The Tangled Webs
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
The Tangled Webs BRUNO'S DREAM By Iris Murdoch Viking. 311 pp. $5.75. Reviewed by PHOEBE PETTINGELL Iris Murdoch's twelfth novel is entirely about love, often in peculiar aspects, as we have...
...I enjoyed one in particular where Danby, drunk, sneaks into Miles' yard at night to see Lisa...
...When Diana dispairs of the situation in which she is entangled with her husband and sister, Nigel tells her, "The terrible thing is that no one will die of this...
...That ye love one another...
...Bruno's Dream is a flawed book, but Miss Murdoch's theme is a sublime one...
...Adelaide marries Will, who becomes a famous actor and is knighted...
...Miles' second wife, Diana...
...Nevertheless, her message is serious: In her view, since man can no longer believe in the existence of the traditional God, another ordering principle and higher power must be found...
...Danby remembers the dead Gwen as the one real experience in a dreamlike life...
...Bruno, Lisa, Miles, Danby, and finally Diana all come to associate love with the presence of death, and Diana seems to learn that the greater Love comes in the presence of death, through suffering...
...Under bushy brows, out of which a few much longer stiffer hairs emerged like proboscises, were the slits of eyes, strangely luminous and liquid...
...We learn, for instance, that spiders existed 100 million years before flies, and that certain species were considered holy in the Middle Ages...
...The crisis of the book is brought about when Bruno summons his son to his bedside to make up their quarrel...
...Bruno's two hobbies are stamp collecting and the study of spiders, and spiders become a central image...
...Love is death...
...As if there were a direct correlation, the Thames has been rising, threatening to flood Danby's backyard...
...Only little parts are clear and they don't necessarily fit together...
...John 13:34) But the disciples do not understand His words until after His Death and Resurrection...
...The interplay between dream and reality is another major theme, beginning with Bruno's waking from sleep and concluding with his death...
...As a symbol of their obsessions with the past, both Danby and Miles are interested in inheriting Bruno's priceless stamp collection, while Will has persuaded Adelaide to steal one of the most valuable stamps for him...
...his son-in-law, Danby, widower of Bruno's dead daughter...
...There is also a spider-fly relationship linking the characters, each of whom is in love with one person and loved by another...
...The rather tangled skein of characters involves the old, dying Bruno...
...Besides the complexities of the present, many of the characters are haunted by their pasts...
...In contrast, Diana, Lisa and Nigel are not preoccupied with the past, and through them the salvation of the others is worked...
...In fact, this book almost does for spiders what Moby-Dick did for whales...
...She talks of selling her jewels and her memoirs of the Tsarist court, and babbles nonsense she pretends is Russian—or so the others think...
...Nigel serves the same purpose as Honora in the earlier book, but where Honora was mysterious and enigmatic, Nigel is too well explained in some respects, without being any less enigmatic...
...Nigel, hovering over Bruno's spider books, "flutters like a moth, filling the room with a soft powdery susurrus of great wings...
...He bumps into a plaster gnome and instead finds Diana, who thinks he has come to see her, then Miles, who tells him that Lisa is in love with someone else...
...as I have loved you, that ye also love one another...
...Diana is "a moth that wanted to be burnt by a cold cold flame...
...He acts as the catalyst in Adelaide's change from Danby to Will, and arranges an absurd duel between the two men, with himself in the middle—the most ridiculous and, to my mind, unnecessary scene in the book...
...Bruno even dreams of God as a spider, hanging in the sky in a gigantic web, and sending a filament down to him...
...For when she dies it turns out that she really was a Russian noblewoman, and Adelaide and Will become wealthy on the proceeds of her jewels and the royalties from her memoirs...
...Bruno's Dream is not so compact as A Severed Head...
...In the end, love and death are the only realities...
...Some occasionally become moths...
...The book also reminds me of an earlier Murdoch novel, A Severed Head...
...Miles begins to realize that Lisa has loved him for a long time, and decides he loves her...
...Iris Murdoch is a philosophical novelist in the tradition of George Eliot...
...Bruno has come to look like a spider: He has "a huge bulbous animal head" and "legs of an insect...
...Ultimately this power is neither Eros nor Thanatos but a combination of the two, very much like the Christian agape, or love feast...
...Danby falls in love, first with Diana, then Lisa (thus cutting out Adelaide...
...Miles' poetic gift, which had deserted him shortly after the deaths of Parvati and Gwen, returns, and he goes back to being taken care of by his second wife, Diana...
