Iris Murdoch’s People

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31760, 17 August 1968, Page 4

Iris Murdoch’s People

The Nice and the Good. By Iris Murdoch. Chatto and Windus. 350 pp.

A new novel by Iris Murdoch is always an event It may be shocking, stimulating, comic or confusing, but it will always be satisfying. It will always offer the reader an extended and exciting vision of life. All Miss Murdoch’s books have that happy quality which has been described as

“button-holing readability.” Their grip loosens only with the last page. In this, her eleventh and longest novel. Miss Murdoch draws a batch of disparate characters from her inex-

haustible fund of peculiar people (none of them, incidentally. falling into either categories suggested by the title) and puts them down, this time, in the secluded locale of a pleasant country bouse on the coast of Dorset Trescombe House is the home of the peripatetic Grays —Kate and Octavian, of Barbara their teen-age daughter, irascible Caste the housekeeper. of Paula and Mary (one divorced and the other widowed), and their children, of Unde Theo, Willie Kost

a refugee scholar, and home also of Mingo the dog and Montrose the cat It is beautifully handled. The atmosphere of the house is airier, brighter and more straightforward than that of most of Miss Murdoch’s previous settings. There is little resemblance here to the gaunt castle by the sea in “The Unicorn,” or to the fog-beleaguered London manse in “The Time of the Angels.” However this is a book with twin-themes, and the darker side of the story lies in London, in the comfortable fiat of John Ducane, and in the governmental offices of Whitehall, where civil servant Radeechy commits suicide at his desk. Ducane is the man at the centre of the plot who weaves the two themes together. A longstanding friend of Octavian Gray with whom he works at Whitehall, he aspires to be Kate Gray’s lover and spends all his week-ends at Trescombe House. Radeechy we meet only as a corpse, but in John Ducane’s investigation into the man’s death—and here is a touch of the old Murdoch metaphysics—evidence is found that Radeechy and certain nubile accomplices performed black masses in the forgotten cellars of Whitehall.

The book is riddled with the unexpected—the nearest Iris Murdoch has come to producing a thriller, with the final phalanx of surprises coming in the last chapter in the pairing off of the characters. We are given, in fact, something very uncharacteris-

tic for Miss Murdoch, a conventionally happy ending. Those readers fortunate enough to hear the unassuming Miss Murdoch and her husband, during their lecture tour of this country at the end of last year, will open this book with a personal and heightened sense of anticipation. One flaw disturbs the excellence of the work; the typography is poor, and cramped lines of print are squashed in distracting proximity on each page.