Angels and Enchanters

...ordinary outside life keep knocking at the door of the Rectory, but Carel refuses to let it in...

...I have quoted almost all of this crucial speech because, while summing up the seriousness of her theme, it also points to the allegorical nature of Iris Murdoch's work...

...Indeed, she has written a brilliant analysis of Sartre's work which gives him his due as an incisive thinker, yet makes it clear that she is skeptical of his rationalistic despair (though she refuses to give up reason) and judges it, rightly, as a tortured attempt to save the idea of the individual...

...The majority of writers find it as convenient to ride along on the ideology of despair as on a bandwagon...

...Suppose the truth were awful, suppose it was just a black pit, or like birds huddled in the dust in a dark cupboard...

...Her style is grave, emblematic, often mysteriously moving, but never obscure or ponderous...

...The angels of her title are both the young, beautiful girls and, by extension, all of us, victims of the random spirit which "seems to have deserted our social fabric and to hang in the air, blowing to and fro on the ideological gales.' The beauty, charm and allusiveness of this novel seem to me unprecedented in our day...

...For example, Norah Shadox-Brown, the Fabian do-gooder, is described thus: "Like so many of those whose only troubles are the troubles of others, she had carried her girlish looks well on into middle age" She can also convey atmosphere and mood with sure, evocative, painter-like touches...

...Her novels are written on that margin-increasingly narrow-where ideologies lose their power and the individual, with all of his tragedy, his undirected force and foolishness, rules supreme...

...Besides being conversant with so much more than the average, or even unaverage, novelist, Miss Murdoch also has unusual talents as a story-teller...

...The Bishop, with the composure of the fashionable, smiles...

...Above all, that novel seemed unusual to me because, at a time when sex appears in a dutiful, banal or apocalyptic role in most novels, she actually had something original to say about its power and the entangled, appalling farce it can become between (and, in this case, among) consenting adults...

...In an earlier scene with an affable, very up-to-date Bishop, who accepts "the death of God as a necessity and believes that humanity is living through a spiritual interregnum, Marcus had cried: "But suppose suppose the truth about human life were just something terrible, something appalling which one would be destroyed by contemplating...

...As in her previous novels, Miss Murdoch can strike off a character in a swift, witty sentence...

...It is in fact the adult atmosphere of Miss Murdoch's books that marks them off from the run of her contemporaries...

...Her people, as one humorist accurately put it in another connection, are just as big as you are...

...And if they perhaps, through some crack, some fissure in the surface, caught sight of that, they ran straight back to their desks, they worked harder than ever late into the night to explain that it was not so, to prove that it could not be so...

...And they are terrible...

...That astonishingly fresh work was appropriately dedicated to Raymond Queneau, the learned French novelist who conceals his complicated philosophical concerns behind a screen of dead-pan, zany, vernacular prose...

...The death of God has set the angels free...

...Those who call themselves atheists," he says, "have changed nothing but a few words...

...Fog dominates the book, a thick, brooding London fog which, "like a hushed lifted finger, imposed quietness' The quietness is broken by the intermittent, death-reminding rumble of the subway which passes under the Rectory in which Muriel, her father, her beautiful invalid cousin, Elizabeth, the Rector, Carel, and their mulatto maid, Pattie, live in a kind of enchanted island, a waste space made by Hitler's bombs...

...Carel is full of passion, however...

...Spiritual questions, she believes, are much realer than those who lightly take up the current ethos of alienation and anguish usually admit...

...Though her characters may be, and often are, victimized and defeated, they are always aware...

...But all is different now, toto caelo...

...her characters are emotionally real and convincing...

...Elizabeth is his ward too, and he has become upset by Carel's increasing eccentricity...

...His domain can only subsist if the world is kept out, or at least kept at arm's length...

...Who could face this...

...She is also a trained philosopher and knows quite well the existentialist concept of gluey, viscous, formless consciousness...

...Only a few of them really feared Chaos and Old Night, and fewer still ever caught a glimpse...

...It is magical and I urge you to read it...