...I find it difficult to determine how Miss Murdoch wishes us to regard this sort of passage, which reads like a parody in an early Al-dous Huxley novel (or a serious passage in a later one...
...Lisa's nun-like renunciation of Miles, and her desire to go work for the Save the Children Fund in India, have a faint echo of Celia in The Cocktail Party...
...Miles behaves so badly that Diana and Lisa come to apologize...
...The characters have numerous dreams (Bruno of the past and God as a spider...
...The concept of love centers in the character of Nigel, the most enigmatic and, unfortunately, the least successful figure...
...and her sister, Lisa...
...The past being finally purged, a fairy tale ending is possible...
...Bruno's son...
...Gwen...
...Nigel's mysterious god is a combination of Eros-Thanatos...
...Reviewed by PHOEBE PETTINGELL Iris Murdoch's twelfth novel is entirely about love, often in peculiar aspects, as we have come to expect of her...
...After the situation has become so tangled that any solution seems hopeless, the river does overflow its banks, flooding the house, and the stamps are destroyed...
...If Nigel is indeed a god or seer, he is also a "potty" young man who is in love with both Danby and his own twin brother...
...Almost all possible combinations among these eight people work themselves out in the course of the novel...
...Her novels seem to derive deductively from her ideas, and everything has its meaning in the larger scheme of things...
...Almost every chapter ends with one of the characters shedding tears...
...Many of the characters eventually become moving, especially Diana as the new, and more serious, priestess of Love...
...A number of incidents are unduly melodramatic...
...He describes himself at one point as "the nonsense priest of the nonsense god...
...her twin cousins Nigel, who works as a male nurse for Bruno, and Will, who is in love with Adelaide...
...Bruno's Dream is reminiscent of many other works...
...Bruno's last days are tormented by the memory of his mistress, and guilt at not attending his wife's deathbed lest she curse him because of the unhappi-ness his affair brought her...
...Time and space crumple slowly...
...Bruno's mistress, Maureen, with her feathers and flighty ways, is another manifestation of Georgie, and the complex minuet of changing relationships is similar in both works...
...Yet in Bruno's death, redemption comes to all the characters, and Diana, at least, learns to love the others selflessly...
...Or: "His wide open eyes see nothing, he, Nigel the all-seer, the priest, the slave of the god...
...Miles, the poet, is obsessed with the death of his Indian first wife, Parvati, and the resentment he feels toward his father for not accepting the marriage, which enforces an older bitterness about the treatment of his mother...
...Dan-by's mistress and housekeeper...
...And Will, who has been proposing to Adelaide for years, is told by Nigel that she is having an affair with Danby...
...its scope is larger and more ambitious, yet it seems to me less successful...
...quite a few others, however preposterous, are exceedingly funny...
...Will and Adelaide long to return to their childhood, when they were happy together...
...He also gives the rationale for the book's title: "It is mostly a dream...
...Miles of Parvati's death...
...One isn't anything, and yet one loves people...
...All is one...
...while Lisa first seems like an apparition of Gwen to Danby), and many situations occur that seem like dreams (the duel, for example, and Lisa's decision to love Danby instead of Miles...
...Bruno's sharpened observations in the presence of death suggest Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich...
...From those chapters dealing with his trances, the reader can easily believe this to be so: "In the beginning was Om, Omphalos, Om Phal-los, black undivided round devoid of consciousness or self...
...Although Bruno can no longer believe in God, at the moment of death he knows, almost by revelation, that his wife had wanted to forgive him, not curse him, and he dies in peace...
...Like Eliot, she is caught in the dilemma of being both realistic and moralistic, and her books sometimes suffer from a feeling that they are complex logical problems rather than human stories...
...At the end of the agape in Saint John's Gospel, Christ tells his disciples: "A new commandment I give unto you...
...Diana, abandoned emotionally by her husband and by her prospective lover, Danby, learns to love Bruno by taking care of him and, through this love, can forgive the others...
...The craziest character in the book is an old woman who takes care of Will and believes herself to be a Russian noblewoman...
...Miraculously Lisa decides to love Danby instead of Miles, thus merging with, or replacing, Gwen (who had drowned in the Thames), and joining past, present and future...
...Adelaide the maid...
...Nigel's one important function is to console Diana, to assure her that through Bruno she will learn to love the others: "They will flourish, and you will watch them kindly as if you were watching children...
...At times, the complexities and absurdities of the situations recall A Midsummer Night's Dream...
...At one point Diana exclaims, "It all seems like a dream now, a nightmare, with nothing clear...
...Miles...
Vol. 52 • March 1969 • No. 5
