Half a Mystery

...The possible murderer, George McCaffrey, struck me at first as a bit extreme in his pursuit of his former mentor Then I thought of the times our household had been roused by phone calls, even personal invasion, after 20 years, and realized that there is no limit to the tenacity of the professor's grip on the psyche of certain unstable students Murdoch's experience as an Oxford don must have been strenuous enough to supply her with all she needed (except the last scene, one hopes) for the struggle of Rozanov against George's violent dependence...

...Half a Mystery The Philosopher's Pupil By Iris Murdoch Viking 376pp $17 95 Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellow, Radcliffe At what point does a novelist attain the power to insist that readers sit still for whatever is on the authorial mind, even if it clogs the narrative stream...

...Did Saul Bellow believe that each of the letters to prominent people he interpolated in Herzog would be studied...

...At first the suspicion arises that writer's pride keeps Murdoch from presenting her novel as merely a thriller, she must take pains to wrap the skeleton of her plot in plenty of hifalutin discourse This theory might work if the discourse were not so good, the observations so accurate and surprising, so relevant ("How rarely can happiness be really innocent," she says of a beneficent married couple "How offensive it can be, the natural instinctive showing off of decent happy people...

...And then, later "Even some last lingering belief that someone, somewhere, at some time had had a pure untying thought was, in his mind, a festering sore ". The passage ends after Rozanov makes short work of Ontological Proof the doorbell rings, and George McCaffrey, the title character, Rozanov's former protege and present nemesis, arrives to carry on the story...

...Surprisingly, since the story so directly involves Murdoch's own concerns, its tone is more than usually detached She distances herself by having even her narrator disclaim responsibility by such remarks as "Some of those who intuited these thoughts of Stella's considered them completely daft " Her pages bristle with quotation marks "Ruby had been 'sent over' by Alex to 'help out' in 'settling Stella in "' It is just possible that Murdoch does this to annoy She has already exasperated many of her critics, who feel she is tricking them with secret, devious and bizarre designs having to do with what a scholar has called "literary correlatives of the author's philosophical vision ". Whatever, we must assume that Murdoch has a good reason for giving this effect of dissociation in The Philosopher's Pupil One clue may be provided in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, where she states flatly "An author's irony often conceals his glee This concealment is possibly the chief function of irony " Next question Why the glee...

...are not necessarily doomed...

...It is up to us to understand her purposes and risk the possible loss if we tail Of course, it also is our privilege to conclude that neither our need nor our stamina equals her desire to tell us, for six pages, about her philosopher's mental state "John Robert Rozanov was tired of his mind He was tired of his strong personality and his lace and the el led he had upon people He often thought about death But something still temained which bound him to the word It was not philosophy "Yet on the next page he reflects "The point of solipsism, often missed, was that it abolished morality So if the pain he felt seemed like a spiritual pain, must he not be the victim of a mistake...

...There is, to be sure, much more to the novel than this conflict interacting family relationships and marriages, love fearfully, meekly and brutally received, vivid beach and spa scenes, each with its perils, a Dionysian not, a wise child, and one of Murdoch's most charming dogs The tiny creature, peering from the pocket of his young owner, nearly disrupts a Quaker meeting by his intent, intelligent gaze at the leader...

...references to it "Philosophy," muses Monty in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, "had long seemed to him like the pointless journeying of insects ") Perhaps to balance the heavy demand of this subject on the reader, she has provided an array of shockingly flawed characters and with them almost as many whom we can love, wish well, and hope m the end (dare we reveal this...

...Murdoch herself may be cheating the dark gods Though like the Greek dramatists she unpeels layer after layer of shocking revelation, we seldom shudder What happens is likely to be terrible-she makes sure her people get their quota of suffering-but there is no purgation for the reader in the characters' punishment Nor even, on the thriller level, great suspense The response to her sexual explorations, too, is felt mostly in the head Sometimes she is explicit about the lovers' physical contact, as in The Word Child, but the frissons are as few as in The Sacred and Projane Love Machine where Blaise, attracted to mysterious vices, finds at last a mistress adept at them After three pages devoted to their activities we still don't know what the two really do together, and never learn...

