Metaphysical Props

By John Skow

HENRY AND CATO by IRIS MURDOCH 375 pages. Viking. $8.95.

This curious batch of novelizing is Iris Murdoch's curtsy to a literary form perfected by Graham Greene: the semi-serious religious melodrama in which the Hound of Heaven barks fiercely, bites someone on the ankle and then makes a mess on the kitchen floor. Cato Forbes is the failing priest, a convert hung over from a long binge of mystical intoxication.

Cato, suitably costumed by the author in a soiled cassock, crouches in a moribund mission. His sole parishioner is an apprentice thug named Beautiful Joe, who teases him with hints that he is willing to be redeemed. Cato wants desperately and genuinely to save Joe. He also wants to take Joe to bed.

How far will Cato fall? And how ludicrously? Though Novelist Murdoch draws well and in detail the priest's early certitude and later doubt, her line thins to sketchiness when she deals with Cato's predicament. Her artistic imagination seems to have picked up the clerical figure for a moment, examined it with a curator's interest and then passed to other concerns. Among them: a talismanic revolver, a kidnaping, a near rape--most of the props appropriate to Greene-ish metaphysical drama.

The remainder of the book seems less specifically derivative. The author balances Cato, somewhat arbitrarily, with Henry, a stock Englishman from a different shelf -- the young bachelor schoolteacher so feckless as to be invisible to himself. After a series of misadventures, Henry finds his soul and weds Cato's blooming younger sister Colette. Cato drops off the edge of the plot, into hell or the stock room. It is difficult to tell which.

What is this all about? Iris Murdoch, the philosopher-author of such elegant oddities as A Severed Head and The Unicorn, has written nearly 400 felicitous pages, apparently with no motive except to move characters about. Henry and Cato is a diverting disappointment, worth reading for its paragraphs, but not for its chapters.

John Skow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.