A Fairly Honourable Defeat Read Free Page A

but certainly explores many variant relationships. All too often, Murdoch shows, people—especially those with a shaky sense of self-identity—try to define themselves through a relationship. Thus we see Morgan, for example, having found that her husband’s compliance has failed to provide the structure she needs, turning to an affair with a dominating man. When that relationship fails, she looks for simplifying innocence with a boy, which in fact places more responsibility upon her than she wants. Consequently, she turns to a father figure, and when that culminates in disaster, she again reverts to the comforts of an indulgent mother figure. Simon and Axel are both, in their respective ways, uncertain of their relationship because of their own and other people’s perceptions of the nature of homosexual love. By the end of the novel they have learned to trust their love and that their contributions to the “defeats” that occur were due to their failures to do so. “It was a failure of love,” says Axel, having learned another of Murdoch’s lessons, that the form love takes matters less than its quality. But this education may be incomplete. Acknowledging that they have been too concerned with their own relationship to see clearly their responsibilities to others, Axel concludes, “To take refuge in love is an instinct and not a disreputable one.” Simon echoes those words, as if Murdoch wishes to underline them. An instinct, yes, and not disreputable, she seems to say, but not entirely honorable when it means turning away from responsibility to others.
    The complications of the relationships, the intrigues, the keeping secrets to spare feelings, the miscommunications, the melodramatic scenes in this novel at times resemble an earlier Shakespearean comedy of errors. The opening pages of the book, consisting almost entirely of dialogue, feel like comic contrivance. Rupert and Hilda run through the cast of the novel, their situations, and prepare for the inevitable complications to follow. Yet while A Fairly Honourable Defeat remains lighter in tone than some of her other novels, a sense of threat, of the sinister, remains. And there is also real suffering, a distinctive characteristic in much of Murdoch’s comedy. Tallis rejects the temptation to think, like his embittered father, that “it all went wrong from the start” or that life is “a disastrous compound of human failure, muddle and sheer chance,” and we sense Murdoch shares in his rejection. But she has witnessed enough of that “compound” to know that it must have its place in comedy, or any philosophy, that addresses life truthfully. The comedy of humans’ “fairly honourable defeats” lies in their being distracted by superficial discomforts and failing to address real human suffering. People’s efforts to muddle through, to act morally and decently against life’s odds and their own foibles, become the source both of Murdoch’s comedy and of her compassion.
    Murdoch at times even may seem unfair in making comedy out of confronting “nice” or ordinarily decent people with the moral challenges of severely testing situations. Does she recognize this when she offers Julius as a surrogate author figure within the novel, manipulating people as an author might fictional characters into morally testing plot situations? This kind of manipulation within her novels is a trait that is sometimes faulted. Her plots have been seen as sometimes overly contrived. The multiplicity of characters and (sometimes) a shifting of narrative perspective have been cited as making it more difficult to identify with or feel much engaged by any one character. Rubin Rabinovitz notes her “desire to fool the reader with sudden and unexpected twists of plot,” and one may well see that trait in the revelations about Julius’s past at the end of A Fairly Honourable Defeat. 6 It is not a novel that entirely escapes any of these criticisms. On the other hand, some of