Bad Spell in London

THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER (316 pp.)--Iris Murdoch--Viking ($3.75)..75).

Iris Murdoch, Oxford don, is as rare a thing in modern writing as Dr. Johnson's bipedally ambulatory dog. *She is not just a woman novelist, which is not rare, or a woman philosopher (teaching at Oxford's St. Anne's), which is somewhat rare, but a woman philosopher-novelist, which is very rare indeed.

In her second novel (her first: the widely praised Under the Net), Author Murdoch plays ducks and drakes with a madding crowd of English characters who have not fared well in the welfare state, members of that middling class of drab London sparrows who were brought up to think of themselves as hummingbirds and now lack the sugar for their special diet.

Junior Myth. Novelist Murdoch writes in the comic intellectual tradition of the early Aldous Huxley, but now the sad young Huxleymen of the '20s have grown up to be desperately dim middle-aged men in dim jobs. Murdoch's subjects are transfixed at a moment in history when those who inherit a great tradition are not enriched and strengthened by the past, but mocked and enfeebled.

Only those who live it up from moment to moment are exempt from this curse. Chief of these is the prettiest little existentialist in existence, Annette

Cockeyne. Annette, a "cosmopolitan ragamuffin," according to her diplomat father, begins the novel by leaving finishing school because teacher, who was reading Dante, said the poor Minotaur was suffering in hell. Since Annette feels that the classical monster* can't help being a monster, she leaves, not neglecting to swing on a chandelier on the way, and goes out to live the exciting life of a junior myth.

Annette survives unscathed a succes sion of farcical and scabrous sexual ad ventures, and even when, for love of a real monster called Mischa Fox, she swallows some deadly tablets, they turn out to be milk of magnesia. Novelist Murdoch's moral seems to be that only those can get along today who have a talent for forgetting about yesterday.

Rolling Oddballs. Annette rolls through the story with a large collection of fellow oddballs, and all are kept in motion by the mysterious Mischa Fox, the enchanter of the book's title. A fabulously rich publisher who lives, like the Minotaur, in a mazelike palace, Mischa is, in terms of realism, the weakest thing in the novel. But he serves to underline Author Murdoch's philosophic point: those unsure of their own identity are at the mercy of anyone's will.

The author tosses her symbols with a conjurer's cynical eye for the audience. The book is brilliant in detail, lit by a woman's sharp eye for gesture and the shape and condition of others' clothes and faces. In between the dilemmas and existentialist mazes, there is a great tragicomic talent at work, and readers who fail to take a pass or two at Murdoch's Minotaur will miss some fine and frenzied fun.

*Said Johnson: "Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.* A bullheaded character of mythology, to whom many innocents were sacrificed. It took a hero, Theseus, to find the way out of his labyrinth.

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