Jackson's Dilemma by Iris Murdoch

Edward was (as Benet recalled and even retailed later) made of steel. He had ceased to tremble. He was no longer pale, but somewhat flushed. He sat silently, very still, frowning and looking down at the paper. Then he handed it back to Benet, and speaking in his ordinary voice, he said, 'So be it.' then he said, 'We must put off the wedding guests. Is it too late to ring them?'

Benet, now more collected, said, 'That is her writing, isn't it? It could be a hoax--'

'It is her writing -- rather hasty -- but yes, hers."

On the eve of Edward Lannion's marriage to Marian Berran, a message is discovered at Hatting Hall, Edward's estate. It's in Marian's handwriting, and it says she cannot marry him, and has gone away. This sends the hanger-son at Hatting Hall, and its neighbor, Penndean, into a flurry of handwringing and activity, chief among these Benet, the master of Penndean who orchestrated, more or less, the marriage between the two. It's Benet's servant, the mysterious Jackson, who ends up getting to the bottom of things. through cunning and sheer luck he's the one who tracks down Marian, who is in a state of hysteria after being coerced into writing the note by her Australian lover. Jackson, sensing perhaps that she is really more in love with the Australian than Edward, delivers her to him, leading to a chain of events that resorts the fragile ecosystem of the two houses.

It took me a while to figure out what exactly this novel was doing. Ultimately, though Marian's letter feels like the beginning of chaos--like the mysterious rock thrown through Edward's window at the beginning of the novel--it ends with all the characters understanding themselves better and pairing off in happy relationships. Edward ends up--spoiler alert--with the widowed Anna, whom he has always truly loved. Marian ends up with the Australian. Tuan, one of Benet's hangers-on, distinguished by being Jewish and neurotic, ends up with Marian's sister Rosalind, who had until now been nursing a wayward crush on Edward herself. And Benet ends up with Jackson, who he inherited from the dead patriarch "Uncle Tim," and whose mysterious nature he has always been unduly suspicious of--Jackson's deeds, in this case, wipe away the suspicion and bring the master and servant together in a new relationship as friends. Looking at it this way, the novel is something of a fairy tale or a Shakespearean comedy, and it suggests that the characters are induced to throw off the yoke of "Uncle Tim," whose dead hand guides the misbegotten relationship between Edward and Marian.

I didn't think much of this worked, really. I thought the novel made the fatal flaw of depicting Jackson as both mysterious--he shows up at Tim's/Benet's door with no history or family, and only the one name--while also giving us sections of his internal third person deliberation. It might have worked if Jackson really had been a figure of mystery, but the mysteriousness here feels like something more declared than explored. I was left wondering what it is about the guy that everyone feels is so extraordinary. I was put off, too, by Jackson's delivering of Marian to the Australian, who has basically gotten Marian drunk and forced her to write that letter. I was shocked by Jackson making such a mistake as to deliver Marian up to a sort of predator, and shocked moreover when I came to understand that Murdoch didn't think it was much of a mistake. I often find Murdoch's novels frustrating, teasing up big reveals or dramatic moments that don't quite come, piddling around with philosophical ideas that have little or nothing to do with the story, and this one might have been the most frustrating of all.

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

It was only now clear to me how very much I had made that image, and yet I could not feel that it was anything like a fiction. It was more like a special sort of truth, almost a touchstone; as if a thought of mine could become a thing, and at the same time be truth. It was the dismissive resentment, the 'let her go then', which was a lie. My odd almost mad faithfulness had become its own reward in the end. I had smoothed Hartley's brow and unclouded her lovely eyes as the years went by, and the ambiguous tormenting image had become gentle and a source of light.

Theater director Charles Arrowby has decided to retire and move to a drafty old house in the north of England, overlooking the sea. He's trying to get away from it all, but his past keeps turning up to find him: in the shape of his former actress-lovers, like the guileless Lizzie and the fiercely jealous Rosina, as well as several friends and one ascetic cousin. These guests turn up to remind Charles of the life he's tried to leave behind, sometimes as friends and sometimes as enemies. But the most remarkable surprise visitor of all is an aging woman who turns out to be Charles' long lost love Hartley, who broke his heart as a teenager by refusing to marry him.

It seems like kismet, and Charles certainly takes it that way. He wages a long campaign to convince Hartley that her unhappy marriage to a blue collar man has been a mistake, and that she should return to him and lead the life that was lost to both of them years ago. He takes it as a given that her love for him is as eternal as his love for her, and this certainty leads him to troubling places. Soon, he's more or less kidnapped Hartley, refusing to let her leave his house and return to her husband, certain that she'll eventually come to her senses. Into this volatile atmosphere arrives Hartley's adopted son Titus, who believes he's Charles' son--it's not true, but as far as Charles can imagine, it certainly might be.

