Murdochisms

By Martha Duffy

THE MESSAGE TO THE PLANET

by Iris Murdoch

Viking; 563 pages; $22.95

Novels by Dame Iris Murdoch are about as sturdy and reliable as a well-made trench coat. The reader can count on several things from these lengthy dissections of the British intelligentsia, and the new installment, her 24th, is no exception. One can be sure, for instance, that demon lust and his faithful servant, self-deception, will make fools of the witty, wise and powerful. There will probably be a maddeningly masochistic woman and a childish, manipulative man. A young person, usually a girl, will act as an unsparing force of nature.

By now, too, the author's mannerisms are like old pals. One staple is stretches of unanchored dialogue so protracted that one has to go back and count off who is speaking. Another is italics. A simple sentence like "If only Marcus could start writing, then everything would move" would not appear to need emphasis, but Murdoch's fans play along, as if she were somehow reading the story aloud.

The same applies to the liberal use of quotation marks, which run through the books like tiny underscoring arrows. The Message to the Planet is overly fond of this intrusive nudging. Here is the latest Murdoch female masochist in full lament: "Franca contained in her breast a storm of anguish and violence so terrible that she had at times, when she was alone and longing to 'break down,' to clutch her breast." Terrible, for that matter, is a favorite word. So are appalling, awful, horrible, dreadful and all forms of the word dark. "These dreadful ideas, horrors from the past now poised to darken the future" is typical of Dame Iris at her most overwrought.

It is easy, far too easy, to poke fun at these idiosyncrasies. What Murdoch can do surpassingly well is move a narrative. Once caught in her grip, the reader flies through myriad complications, signal switches and genuine surprises. The Message to the Planet is not her strongest book. It chronicles the decline of Marcus Vallar, a charismatic man who may have mysterious healing powers. But the central figure is a tiresome young don, Alfred Ludens, who is preoccupied with genius -- he is writing a book about Leonardo -- and obsessed by Vallar. The subplot involves a pigheaded painter and his attempts to maintain a particularly grotesque menage a trois. There is some wit here; the book could in fact be viewed as a send-up of Doris Lessing's more apocalyptic fictional efforts. But in Murdoch's best work, the characters have more zip than these do. On to Novel 25.