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About two-thirds of Musil’s vast novel are now available to English readers. Its progress in time, from August 1913 to the first weeks of the war a year later, is accompanied by a series of crises in the behaviour of the principal characters which lead the more genuine and sensitive of them from stability to bewilderment and despair, while the superficial and materially-minded ones adjust themselves without undue difficulty. The work begins as satirical comedy, but gradually becomes more sombre. Ulrich, aged thirty-two, is the son of a man who has made his way from poverty to high places. We first meet him as the new owner of a Viennese Rococo villa, the expense of which annoys his father. He has been an army-officer, then an engineer and a student of mathematics. He gives up one mistress, a café-singer, when a chance adventure throws him into the arms of a married woman whom he calls Bonadea. In a carefree mood he then accepts the secretaryship of a newly-founded, but elaborately and portentously conceived cultural enterprise that is to combine publicity for an imaginary Austrian way of life with preparations for imperial anniversary celebrations in 1918. It is Walter, the would-be creative artist and unfortunate husband of Clarisse, who refers to Ulrich as being ‘without qualities’, criticizing him as a man who has great gifts and potentialities but who makes no use of them, and who in his intellectual relativism is sterile and in this respect typical of the age they live in. The leading spirits of the Collateral Campaign appear before us, and we see them largely through the eyes of the amused and indifferent Ulrich.

     This satirical exposition is abruptly interrupted when Ulrich receives news that his father has died. The present third volume shows the novel taking a new turn with the beginning of closer relations between Ulrich and his sister Agathe, following their meeting as chief mourners at their father’s funeral. Various satirically drawn figures from the earlier volumes lose in significance as the new action gains momentum. Arnheim, businessman and fluent manipulator of ideas, is for the most part off the scene. Diotima is in the background too, conscious that her salon may be losing influence and that her first enthusiasm for shaping the Campaign in her own way has to some extent flagged. Ulrich renews his relationship with Bonadea, though only as an interlude. The difficulties of the marriage between Clarisse and Walter are heightened beyond comedy to a premonition of tragedy in the episode of the exhibitionist and in the visit to the institution where the sex-murderer Moosbrugger is detained. The only character who consistently provides comedy while radiating a sense of warm security is Stumm von Bordwehr, the military representative to the Campaign.

     Brother and sister find they share a mistrust for the conventional respectability of their father’s career as a prominent lawyer, and Ulrich encourages Agathe to leave her husband, the headmaster Hagauer, and share his house in Vienna. Ulrich and Agathe are rebels against traditional morality, Ulrich as elder brother teaching her his particular theories of urbane and sharp scepticism, while Agathe takes action by tampering with her father’s will. The lengthy conversations between brother and sister cover many complex issues, but they keep coming back to questions of moral behaviour. Agathe’s husband ‘was more one of those people who always do good without having any real goodness in them. That was what Agathe thought to herself. Apparently the goodness disappears out of people in the same measure in which it turns into good will or good actions. . . . “It seems it’s really only the people who don’t do much good who manage to preserve their goodness intact.”’ Hagauer again comes to her mind when on another occasion Ulrich states: ‘A good man is one who has good principles and does good works, and it’s an open secret that he may at the same time very well be a perfect horror!’ When the reader does encounter Hagauer late in the course of this volume, he is introduced to a genuinely bewildered man who is astonished that his wife unaccountably fails to return after having departed to attend her father’s funeral. The debate between brother and sister reaches a climax when Agathe, believing that Ulrich is lacking in sympathetic understanding of her immediate feelings, rushes out and gives a stranger the impression that she is contemplating suicide. This man, Lindner, although he is trying to be helpful to her, soon arouses her mockery and mistrust when he reveals himself as a schoolmaster and admirer of her husband’s pedagogic reputation. Agathe is a subtly drawn character, imaginative and mercurial, quickly responsive to situations. Ulrich is at times overbearing in his attitude towards her, pressing his point of view with a persistence that she would not have tolerated from Hagauer, until he drives her out of the house into the encounter with Lindner:

‘Perhaps we can put it this way,’ he suggested, ‘— the Good has by its very nature, become almost a platitude, whereas Evil is still criticism. What is immoral gets its divine right from being drastic criticism of what is moral. It shows us that life is also unthinkable in other terms. It gives the lie . . .’

Agathe is not alone among women characters in the novel in being irritated by Ulrich. Clarisse thinks of him as ‘a skater on intellectual ice, coming nearer and going off into the distance again just as he felt inclined’. Bonadea’s reaction to one of Ulrich’s references to his sister is outspoken: ‘Heavens, you are perverse!’

     Ulrich’s being ‘without qualities’ seems to impel him to a dislike of the whole tradition of moral idealism, as expressed in German literature from Goethe up to and including the Expressionist Movement; the poet and dramatist Feuermaul is presumably a caricature of a representative of this latter group. He is especially impatient with didactic tendencies (Diotima is, incidentally, the daughter of a schoolmaster), though anything but free of them himself.

     In this volume Musil’s irony appears to extend to Ulrich himself, as well as to the various subsidiary personages whose foibles are more obviously described. There is an intellect of massive playfulness and caustic disillusionment at work here, though the irony is less light and the atmosphere less sunny than in the opening sections of the work. It is a painful and grim world that awaits the reader in the sequel that is to come; the culmination and collapse of the brother-and-sister relationship in their Italian ‘honeymoon’, and the unmitigated sadness of Clarisse’s increasingly distraught condition are more imaginatively significant than the overnight dissolution of the Collateral Campaign at the outbreak of war.

     The translators are to be congratulated on the faithful, lithe and masterful way they have rendered the author’s German into English.

     One misses in Musil the incessant interest in Vienna as a particular place at a particular time that is present in Heimito von Doderer’s Die Dämonen (1956). Nor is Musil’s world both magically remote and familiar, like that of Kafka. The Man Without Qualities has more in common with Thomas Mann than with Kafka — perhaps the Thomas Mann of The Magic Mountain, where Hans Castorp’s long stay in the predominantly intellectual society of a Swiss sanatorium is terminated by the outbreak of the First World War. Mann and Doderer control their plots more firmly and skilfully than does Musil. The latter usually presents his arguments directly through the conversations of his characters, like Aldous Huxley, though in a more complicated way. But the arguments of Huxley’s later works, like those of The Magic Mountain and of another Austrian novelist, Hermann Broch, in The Sleepwalkers (translated by the Muirs in the 1930s), are ultimately of a consoling and enheartening quality. As Musil’s novel was not completed, it is hardly possible to judge its final purpose, or how its author would have rounded it off had he not died in exile in Switzerland in 1942. It is an astounding and impressive torso; whether it is one of the very greatest German novels may be open to doubt.