A Fairly Honourable Defeat Read Free Page B

these criticisms need to be weighed against the point that comedy is traditionally served by the contrived, the unpredictable, and the fantastic, and that its purpose is often more to comment on human nature than to probe in depth the complexities of an individual psyche.
    The novel’s strengths, however, are equally typical of Murdoch. It displays her great powers of invention, her dazzling imagination, and her narrative skill in command of a complex plot. Her powers of characterization show in the range of characters and in the deftness with which they were penned. She captures a character with a defining gesture, a speech mannerism, even a pose. Her characters can be compelling, so that we feel their menace or vulnerability. The novels frequently generate the kind of suspense normally associated with a good mystery. She has a remarkable sense of the visual, scenes being laid out as if for the camera, and much of her humor is visual. But the great strength of Murdoch’s fiction is that while she spares us little in reminding us of the potential for folly or malice in human nature, hers is an affirming voice, compassionate, moral, and resolutely refusing the negative logic of a Leonard or the cynical detachment of a Julius. It is with that perspective that she can, with some irony no doubt but certainly with understanding, see our defeats as all too human and even “fairly honourable.”
    —Peter J. Reed
     
    NOTES
    1 Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good,” Chicago Review, XIII, iii (1959), 52.
     
    2 James Hall, The Lunatic Giant in the Drawing Room (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1968), 181.
     
    3 Sharon Kaehele and Howard German, “The Discovery of Reality in Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, ” PMLA , December 1967, 555.
     
    4 Simone Weil, Selected Essays 1934-43 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 30.
     
    5 John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Sons, 2000), 14.
     
    6 Rubin Rabinovitz, Iris Murdoch: Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, No. 34 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 46.
     

To Janet and Reynolds Stone

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE
     

CHAPTER ONE
     
    ‘JULIUS KING.’
    ‘You speak his name as if you were meditating upon it.’
    ‘I am meditating upon it.’
    ‘He’s not a saint.’
    ‘He’s not a saint. And yet—’
    ‘What about him?’
    ‘He’s in England.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘Who told you?’
    ‘Axel.’
    ‘I didn’t know Julius knew Axel.’
    ‘That is characteristic of both Julius and Axel.’
    Hilda and Rupert Foster, celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary with a bottle of rather dry champagne, were sitting in the evening sun in the garden of their house in Priory Grove, London, S.W.10. Hilda, a plumper angel now, reclined limply, exhibiting shiny burnished knees below a short shift dress of orangy yellow. Her feet were bare. Her undulating dark hair showed some needle-thin lines of grey. Her burly boyish-faced husband, whom she had at last persuaded to stop wearing shorts, sat openshirted, cooking in the sun. He was red, hoping later to be brown. His shock of abundant fair hair had faded with the years, becoming unglistening and dry while still undeniably blond. They were a handsome pair. They were altruistic, but treated themselves judiciously to luxuries. The latest one, to which they had not yet become accustomed, was a diminutive swimming pool which made a square of flashing shimmering blue in the middle of the courtyarded garden. The garden was enclosed by an old redbrick wall which was surmounted by a trellis bearing an enlacement of Albertine and Little White Pet, all now in outrageous flower. The air was dense with smells of roses and of the camomile which Hilda was attempting to grow between the paving stones.
    ‘Who told you? ’ said Rupert.
    ‘The Evening Standard. ’
    ‘Of course. I suppose Julius is rather famous now. And there was all that publicity when he gave up the biological warfare