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Miss Murdoch’s new novel (1) is very strange indeed; both in itself and as coming from her. Like Mr Angus Wilson in The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, she seems almost to have made a deliberate effort to pare away the characteristics by which she was becoming best known. Possibly both writers were afraid of the distortions inseparable from a widely accepted public image. More probably, they genuinely wanted to extend their own range, to avoid the mere repeated practice of a technique already mastered. In Mr Wilson’s latest book, the morality was there undisguised, quite free of all the satirical observation and deliberate ‘unpleasantness’ which had previously decorated — or for many people obscured — the basic didactic structure; not surprisingly, many of his readers mourned for the plumage and forgot the living bird. In the same way, those who have been delighted by the grace of Miss Murdoch’s writing, by its complexity and depth of imagination, by its extraordinary mixture of the real and the fantastic, will probably be surprised and may perhaps be disappointed. Even the blurb-writers will have to find some new clichés to describe her; the ones in the last sentence are already out of date.

     It is primarily, I think, a question of form. Under the Net was in a sense a refusal to write a novel at all (as all picaresque novels are); the life shown in it is too fragmentary to be forced into the conventional novelist’s pattern of turning-points and crises, problems and solutions, significant incidents and revelatory experiences; there is only a series of contingent adventures, with the ownership of a dog and the vague promise of some future creative writing for the hero at the (arbitrarily chosen) end. As Jake makes Hugo say in his account of their conversations: ‘All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular.’ In speaking at all, we are condemned to some kind of oversimplifying falsehood; in the same way, Miss Murdoch is cheating a little by using a novel to make the point that points should not be made by novels; as Hugo says, only actions can be entirely truthful. But a refusal to generalize is at least an approach to truth.

     In The Flight from the Enchanter, Miss Murdoch seemed to have come to terms with the novel far enough to permit herself a more elaborate plot, and to choose an impersonal narrative form which allowed her to generalize about her characters (Rainborough, for instance) in a series of epigrammatic asides which Hugo could hardly have sanctioned. Again, the point seems to be partly that no satisfactory points can be made; but, as the scholar Peter Saward says of his labours over an indecipherable script, ‘one reads the signs as best one can, and one may be totally misled. But it’s never certain that the evidence will turn up that makes everything plain. It was worth trying.’ The epigraph applies perhaps equally well to Annette’s attempts to ‘educate herself in the school of life’ or to Rosa’s to escape the consequences of her own and her brother’s actions in her pursuit of Mischa Fox to Italy. Miss Murdoch’s characters seem in this book to move more obviously along lines she has laid down for them: one real and one attempted suicide, a convenient death in the last pages, the mechanism of intrigue which finishes Rainborough’s career — all these are controlled if not contrived events. On the other hand, they are still only a beginning. For the most part, one is still left with the impression that Miss Murdoch is recording rather than creating a world which defies explanation, full of loose ends and disturbing ambiguities (the Polish brothers, Mischa Fox’s fish, the destruction of Rainborough’s garden wall), which may be symbolic or not, which are magic, but only, as Mischa says about his netsuke, ‘in the way in which magic can be part of ordinary life’.

     When The Sandcastle appeared, many people welcomed it as a sign that Miss Murdoch’s writing had become more ‘realistic’. It would be truer to say that it had become more conventional. The world of The Sandcastle is not necessarily more everyday than that of the earlier novels — the gypsy-like man who appears announcing disaster is quite as fantastic as anything in them — but it is more neatly and recognizably an artefact. It is the coherence as well as the plausibility of the plot that reassured critics that Miss Murdoch had, as it were, settled down to her trade. Rain Carter’s car falling into the stream not only demonstrates the cogent mechanical reality of the external world (like any of Miss Murdoch’s engineering set-pieces); it also symbolizes the irreparable emotional disaster that has fallen on Mor. After the point of balance is reached, there is no turning back. The situation is not merely particular, even though its connection with other situations may be hidden. ‘Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.’ (The Bell.)

