Henry Marshalson is the second son of wealthy British gentry, living in America as a second-rate art professor. When he finds out that his older brother, Sandy, has died, he's overjoyed--not because he now will inherit the massive estate, Laxlinden, but because he regards Sandy, along with his parents, as the chief tormentors of his life. The estate, in fact, he plans to sell, and give all the money away to charity. This plan is not well received by his mother, who's been living there, and in fact it's made in a sort of frenzy of feeling of which idealism actually plays a little part. There's a little revenge in there, but mostly, there's a feeling that if he can divest himself of Laxlinden, his mother, his money, then he can return to America unencumbered by his past:
Why had he got to get rid of his inheritance? He did not even any more know why. He just had to transform all these objects, these things and spaces, into clean easily disposable money, and then to get rid of the money and be--what--free, good? Even these names were too flimsy for what god-possessed Henry had to achieve.
Cato, Henry's old friend and neighbor, is the son of a deeply secular man who is bitterly disappointed that Cato has become a priest. Cato's conversion was sudden, rooted in feeling rather than intellect. But where once he felt the divine presence of Christ, he feels nothing but absence, and a sinking feeling that there is no God. Even in his process of deconversion, his priest friends tell him to stick it out, and try to remind him that a life of faith is more complex than a feeling of the divine presence. But Cato's decision is complicated: he has fallen in love with a young criminal drifter who goes by the name Beautiful Joe. Joe hangs on to Cato with a puppy-like love, but refuses to be reformed or remade, and talks up his own vicious wickedness. When Henry returns from America, chattering about his desire to give his money away, Joe wonders if he himself might not be the best recipient of Henry's largesse.
Like Cato, Henry has a love-object: Stephanie, a woman he discovers in a secret flat kept by his brother, and who claims to have been Sandy's lover. Stephanie is older, she's not very attractive, and in fact she's irritatingly needy, but that's exactly what Henry desires: a woman he can possess. Stephanie is the one thing of Sandy's he inherits but won't divest himself of. In both of these relationships there is a warning about the dangers of one of the many things we call love. Henry is driven to Stephanie, and Cato to Joe, by rote compulsion, and both justify their high-handedness with an intent to remold their love objects into better people. Whether they are captives or captors isn't quite clear, and this dynamic is reflected a third time in the relationship between Henry's insightful mother, Gerda, and Lucius Lamb, the pathetic aging poet she keeps around like a dog to be kicked beneath the table.
Like all of Murdoch's novels, Henry and Cato is philosophically rich. Among other things, she asks: what does it mean to be good? Henry approaches goodness at times despite being selfish and amoral; Cato, the caring priest, seems only to do damage. What does it mean to believe in God? Can one call themselves a Christian in the absence of both intellectual assurance and the feeling of divine presence? What is suffering? That's a question that the novel is deeply concerned with:
Supposing one lacked the concept of suffering, thought Cato, sitting in the bedroom waiting for Beautiful Joe to arrive. Supposing one just suffered like an animal without thinking all the time: I'm suffering. Is it a sophisticated concept? He was not sure. Christianity hands it out even to peasants. Christ suffered, that is the whole point. But what a pointless point. It's such a selfish activity, suffering. Buddhism treats it with contempt.
Cato, Henry, Stephanie, even Lucius and Gerda, all choose a kind of suffering and call it by the name of love. (What is passion, after all, but a word for the suffering of Jesus?) A few characters seem cognizant that they could choose happiness, like Cato's sister Colette, who assures Henry that they are destined to be married. And then there's Joe, whose plan to kidnap Cato, ransom money from Henry, and defile Colette, seems to be a kind of blissful ignorance, the product of an id unshackled from the suffering superego. Not that you'd want to be like Joe.
The kidnapping episode, in which Cato and Colette are trapped in an underground air raid shelter, plays like a section imported in from a dimestore thriller. But Joe is so compelling in his childish will to violence that it doesn't matter. In fact, the most compelling characters in the novel are the minor ones--canny Gerda, sad Lucius, and the mysterious bird-headed inscrutable servant of the Marshalson family named Rhoda. They're more palatable perhaps because we don't have to sit so long with their mania, like Henry, or their melancholy, like Cato. I'm not one of those people who thinks that novels need likeable characters, but the sour myopia possessed by every person in Henry and Cato can make it into a grind.
Menaced and slashed a little by Beautiful Joe, Henry runs to the National Gallery to sit before a painting of Diana and Actaeon. That's just the kind of thing people do in Iris Murdoch novels: they combat existential horror by sitting in front of paintings. The violence in the painting is nothing, Henry remarks to us, compared to the real thing, or even the premonition of it. (Chill out, Henry. It's only a flesh wound.) But there's Murdoch, too, reminding us that the picaresque novel points toward real terrors, that are only glimpsed in the pages of art. Enjoy the rest of your summer!
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