Iris Murdoch’s Gayest Novel

Iris Murdoch.

The critic and biographer Peter J. Conradi reports that in the four years leading up to the publication of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Iris Murdoch devoted herself to rereading the plays of Shakespeare. One sees the influence everywhere in her thirteenth novel, which presents a harmonious social world, its nucleus the marriage of Hilda and Rupert Foster, only to show that world exploded by the machinations of a seductive, baleful outsider, Julius King. Julius uses strategies of deceit taken directly from Shakespeare’s Iago: he isolates his victims in silence, making it seem impossible for them to speak to one another; he leverages their fears and jealousies; he curates reality with the aim of their torment.

Julius’s stratagems have their tragic result, but the richness of Murdoch’s novel comes from its success, unequaled elsewhere in her work, in combining Shakespearean tragedy with Shakespearean comedy. As in Much Ado about Nothing, love is induced by flattery; as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a conjurer shuffles affections like so many cards in a deck. To Murdoch’s rereading of Shakespeare is owed the peculiar nimbleness of this novel, its ease with ensemble scenes, its brilliant use of cross-cut dialogue.

These are a few of my reasons for thinking that , while not the most perfect of Iris Murdoch’s novels (that distinction belongs to ), is decidedly her best. But there are others. First, the book is enlivened by a kind of verbal energy almost unmatched in her other work, both in its intensity and its range. One finds this energy in the elderly Leonard’s Bernhardian rants; in the eerie, imperturbable calm of the late scenes between Tallis and Julius;