The Green Knight.

THE GREEN KNIGHT 

Iris Murdoch 

Viking, $23.95,472 pp.

Someone who knew I was reading Iris Murdoch asked me recently if she engages large issues in her novels. Well, she certainly introduces large issues, and she has her characters discuss them at length (and sometimes ad nauseam). Abstractions such as good, evil, mystery, and magic, and ideas about history, art, and religion play roles as large as those of the characters. She introduces large issues into the action, too. For example, in The Green Knight two of the characters act out a drama of fratricide and, to be sum we don' t miss any allusions, we are repeatedly reminded of the story of Cain and Abel. As I read this novel I reminded myself that in Genesis this drama, so vivid and terrible that it still reverberates undiminished, is related in a few lines. Several hundred pages of Murdoch's present-day elaborations on the story offer no new perspectives and reflect none of the power and awe one experiences on reading the Jewish Scripture. If you're going to base a novel on the story of Cain and Abel, you ought to have something of significance to say about it.

Large issues abound; we could say that large issues make up the entire substance of Murdoch's novels. But she does not succeed in engaging these issues. Disengagement is a more characteristic mode, "disembodied" a good description of her characters in these fatally cerebral works. Alasdair MacIntyre comments that Iris Murdoch "... is an author whose project involves an ironic distance not only from her characters but also from herself." What this distance and irony remove from the work is a point of view, a moral context in which the characters and action are given meaning. The author and her characters are all floating in the same ironic soup, in which good, evil, history, art, belief and atheism, religion and magic mingle and merge into one another until the distinctive flavor of each is obliterated. What one of her characters says about himself, many readers might say of the others in the book: "...I have been...in retreat--or in eclipse or in never-never land--somewhere else anyway!"

Perhaps in an attempt to counteract this disembodied quality in her characters, Murdoch describes their physical characteristics repeatedly and in minute detail, with heavy emphasis on hair, eyes, skin color, and clothing. She makes the same effort to give concreteness to physical surroundings--houses, rooms and furniture are prominently present and we are kept very current on the weather. This exercise reveals the author' s wit and sharp observations, but tails to animate the puppets she has created.

In The Green Knight, the large issues are contained in a plot too convoluted to summarize here. With one important exception, the characters are all part of a fight circle of friends whose lives are enmeshed by habit, love, jealousy, anger, suspicion-all the usual binding forces. The central drama revolves around Clement and Lucas Graffe, a pair of brothers into whose fratricidal drama a mysterious stranger thrusts himself. The stranger's name is Peter Mir ("Mir" means both "world" and "peace" in Russian, he explains) and he becomes the psychological center of the book. Even as his involvement with the brothers flings them from one violent and mystifying climax to another, Peter inspires a calm faith and trust in the circle of friends to whom Clement introduces him. As if it isn't enough to have a name that means "world" and "peace," quite early in the book one of the characters compares Peter Mir to the Green Knight of medieval legend. But it isn't until the end of the book that this legend is retold. As with the Cain and Abel story, the connections are tenuous. "Pieces of the story are there, but aren't they somehow jumbled up and all the wrong way round?" asks Clement.

Almost all the characters in the novel are used to embody one abstraction or another..Art is represented by a sixteen-year-old child painter who has magic powers to move stones and a reverence for the natural world that borders on insanity. Religion makes its appearance in the person of Bellamy James who, in a series of letters to a monk, shares with the reader his puerile longing to find enlightenment and sanctity in monastic life. The monk's sensible replies attempt to bring Bellamy to a realistic understanding of the true nature of religious vocation, but Murdoch undermines the credibility of this character by having him leave the priesthood and the church. Murdoch's notion of a true vocation can be found in a lecture the historian Lucas offers to his pupil: "Remember that this is a lifelong dedication, you are entering upon it as into a religious house, something to which you must give your whole life .... You must be an ascetic, shun sins, avoid remorse and guilt .... Do not marry .... Solitude is essential." A dog named Anax takes up so many pages (yawn) that he must represent something, perhaps goodness and innocence.

At the conclusion of a very intricate plot, all these characters pair off as they do in a Mozart opera, but, alas, without the music.

Fans of Iris Murdoch will probably enjoy this work; it is very like many of her earlier novels. Those who are not fans will probably be annoyed by the endless repetitions of story and idea as the characters dream about, muse on, chew over, and tell each other what has happened, is happening, and is going to happen. Another source of annoyance will no doubt be the author's habit of using magic as a carpet under which she can sweep all the inconvenient loose ends of character and plot. Perhaps annoyance is not a serious enough response. Alasdair MacIntyre offers another possibility:

"What entangles us and so endangers [human] freedom is our propensity to be deceived by a self-indulgent resort to myth and fantasy, a resort which makes us all too easy victims of those who use myth and fantasy to enchant us."