An Accidental Man Read Free

ever in a Murdoch novel, love takes many forms – which is the point of the Sophocles fragment which Ludwig’s gay Oxford classical colleague quotes in his letter from Athens towards the end of the novel (the Greek is untranslated, as usual: Murdoch expects her readers to be as learned as she is) – but here none of love’s many variant forms lacks flaws. And flawing of some kind is all over An Accidental Man .
    The old, once vital, remembered myths, still vivid in many characters’ minds as they are in Murdoch’s, prove to be mainly vain fantasies. People keep imagining they’re redoing Biblical stories – Matthew washing Dorina’s wounds like a Good Samaritan, Dorina rising again in ‘the joy of resurrection’ after her three days at Matthew’s place, Mavis thinking Dorina ‘died for us’, Dorina aweing over Matthew as if he had ‘made’ her like a Creator God. But like prayer for these characters, the old formulae are dead. They’re vain repetitions. Charlotte might feel the ‘irresistible authority’ of the old words of Psalm 23 as her mother Alison lies dying, but for the rest hunting out the Scripture is matter of farce (‘What number is it? Somewhere near the beginning’), before the priest arrives with his letting-down talk of Youth Clubs and ping pong. Matthew’s feebleness as a moral saviour is only mocked by the suggestions of godlike powers. Compared with the philosopher kings and guides of the other novels, Matthew is very run-down. His own Master, the Buddhist Kaoru, is even less effective – distant, off-stage, silent. And why, we wonder, at the end, is Matthew running away to America with Ludwig? How good, in fact, is he, really? Indeed, and the question comes home with stunning force in this novel, how good is the good itself?
    As ever, this Murdoch text comes heavily seeded with a vocabulary of the good. Good!, people keep saying, good-good-good, jolly good, good for him and so on. The great plethora of common English phrases involving goodness is always on these people’s lips – on to a good thing, with good wishes, good lover, good friend, too good for me, too-good-to-be-true and the like – is no doubt a way of indicating, as usual with Murdoch, the presence, despite ourselves, of a moral sense, the residue of the God-eras, embedded in our ordinary language. But here this crypto moral vocabulary seems to mock rather than endorse the persistent moral conscience it might be thought to stand for. When, in his last conversation with Austin, Matthew studs his responses with That’s good, Good for him, Good and the rest, it all seems dead, an inert parody of ethical thinking, cynically dismissive even. Austin’s ‘A good thing too’ when he hears of the charlady’s ‘idiot child’ being doomed to an early death confirms the sense of prevailing ethical upside-downness. ‘We are a very good-looking family’ are Austin’s final words. With them any faith we might have had in a meaningful ethical mindfulness contained in ordinary language just flies out of the window.
    It’s all a grim reflection on the prospects for a continuing ethical mindfulness in the modern world, commensurate with Murdoch’s savagely jokey christenings here. J.L. Austin, one of Oxford’s greatest ‘ordinary language’ philosophers, has had his name appropriated by a linguistically casual monster. Kierkegaard, the great Christian agoniser and doubter, master-mind of existentialism, so admired by Murdoch, is now just the nickname of a dodgy motor-car – a piece of suspect material, passed back and forth between the characters, exemplum of the ordinary and the particular as a bad bargain. As old Alison lay dying, Charlotte answered the door to a neighbour concerned about a car blocking his garage, and she ‘looked out . . . at the beautiful, perky, ordinary, selfish,