...He endlessly plays the phonograph-this image, like all of Murdoch's images, is marvelously exact and percipient -throws paper darts and writes existentialist tracts that combine remote "scientific" language with an arctic pessimism...

...Angels are the thoughts of God...

...her plots, even when verging on the improbable, sweep us along...

...MARCUS, Carel's slightly effete bachelor brother, manages in a scene of great, subdued comedy to break into the enchanted domain...

...To a great extent she succeeds...

...Murdoch pushes in the opposite direction...

...She is not an impressionist, like Joyce or Faulkner...

...Carel is the central figure...

...Muriel, the young woman who is the novel's central intelligence, yearns "for reunion with simple innocent things, with thoughtless affections and free happy laughter and dogs passing by in the street...

...Her latest book, The Time of the Angels (Viking, 245 pp., $5.00), is a wholly unideological comment on the ideology of despair which darkens the thought in our novels as pervasively as Darwinism stained the work of the late Victorians with a lurid and unhealthy iridescence...

...and when it does, it is a dazzling, fleeting reminder of the fragility of human happiness...

...Pattie is his mistress, his "Anti-Maria...

...They can maim and kill, destroy lives, wither innocence, provide philosophers with the means to scorn ordinary existence-those "dogs passing by on the street"-and fashionable novelists with smooth, empty fables that work a responsive public nerve...

...and her style, at once sharp and unobtrusive, proves time and again to be a wonderfully adept and flexible instrument...

...Now even the name is gone and the spiritual world is scattered...

...the thoughts and experiences of her characters come not in frayed sheaves of light or darkness, but one at a time, etched and impeccable, at a seemingly old-fashioned pace...

...She is what used to be called a born writer...

...It does not tell us what to do, but it sets the problem before us in glowing language and exciting characters...

...Suppose only evil were real, only it was not evil since it had lost even its name...

...There is nothing anymore to prevent the magnetism of many spirits...

...Quite possibly, this, her 10th work, is a masterpiece...

...He is also writing a treatise- "upon morality in a secular age a very lucid and dogmatic work, designed to resemble Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy in its streamlined rhetoric and epigrammatic vigor...

...When Pattie, the mulatto girl, is overcome by despair, "a darkness entered into her like a swarm of bees...

...His inability to write a great novel," she says at the conclusion of her short book, "is a tragic symptom of a situation which afflicts us all...

...He is the person of charismatic force who has appeared in so many of Murdoch's books...

...The philosophers have never even tried...

...Their pathos rests precisely in their consciousness of possibility and their inability to avail themselves of it...

...The sun rarely appears in this somber novel...

...but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction...

...There are no "little men," either in the sexual or social sense, in any of Miss Murdoch's books...

...None of her novels have delighted me as much as her first novel, Under the Net...

...The divorce of the social integument from the questing spirit-so often in her novels embodied in malign or destructive characters-is the constant preoccupation of her fiction...

...My next favorite, The Severed Head, showed Miss Murdoch at the other end of her creative gamut: elegant high comedy that was really funny, foreboding and perceptive...

...She can epitomize the emotional element in which her dazed characters exist sharply and beautifully: "The physical connection between them still cobwebbed the house with its electric silk...

...A minister who has lost his faith, he has decided, in a characteristic modern gesture, to take the place of the dead divinity...

...Muriel and Elizabeth live under his sway...

...We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique...

...He echoes Marcus' question, but in a completely frightful manner...

...It is this more than anything else that has made her unattractive to the proponents of a plunge into the bath of the irrational...

...Though aware of all the currents of voguish thought, she goes her own way, remaining totally impervious to them...

...Her novel, though somber, is really a mordant satiric examination of the self-absorbed human spirit which can be found in so much of contemporary philosophy and art-the solipsistic spirit...

...Men will soon begin to feel the consequences, though they will not understand them...

...Miss Murdoch takes this despair much more seriously than is now customary...

...The disappearance of God does not simply leave a void into which human reason can move...

...She wants to arrive at first principles, to find the human motives that make the vast, public, ideological machine chug away, to separate the core of the personal from the haze and clatter of abstraction...