The Donkeys

A FAIRLY HONOURABLE DEFEAT by Iris Murdoch. 436 pages. Viking. $6.95.

Love has always been blind, but that does not appease the Iris Murdoch demon. Her 13 novels, written over 16 years, are cruel choreographies for lovers who must play a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey in which there is no tail and no donkey. The grotesque charade is heightened by the fact that Murdoch's lovers are usually intellectuals, often philosophers or linguists, who can talk their way to "steamy moral altitudes" while betraying others and mortifying themselves.

Her latest novel, the most ambitious since A Severed Head, concerns two married couples--one heterosexual, one homosexual. Rupert and Hilda are toasting 20 years of guileless union; Axel and Simon, who is Rupert's younger brother, have just passed their third year of wary connubiality.

Into this amicable stasis Murdoch introduces a favorite character of hers, the mean, mysterious catalyst. This time it is a famous scientist named Julius King, who is a latter-day lago, if not the Devil himself. Arriving in London and finding his friends happy is too much for Julius. Playing on vanity, sowing distrust he labors suavely to link Rupert with Hilda's younger sister and Simon with himself. As the plot unravels, the book shifts from comedy to melodrama, to tragedy--a course few writers could control or sustain. Miss Murdoch nearly manages it, because her presence is so forcefully stamped on every event and every line of dialogue. She is moralist, realist and magician, an unsentimental Titania gazing coolly at the "enchanted donkeys"--lovers whom she awakens from Midsummer Night's madness.

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