Figures in a Moral Pattern

By Paul Gray

THE PHILOSOPHER'S PUPIL by Iris Murdoch; Viking; 576 pages; $17.75

This is Iris Murdoch's 21st novel. Her fecundity is remarkable, but even more so is the manner in which she has written her books. Allegory, that stately, illustrated progress toward foregone conclusions, worked best in ages of faith, when author and readers agreed on the subjects of good and evil. Such has not been the case since roughly the time of Edmund Spenser and his Faerie Queene, yet Murdoch, a philosophy don at Oxford, has successfully built a career on this outdated literary genre. Her characters manifestly stand for abstract values; they are figures in a pattern of moral design and significance. The question in her fiction is not what happens but why. And allegory, in her hands, becomes a tool for testing, rather than affirming, beliefs.

The Philosopher's Pupil shows Murdoch at the top of her form. At issue is the salvation of George McCaffrey, an apparently deranged man in his middle 40s who is first seen trying to push a car containing his wife into a canal. What, or who, could have got into George? In addition, how does the reappearance of George's old philosophy teacher, John Robert Rozanov, figure in what appears to be an attempted murder?

Murdoch surrounds these stark questions with an abundance of local color. She provides a narrator (called N) and the English village of Ennistone (N's town), the site of an ancient hot spring where residents and tourists gather daily to bathe and socialize. Legend maintains that this spa has aphrodisiacal powers and was once associated with pagan rites of Venus. Vigilant congregations of Anglicans, Methodists, Catholics and Quakers keep watch on the "unholy restlessness" that periodically seizes Ennistone, a madness lately exemplified by reported sightings of flying saucers and the peculiar behavior of George McCaffrey. The town does not take all the speculation about the automobile incident lightly but rather as "an example of how pure disorder at one level can cause a fall of moral barriers at another."

The arrival of Rozanov, a native Ennistonian of Russian ancestry who is also a philosopher of worldwide renown, does nothing to calm these waters. Rozanov, who is supposed to have all the answers, is rumored to be writing the book that will cap his brilliant career. Privately, he is in despair. His lifelong search for truth, for a logical edifice that will support the notion of morality, has arrived at a culdesac. He now admits that "at the bottom, which isn't very far down, it's all rubble, jumble. Not even muck but jumble."

This is the figure to whom George McCaffrey appeals for help. Rozanov had been his professor, the one who told him upon leaving the university to give up philosophy because he was insufficiently intelligent. "You ruined my life, you know," George tells his old tutor, during the first of several unpleasant meetings. "You were Mephistopheles to my Faust." Met with indifference, George tries again: "I want to be justified, you can justify me, I want to be saved, you can save me."

Rozanov lacks both this will and power. Nor does any human agent seem capable of ministering to George: not his wealthy mother or his brothers, not his obdurately surviving wife, not the prostitute with whom he spends his evenings. The Anglican priest sizes George up as a bad risk and avoids him. Says one intimate: "You can't explain George by the old theories. You might just as well say he's possessed by a devil."

The demon is ultimately exorcised, but not before Murdoch throws her village and all its inhabitants turbulently up for grabs. The metaphysical design of her book is regularly submerged in a profusion of details. There is, for instance, the meeting of a tiny dog (a papillon) and a fox, told rather charmingly from the dog's point of view. Ennistone, an imaginary place, is given a vivid history and an eerily animistic present. An old industrial waterway thwarts its own modernization: "The canal remained in mourning for its useful past, expressing the grim puritanical character of local history rather than any desire to be reborn as charming." The steam from the Ennistone spa rises from the pools and clouds the chilly English air, a recurrent scene emblematic of both hedonism and rigor. Citizens dunk themselves in sulfuric baths, attempting to drown sorrows that hover in the air waiting for their owners to emerge and reclaim them.

All of this is told in a narrative voice garrulous enough to make Thackeray blush. "I am an observer," says Murdoch's mouthpiece, "a student of human nature, a moralist, a man; and will allow myself here and there the discreet luxury of moralizing." That he does, chatting, passing judgments, characterizing events, keeping track of an abundant cast of players, nattering away as if the 19th century novel were alive and well. In his last sentence N acknowledges "the assistance of a certain lady." The end product of this collaboration between Murdoch and her imagination is both challenging and irresistible: a combination of gossip and profundity, modern times and ancient edicts.

--By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"George, more than most people, lived by an idea of himself which was in some ways significantly at odds with reality. To say he was a narcissist was to say little. We are mostly narcissists, and only in a few, not always with felicitous results, is narcissism over come (broken, crushed, annihilated, nothing less will serve) by religious discipline or psychoanalysis. George was an accomplished narcissist, an expert and dedicated liver of the double life, and this in a way which was not always to his discredit. That is, he was in some respects . . . not as bad as he pretended to be, or as he really believed himself to be." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.