The Real Murdoch Mystery

...A characteristic example of control consists of several pages of one-line speeches, with none of the speakers identified, yet conveying in condensed form exactly the necessary information, often amusingly...

...Stuart's vague, groping sense of the goodness he wants to give his life to ("It's all, everywhere, as if everything spoke and showed it—and it's so deep that it's entirely me, and yet it's entirely not me too") is understandably hard for them to grasp...

...this mystery persists...

...Intermingled, as if in deliberate contradiction, are brilliant displays of her skill, like "set pieces" of fireworks...

...Nearly as much space as she gives to Edward's self-analysis is occupied with Stuart's...

...One of his inner ponderings, lasting six pages, begins, "It is a terrible thing to fallintothe hands of the living God," but he says later, "I don't want any God at all, even a modified modernized one...

...Unless some latter-day Ing-mar Bergman took charge, the pretentious aura would give way to an atmosphere more in keeping with the melodramatic plot...

...staring up from under the surface of that strange and fateful stream...

...Sexis true, Midge, you've recognized it and we've proved it...

...To complete the coincidence, both Edward and Stuart are staying there, and enter the room just as Harry under another name is asking for help...

...I'm so full of terrible things, enough for a lifetime of writing...

...I'll write all about what has happened to me, or rather not about it, but about something terrible that I'll invent...

...The word recurs elsewhere, along with ominous threats suggesting not only man-made menaces such as drugs and poison and drowning but poltergeists, symbolic spiders, wails in the night that may or may not be owls mating, the inexplicable shattering of glass, voices of the dead, disembodied evil...

...Harry is jealous, of course...

...The Good Apprentice describes the aftermath of a youthful trick Edward Baltram has played on a fellow student...

...Nearby a lone man is obviously about to leave, and Harry politely asks if they may sit with him in the meantime...

...The puzzle of style constantly recurs...

...She fails to explain how Edward, born after his mother married Harry, acquired the surname of Jesse, who was married to someone else...

...This evokes from his family a worldly, rather gossipy skepticism that even tinges some of the psychiatrist uncle's diagnostic reasoning...

...At the moment he is scheming to "wrest" from Thomas his wife, Midge...

...Ontheonehand, theaf-fair between Midge and Harry has to be taken seriously if we are to take human pain seriously...

...After a few more sessions with him we come to feel an envy of his brother-in-law, Harry Cuno, who shouts at the TV image of Thomas lecturing: '"Oh, shut up you silly old bastard!' switching the set off...

...A subplot in vol ving adultery is obligatory in a Murdoch novel...

...Unequipped for a tour of the underworld, we do not know why this particular group of people should constitute its inhabitants, or why the scenery is preternaturally dark...

...You would do everything for me, you could make me all over again—' As Edward found these words emerging from his mouth he felt a thrill of fright as if the words were actually little animals which had leapt out of his mouth and were now running about...

...Harry to Midge: " We must live with the truth of our emotions...

...We are used to the way she keeps her characters at barge-pole length, especially when they are going about their business of fornication...

...He refuses through two pages of totally low-voiced, utterly maddening dialogue, leaving Harry defeated and the reader burning in sympathy, for once, with a Murdoch character...

...Murdoch's descriptions of landscape are lyrically moving, and her phrasing often can startle the senses into new awareness...

...she guards against any complaint about lack of clues...

...Throughout some sequences she seems not only to fail entirely to edit or select, but uses in her authorial voice the typical English conversational mistakes in grammar...

...not death, for he isn't dead, though Edward doesn't know that...

...The scene suggests a picture by Salvador Dali in which impossible arrangements are depicted with the most rigorous attention to realistic detail...

...The way she presents his ordeal is almost unbearable, and not entirely because of empathy with Edward's agonized regret...

...You cannot read this without seeing it as a scene in a play or film...

...The costuming has already been done...

...Murdoch is careless and meticulous by turns...

...On the other hand, the scenes between the two—page after page—are written in a style verging on parody...

...But Murdoch wants no illusions...

...In theexigen-cies of film making it would lose its flaws as a novel...

...The trick—feeding a drug to an unsuspecting friend—is not new in Murdoch's fiction, but this time the consequences are as bad as they could possibly be...

...Once Edward finds this sick old man he doesn't even know, he uses language almost as overblown as Harry's: And I do love you, Jesse, I love you so much, I must tell you...

...And oh, what a great opportunity for special effects...

...What seems unbelievable on the printed page would actually take place before our eyes...

...They have tried to show each other too many favorite haunts and arrivelate;thetabletheyhavebookedis taken...

...That figure echoes curiously when Midge, in Stuart's room, astonishes him with the news that she is in love with him: "Her small hands, with darkly red-painted nails, wandered nervously as she talked, along the hem of her skirt, over her knees, up to her throat, to her hair, like two anxious harmless little animals...

...is Murdoch using her talent with a wicked kind of frivolity...

...Another is a scene in a restaurant where Harry and Midge had planned to have lunch on their way home from their first, long-dreamed-of weekend together...

...Midge loves "the particular silence which the stilled life of flowers could give a room...

...Edward's foster brother, Stuart, is also going through a spiritual crisis, one that Murdoch apparently intends us to take far more seriously than her characters do...

...If, as in this story, she lets a character mention a secret will, even when no one seems to hear, we can be pretty sure it is going to turn up later, though the result may not be what we hope...

...The various recognitions cause one pretense after another to crumble in a series of exquisite unfolding embarrassments...

...God is an anti-religious idea...

...If only I had come back 10 minutes sooner...

...Then there is the face of Jesse (is it or isn't it an apparition...

