The Prolific Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch must be one of our most prolific writers. A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Viking, $6.95) is her ninth novel in a decade: one for every year except 1967.

Almost, it seems, I am unable to read as fast as Miss Murdoch writes, and I have therefore read only two of her previous volumes: "A Severed Head" (1961) and "The Time of the Angels" (1966).

Certain characteristics of those two novels are present again in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. The characters are a closely knit group (nine, in all) bound by fami· ly relationships or common university experiences. Many are intellectuals. All, or nearly all, like to discuss and analyze their interrelationships. And as in "A Severed Head," much of the book is concerned with fugue-like variations of love pairs.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat opens as Rupert and Hilda are celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary with champagne. Their only worry is son Peter, who won't return to Cambridge, won't visit his parents at home, can't stand Rupert

Iris Murdoch

By Ruth Bauerle

and won't drink. Counterpointing them are Rupert's younger brother Simon and his homosexual lover, Axel (Axel and Rupert got firsts together at Oxford.)

Another variation is offered by Hilda's brilliant younger sister Morgan, whose husband, Tallis, is beneath her intellectually.

(He took a second at Oxford, she a first.) This disparity is less important since Morgan, several years

Tallis to live with Julius before, had separated from King, another of Rupert's Cxford friends.

ALL THIS yields the reader a good marriage, a bad marriage, a non-marriage and a homosexual marriage. The big-little brother relationship balances the big-little sister one; likewise big-little sister one; likewise a tormented father-son conflict of Rupert and Peter is set against Tallis's loving, filial understanding of his aged father. Neat.

Just as Morgan's meeting with Julius had disrupted her marriage, so Julius's return to London becomes the

disrupting element in most of the other relationships.

He has given up germ warfare research because it "bores" him, though his friends insist his decision must have been rooted in principle. He has passionate, loveless affairs, though his mistresses always insist he loves them. For his amusement and Morgan's, he plays games with his friends as if they were chess pieces.

Superficially described, as above, Miss Murdoch's novel sounds like a kind of drawing room or, in the 1970's patio comedy. She herself took a first at Oxford, however, and is philosopher as well as novelist. Like Henry James (whose

inheritor she, in some degree, is) she is concerned not merely with brilliant portrayal of surface ironies, but with underlying meanings.

SO HER characters pride themselves on living orderly lives in orderly surroundings. But it is really Tallis, despised for the physical disorder of his life and the second-rate quality of his mind, who achieves genuine

order.

Similarly, Julius' intellectual friends and admirers never discover the secret of where he spent World War II. When they inquire, he says only that he had a "cozy" war. Tallis discovers the truth the third time he sees Julius.

Miss Murdoch never lets her ideas interfere with the story, however; and the story holds the reader. Bonuses are irony, wit, satire, comedy all the variations of laughter at human capacity for misunderstanding.