the danger of thought manipulation: what's Marzillian the psychiatrist really up to...

...Murdoch, whose eye and mind-in this book even more than in previous ones-is everywhere, discourses on Freud, modem medicine and technology, behaviorist psychology, literature, art, and music...

...Still, she deserves praise for the generosity with which she offers her erudition...

...With Murdoch's exuberance exhilarating us, it seems we can...

...In taking great men as her subject, and exploring them at length, Murdoch gives us companions with whom we can happily and profitably dwell, and whose potential, at least, we want to emulate...

...The evidence is there: action of mind and body is constant...

...Everything means something, even though we don't always know what...

...She says he's crazy, and therefore she removes him, through subterfuge, to an idyllically situated and luxuriously equipped mental hospital, where the rest of the characters eventually convene...

...As always with Murdoch, the mundane ultimately falls into place in a shower of coincidence, explanation, and revelation that coexists with mystery...

...In her latest novel Iris Murdoch once again offers us a profusion of intelligence as she brings to life that safe, eternal England that protects and contains her characters...

...There are flaws...

...Watching Murdoch's ideas and creations whiz by is part of the reliable pleasure her work provides...

...Part of the enjoyment is cumulative, built on her previous work...

...Second, there are the circumstances and quandaries of Franca, an earthy and humane woman given to honest self-examination, whose husband (Jack Sheerwater) torments her not only with his sexual infidelities but also with his effort to gain her collusion in his pretensions about them...

...In this setting (Murdoch has used the same scenery before, though in different forms...

...Ludens cajoles Marcus to Patrick's bedside in Franca's house, where Vallar apparently cures Patrick through the laying on of hands, despite the remonstrances of a doctor who, anyway- in a typically Murdochian comic aside- later writes a report of the incident for the Lancet...

...We'd gain more from Murdoch's philosophical disquisitions if she made them shorter, or broke them up more...

...There is, first, the story of Marcus Vallar, who was once a great mathematician, might be a miracle worker, could be a pathetic madman, and certainly represents the possibility of the highest and most complete realization of the human spirit...

...Everything matters...

...In the present-day London of the author's imagination, friends gather to sing, drink, and talk...

...Reading Murdoch is, above all, fun...

...Her friends see her as admirable or pitiable, her husband uses her as a convenience, but Murdoch shows her as heroic...

...Marcus Vallar is the latest in a series of charismatic heroes...

...And a character shouldn't be obsessed with food simply because he's Jewish...

...And what does the appearance of priests, of a rabbi named Most, of group singing, all mean...

...Why is there repeated insistence-sometimes pages long-on the struggle to define Jewishness, on the importance of writing...

...Will the Bostonian Maisie, a modern Jamesian feminist, prevail upon miserably unhappy Franca to leave her silly sadist of a husband...

...we are allowed to completely accept the love, given and received, and-more-the spiritual freedom that is Franca's achievement...

...The other components, however, provide satisfaction beyond entertainment, and seem to come from expansive and admirable authorial ambitions...

...Beautiful Franca, who literally lets down her long heavy hair, is the victim of an unhappy childhood and the prisoner of an unjust marriage...

...This abundance of information, insight, and observation is overwhelming without being daunting...

...the planet with her...

...Events, references, and juxtapositions are often comic, but the jokes in The Message to the Planet are hard to isolate...

...To Alfred Ludens in particular, he has religious significance, and is the focus for the hope of an understanding so great that, if attained, it will constitute salvation...

...pithy descriptions of the current and the familiar accompany paragraphs on the cosmic and eternal...

...Simultaneously, her characters enact facets of love, romance, religious yearning, intellectual activity, sexual dalliance (either accomplished-offstage-or, with furrowed brow, attempted-onstage), form familial groupings and extensions, and partake of sweaty, drunken, companionable pub lunches...

...Although she is one of many characters paired off by the end of the story, and she hasn't the agility or learning Murdoch lends other characters, it is her happiness especially that stays in our hearts...

...Murdoch does not seem skeptical about this character...

...It's hard, especially in the beginning, to remember who everyone is...

...The historian Alfred Ludens, the ex-priest Gildas Heme, and the painter Jack Sheerwater (as usual in Murdoch, symbolic names and other signposts abound) discuss the presumed-to-be-fatal illness of Patrick Fenman, first characterized as "a wild man from the west of Ireland" but later shown to be extraordinarily tame, whose illness is supposed to have been invoked by a curse...