...The long solipsistic interior monologues would be cut to the bone...

...This is partly because we would be watching live people who clearly have some sort of existence, but chiefly it goes back to that matter of expectations...

...Seldom do we expect much from the movies in the way of illumination...

...A love like ours is rare, it's a marvel upon earth...

...the treacherous paths through flooded marsh, theclouds lowering over the Railway Cottage where Edward may or may not have been conceived, the dark woods with mysterious "tree men," and a sacred clearing with its prehistoric phallic monument called the "lingam stone" where Ilona dances secretly, her feet not touching the ground...

...Every slight change is reported, to the hairpin falling from the hair of Jesse's wife May...

...If a healer identifies with his patient," he concedes after counseling Edward, "hemaymis-take his own powers for those of the other...

...He is convinced that he will be cured by finding his father, Jesse, a once famous artist, a sort of blended Duncan Grant and Augustus John character, irresistible and unresisting to both men and women...

...The Seegard settings are a moviemaker's dream—so portentous, with the constant fog...

...Still, the insights Thomas comes out with are often plausible...

...It all happens in the first few pages, along with enough exposition, hurriedly and almost arbitrarily supplied, to let Murdoch get on to the real burden of her book—Edward's months of remorse and bizarre adventures in search of relief...

...But this time her distancing is so extreme as to deepen another familiar mystery...

...The intimation, complete with the italics that pepper her pages, is yet another move in an elaborate game Iris Murdoch invariably plays with her readers . Having given them a book which in a sense is itself a mystery (is it serious...

...The worst flaw Murdoch has borrowed from murder mysteries—the distortion of characters to fit the twists and turns of the action, and to permit doubt until the end as to whether they are good or bad (nurturers or poisoners)—would be less obvious in a motion picture...

...Believe in it, give yourself to it...

...Always she presents it with a certain irony...

...In fact, the novel would make a wonderfully satisfyingmovie...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "TheDark Way to the Plaza" "I'll write anovel," resolves young Edward near the end of this labyrinthine record of his torment...

...Our love is eternal and forever...

...Thus "Edward felt as if his heart would burst out of his breast with a great inapprehensible anguish...

...So we would not be disappointed by Murdoch's film, and even angered, as we are here, when we are offered literature from a philosopher and find in it so little truth...

...Edward, given homemade wine by Jesse's mysterious women, "felt he was drinking flowers...

...The results of developments in her fiction are seldom what thereader hopes or expects, though some of the reader's expectations are legitimate ones...

...Probably Murdoch's most sensational set piece is a scene where Midge and Harrv, on their ill-omened way home from that weekend, become lost and arrive at remote Seegard...

...Midge, we love each other, we've said it a thousand times, said it clear-eyed and in the truth...

...With almost painful comic effect, the successive small movements of the players are charted moment by moment, like extraordinarily detailed stage directions...

...We've so tried and tested each other, We've achieved each other...We are the reality of the world, everything else is mere appearance...

...This, by great coincidence, is the famous place Jesse built, where he is now being cared for (or poisoned) by his wife and two daughters...

...Early in the novel Edward's psychiatrist uncle, Thomas, is concerned about the advice he has just given his nephew...

...Describing Thomas' favorite patient's fantasy of having killed his wife (or was it really murder...

...We may not know why the characters do what they do, but we always know what they wear when they do it...

...Midge's 12-year-old son receives a lasting blow when, in one of Murdoch's typical chapter endings, he discovers his mother and his uncle in the act...

...is it perverse...

...And after Midge has told him of her unlikely love for his son Stuart, "You are destroying it all in front of my eyes, all our precious perfect love...

...It is easy to imagine that Graham Greene seance in the medium's dark, shabby bed-sitter when Edward, searching for his father, hears his voice— called up to speak to him—from where...

...Later, when she has much to regret, she hears "the maddening hurtful singing of the birds...

...If only the phone had not rung...

...Was he not sending this beloved child straight into the underworld...

...Although his father abandoned him in utero, and has been as casual in his other relationships, Edward thinks," It was as if Jesse were a prophet or sacred king whose presence would purify the state, making what seemed good be good, and what was spiritually ambiguous into something altogether holy...

...So we are warned that Murdoch is sending us on one of those night journeys that are her specialty, and—as usual—without viaticum...

...At one point she seems to have misunderstood the meaning of a fairly usual word...

...An old hand at plotting melodrama, she knows all the rules...

...And later, "We must follow our hearts, that's what's true, the truth of our whole being...

...she say s he had either buried her or sunk her in a lake or burnt her in an oven or dismembered and "strayed" (instead of strewn) her in the sea...

...And there is as much ineffectual debate by the same sophisticated relatives...

...Shadowed by the fameof his late father, Casimir, a Bloomsbury novelist, he is a not quite successful dabbler in the arts...

...A love like ours is self-justifying...

...These are interspersed with discussions of Edward's problem among his extended and complex family, their sometimes ambivalent attempts to help him, and his own irrational efforts to find peace...

...The reader is tempted to welcome Thomas as an exception, a "sympathetic" character in a cast of players nearly all of whom are labeled at some point as "dangerous...

...Ursula, a down-to-earth doctor friend, calls psychiatrists who think they understand the human mind a "menace," adding, "It's just luck that Thomas hasn't killed anybody yet...

...No, it is the amount of self-castigation, the dredging up of the minutiae of suffering, detail upon detail, five or six pages at a time, throughout the book, that wears out all feeling except fatigue...

...The climax comes when Jesse descends from his tower and engages Midge in a sexual encounter that is both passionate and preposterous...