...Do not doubt that there is plenty of plot There always is in Murdoch's novels They tend to be constructed on a thriller framework, abounding in violent acts and melodramatic episodes, coincidence and interchanging alliances, suspicion and threat, with delicately dropped time bombs of warning Murdoch enjoys playing with the obligatory elements of the detective story In The Nice and the Good she has John, who is investigating the strange death of an office colleague, descend into the vaults deep beneath the building without telling anyone where he is going He is alone in that mysterious depth with the menacing blackmailer who, in air heavy with sulphurous incense from the deceased's Black Mass rituals, offers him a contaminated grape Then, as if to show scorn for the formula, Murdoch does not bother to explain how John emerges unscathed but simply resumes her story at a subsequent point...

...In her new book Murdoch changes her pattern in more ways than by making her central character a practitioner of her own academic discipline (Not that the earlier novels are free from...

...Murdoch sometime-, seems almost perverse in her determination to frustrate the anticipations she very carefully creates 1 el a long-dreaded character appear, an encounter sure to change lives and Murdoch chooses that moment to describe at some length the family history, past habits, present problems, and cogitations of each party to the confrontation...

...Ins Murdoch, too, may be depending on posterity to relish the endless dissections and analyses in The Philosopher's Pupil Whether that is a sound idea is not the point Or rather, it is a point that will not be made by me The more one reads of Murdoch-and she has published 21 novels since 1954, plus three plays (A Severed Head was a Broadway success in 1964) and three books of philosophy-the less inclined one is to doubt that she knows what she is doing and why, as a novelist, she must do it...

...Murdoch can get any effect she wants in a novel, including, when she chooses, speed In The Accidental Man some chapters are made up of letters exchanged by the characters (each marvelously individual), carrying the story swiftly on Other chapters consist of one-line speeches heard at a cocktail party, some comically misleading yet by the end advancing the plot to a quite new phase There seems no area of society the author does not know, from the civil service office with its maddening repartee to the pathetic fringes of the art world where underprivileged and under talented students grope toward vague dreams One of these, in The Nice and the Good, receives from a concentration camp survivor a warning against jealousy in which Murdoch translates her knowledge of philosophy into the tender human language of wisdom The same book (whose plot is a sort of Liaisons Dangereuses) has a widow, burdened with guilt for the death of her husband after a quarrel, daring finally to revisit the scene By quite simply listing what the woman sees-a carved gate-post, an oval of stained glass in a front door a lamppost with a lonely look upon a circle of pavement"-Murdoch achieves the physical response that she declines to win by the easier means of melodrama...

...Murdoch plays with every past form from Greek tragedy through Gothic and Dickensian novels, as well as with those of the current manufactured pornographic best sellers that touch all sexual bases She teases with taboo temptations (aging ex-monk and beautiful naked boy on a beach or, in the present novel, eminent guardian wanting to sell his adored and helpless ward), and often does more than tease In A Severed Head, her most dizzying erotic merry-go-round, the abandoned husband Martin, whose wife has left him for the psychiatrist Palmer, goes to woo the Cambridge don, Honor, sister of Palmer, and finds her nudely entwined in bed with her brother Honor has in fact warned Martin earlier when chiding him for his "civilized" behavior in the triangle with his wife and Palmer "You cannot cheat the dark gods Sooner or later you will have to become a centaur and kick your way out...

...Reports of quite literate friends suggest that they treated the work as a game of leapfrog Perhaps Bellow was wisely counting on future generations to give his thought the attention it deserves...

...She can thus have it both ways These dark "womb-tomb" regions have a genuine tearsome attraction for her When she lacks a subterranean cavern she sends her characters on their night journey through dense London fog, even though England put an end decades ago to the coal fires that caused it (Outer history seems not to exist in Murdoch novels, nor politics Only the results show up when some young character plays drug tricks on his elders ) The nightmare scene of The Philosopher s Pupil is the underground pumping system far below an old-fashioned hot-springs bath establishment The book's setting, a spa town where everyone drinks and swims at the baths, gives a nostalgic whiff of Jane Austen's Persuasion...