It would be accurate, though perhaps not quite apt, to say The Sea, the Sea is a 500-page book about an idealistic old man who kidnaps a woman who wants nothing to do him. Our love-fantasies, Murdoch explains, have a great power of their own. All love, she suggests, might really be rooted in our own imagined versions of the other, and who's to say that Charles is any more misbegotten than anyone else? (It certainly doesn't help Charles' case that his soulmate seems to be as provincial and dour as she keeps trying to convince him she is.)

There's something uncanny about The Sea, the Sea. There's a supernatural element that's never quite explained: a sea monster Charles witnesses on the first day of his new residence, a floating image of his lover's head in a high window, as if hanged. But the coincidence of the whole thing is uncanny, too: why is it, exactly, that all these people keep turning up in this little northern town? It only made sense when I reflected on something that James, Charles' mystic cousin, says about the Tibetan concept of the bardo, that afterlife in which you drift around encountering the spirits of those you've known in life. The moors of the north are Charles' bardo, a place where he encounters the spirits of his life whether he wants to or not, not to make things right, or better, as you might in a book that took its cues from Christianity and not Buddhism, but to contemplate the life that's formed around him. You get the impression that his mistake is thinking that he can reach out and touch the spirit of Hartley, or anyone else, to push or pull them in one way or another, but that's not what the bardo is about.

When I pick up an Iris Murdoch novel, I feel like I'm always chasing the furious comic energy of Under the Net, and it never arrives. Henry and Cato got pretty close, and other books of hers have it to some degree, but the kidnapping of a sad old woman didn't really get there for me. Perhaps it makes sense that The Sea, the Sea seems to churn and churn and not really go anywhere, like the dangerous "cauldron" at the bottom of Charles' cliff--but this is probably the least satisfying of the Murdoch novels I've read.

Henry and Cato by Iris Murdoch

Cato coming from the church back to the Mission, had seen a sign in a clothes shop window which said, in neon lights, TROUSERAMA.  He felt a piercing desire to laugh and cry.  There was no God and the world was damned and everyone had quietly gone mad only they were carrying on as usual.  The universe was funny brittle awful momentary.  Human life was the pointless wandering of insects.  TROUSERAMA.  That's what it was.  Life was simply a trouserama.

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!

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

We got onto an eighty-eight bus.  Mars provoked a flood of remarks from the conductor.  We sat in the front seat on top, the seat in which I had sat not so very long ago thinking about Anna until I had to get off the bus and go looking for her.  And as I looked down now on the crowds in Oxford Street and stroked Mars's head I felt neither happy nor sad, only rather unreal, like a man shut in a glass.  Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute.  All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, life itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing.  Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future.  So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

Iris Murdoch's excellent Under the Net is literally a shaggy-dog story: a key element of the plot is the kidnapping of the Marvellous Mister Mars, who stars in movies.  The narrator, Jake, nabs Mars from a shady bookie who has designs on Jake's translation of a French novel, which he wants to turn into a film.  It isn't really quite clear what Jake wants to do with Mars, but the goals of the characters in Under the Net are never really clear, much like real people, and there's never a sense in which the adventures are headed toward a definite and sensible climax.  Under the Net is really a kind of picaresque, enjoyable because it zooms from one improbable scene to another: a mysterious mime production, a Communist riot on the set of a film designed to look like ancient Rome, an apartment overrun by pigeons.

But the fun of Under the Net belies the seriousness of its subject matter.  The "net" of the title refers to language, which Jake describes as something we are constantly trapped under, and which refuses to release us.  Murdoch was a devout follower of Wittgenstein, the 20th century philosopher who wrote and thought the most about language.  In Under the Net, Wittgenstein's ideas appear under an unsuccessful novel written by Jake called The Silencer, a kind of Platonic dialogue adapted from conversations Jake once had with a friend named Hugo, who was his roommate during a cold medicine study.  Jake is so impressed with Hugo's ideas that he turns them into The Silencer, but seeing them transformed by his own language, he's so embarrassed by them that he can't face Hugo again.  (What Jake learns is what Nietszche said: you can only find words for what's already dead in your heart.)

What drives the action of Under the Net is Jake's discover that Hugo has fallen in love with, and been harrassing, an actress friend of his named Sadie.  Jake is in love with Sadie's sister, Anna, but Anna--we find out later--is in love with Hugo.  Sadie, in turn, is in love with Jake.  Somehow this love square results in the theft of Mr. Mars, and Jake helping Hugo escape a hospital, and all sorts of other ridiculous stuff.  But despite being very high in hijinks, Under the Net proves to be one of the more thoughtful and intellectually interesting books I've read this year.