     I have stolen this last point, which I failed to recognize for myself, from a more intelligent friend; but it would be difficult to miss the unity of theme which The Sand castle possesses. It revolves around a central and eminently general issue: the issue of freedom. Mor, like most human beings, cannot escape the fact that he is free. When he realizes that he can walk into Demoyte’s house and speak to Rain at night, ‘the pain of knowing that it was possible was for a moment extreme’. And when Rain leaves the dinner at which Nan (herself in many ways the least free, and yet the most powerful, of the characters) has attempted to reclaim her husband, ‘although Mor struggled in his seat he could not bring himself to get up. A lifetime of conformity was too much for him.’ He is like the cock in the experiment, whose beak is pressed against a chalk line on the floor, and who cannot lift his head until the line is rubbed off; he is imprisoned in his own refusal to be free.

     But the novel is also concerned with the problem of deception. Mor deceives his wife, but cannot be entirely truthful even in doing so; he conceals his political ambitions from Rain, and through this gap the laws of consistency can reach him, and take a terrible revenge. The same problem recurs in The Bell. The bell itself is called Gabriel (the archangel of the Annunciation) and is inscribed Ego Vox Sum Amoris. In the monastic legend, this is exactly what it is; its miraculous flight into the lake reveals the fact that one of the nuns had a lover. But even in twentieth-century fact, that voice cannot be silenced: Catherine’s love for Michael, Michael’s for Nick or for Toby, break through their profession of religious vocation as irresistibly as Dora is forced to ring the bell which she and Toby have dragged out of the lake. Dora herself cannot eventually conceal the fact that she is free to leave Paul, and must use that freedom. In the long run, self-deception is not so much immoral as impossible.

     This is partly, of course, a technical device for maintaining suspense; where the characters deceive each other, the process of discovery can be used to hold the reader’s interest. The more basic moral issue of The Bell is that of fundamentalist or interpretive ethics, as reflected in James’s and Michael’s sermons. It raises the infinitely difficult question of how far one can be guided by rules as opposed to experience, how far it can be good to renounce the world without knowing it, how far one must know one’s own limits before setting oneself any moral objectives at all. ‘Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.’ The Bell is an account of such disappointments. It is in every way an astonishing book, and one of its most impressive features is the extreme ease with which so tightly disciplined a conception is carried out. Even the style is supremely confident. The Sandcastle was often stiltedly written, in a form of Revived Mandarin (‘In his own household Evvy was able to proceed unchecked, especially as he had refused to draw the considerable entertainment allowance which Demoyte had established as part of the Headmaster’s emoluments’) which perhaps reflects a certain stiffness in Miss Murdoch’s new approach to the novel. But The Bell contains whole pages of analysis written with marvellous aphoristic clarity, and its narration never falters for lack of a word or a phrase. Structurally, it is equally imposing, and equally carefully worked over. It is a very long way from a world too random to be forced into any moral or artistic order.

     In the light (if it is a light) of this, what can one make of A Severed Head? Obviously, Miss Murdoch has become more formal still — perhaps following as large a change of course as was marked by the publication of The Sandcastle. In her two previous novels the figures move to some extent in a pattern; in A Severed Head they go through an elaborate minuet worthy of Mr Henry Green, in which six partners try out every possible heterosexual combination except one (Honor Klein and Alexander). Indeed the novel contains, in a sense, nothing but form. With the exception of Honor Klein cutting up napkins with a Japanese sword, and the entry of the removal men on to a scene between Martin and Antonia, there is neither the strangeness nor the juxtaposition of minor incident that Miss Murdoch’s admirers have come to expect; the characters’ backgrounds and occupations seem merely designed, as in the most crudely romantic novel, to give them the money and the leisure to pursue an intricate scheme of personal relations; and their personalities vanish in the mist of their own involvements. As Martin says, his love for Honor is an inexplicable phenomenon which has nothing to do with personality; as she says, it has nothing to do with happiness either. It has no conceivable connection with Rain Carter’s love for Mor, or Jake’s for Anna Quentin; and it makes total nonsense of the pretensions to rationality of Palmer and Antonia, who insist that everything must be discussed and can be settled. In a sense, Miss Murdoch has come full circle: she is again arguing against too much seeking for explanations, although she has now chosen a highly sophisticated rather than a loose-knit form for her argument. In another sense, she has started on a new track which may lead further. The imperfections of The Sandcastle were a small and (if the suggestions of this article are true) a necessary price to pay for the smooth perfection of The Bell; the sequel to A Severed Head may be equally remarkable.