From Rome to Leningrad

...The girls have blended in Edmund's mind into a composite girl, whose tenure in office stretches back to his earliest memory...

...Perhaps by now it goes without saying that Miss Murdoch's prose has the power of making an ordinary writer feel as if he were wearing a dubious shirt for an extra day and not getting away with it...

...The Levkins went south in search of a dream of freedom...

...Although one part of Edmund resists the idea of staying and becoming involved again, another part wants nothing but commitment...

...There are no symbols imposed on the story only for the sake of the author's convenience or for their brilliance of conception—as, for example, the salmon in The Unicorn and the sword in A Severed Head...

...It is no accident that the last word of the novel is "Rome...

...The nature of the help expected is not clear to Edmund, and he resists them all until he is appealed to by the innocence of his niece...

...What he does not sufficiently understand, even in his own case, is that during her life Lydia poisoned the springs of love with a poison that would long survive her...

...This last idea he gets from David Levkin, a Russian refugee, who is on the point of trying to escape back into Russia...

...In attempting to answer this question, Edmund must become aware, not only of the Self, but of the Other, and it is here that the Italian girl comes in...

...Is he above the conflict, as some suggest...

...Almost from the first, Edmund is asked by one person after another to stay and help them all...

...Or does he merely make himself vulnerable by getting involved...

...In fact, part of Edmund's failure as a man is indicated by his misunderstanding of the legend of the Italian girl...

...They all came to this same impossible place, which denies all dreams...

...In this case, the death of his mother brings Edmund Narraway home after a long absence...

...It is David who mysteriously appears to let Edmund into the house that first night, and the two men are closely linked from the moment Edmund mistakes David for a reflection of himself, the same kind of psychological link Conrad establishes in "The Secret Sharer" when he makes his captain look into the water and see, instead of his own reflection, Leggatt, his secret self...

...The characters seem to be making speeches out of their own inner need rather than the need of the author's dialectic...

...The household into which Edmund walks is made up of Otto, his wife, Isabel, his daughter, Flora, his apprentice, David, David's sister, Elsa, and the Italian girl...

...Does Edmund have power to help...

...Other passages bear in their thought striking resemblance to Dostoevsky, and are even equipped with a couple of Russian characters straight out of Faulkner at his most Gothic...

...This motion toward suffering is, by and large, to the north, to homes that do not contain the thing that for so long has lain hidden in Edmund's home: simply the south, the Italian girl...

...When Edmund is trying to find his way into the home of his childhood, part of him is already recognizing that only here can his past be continuous with his future and that each man must suffer in his own place...

...Indeed, most of the characters involve him deeply...

...Certain passages are strongly reminiscent of Kafka...

...and as the characters move north or south, meanings accumulate...

...But one of the things that the novel is debating is whether this sympathy can do any good for anyone...

...All of the characters, whether from north or south, dream of the other extreme...

...The situation is complicated...

...At one end of the scale of allusion is Rome, at the other end, Leningrad...

...When the characters are all dispersed at the end, each to his private fate, it is to home that they go to suffer in their own places...

...She went north in search of her dream...

...She stands up to this comparison as well as anyone now writing...

...The precise nature of his mistake has been to lose the real in the symbolic and not recognize them as equally part of an indissoluble human mystery...

...Maggie says, "I had a dream of the north once, a dream of strength...

...The opening image establishes exactly this fact at once...

...A large part of the meaning of the book is bound up with simple geography...

...Like Elsa, the half-crazed refugee, he remembers memories not his own and suffers in himself the suffering of others...

...On the other hand, when he originally went south he was escaping from a northern tvranny...

...Looked at in one way, it is a love story full of modern instances and complete with happy ending...

...Looked at in another way, the love element is strangely hallucinated, used as ground for a commentary on the Self and the Other...

...Maria Magistretti is from Rome...

...Conversation and symbols are more fully integrated into the novelistic texture...

...This is surely enough to suggest that The Italian Girl is no less intellectual than Miss Murdoch's other novels, but it as surely fails to suggest that the book is less obtrusively intellectual than some of her more recent ones...

...The house is locked...

...Edmund, for example, has been living his sterile life in a city to the south of the family home...

...His enchantment can only be lifted when he is capable of seeing her as an individual rather than as a symbol...

...One doesn't quite know how to have it, although it is quite clear that a lot of people are going to have it for one reason or another...

...Isabel went south in search of a dream of love...

...or is he, in his own words, "just taking a long time to reach the human level...

...therefore, he must go north to reach home...

...Although Edmund long ago escaped from home, his brother, Otto, has remained trapped there...

...For Edmund, however, this place is home...

...David is not the only reflection of Self that Edmund finds in the novel...

...The first words of the novel are: "I pressed the door gently...

...The Italian girl is the last of a series of Italian girls who served as nurse to the Narraway boys...

...Isabel is from Scotland, to the north, and the Levkins are from Leningrad, "the true north...

...By style, by technique, by subject, and even by direct allusion (to Dostoevsky, for example) Miss Murdoch invites comparison with the very finest writers...

...The basic situation is a simple one, and one Miss Murdoch has used before: A stranger enters a house and undertakes to explore the reality underlying the surface life around him...

...He has returned at night and everyone is asleep...

...For her he feels willing to try, although it seems to him that everyone will be freer now that mother Lydia is dead...

...however, because she is of vital importance to him both in her personal and in her symbolic roles...