Unbelievable Don

THE RED AND THE GREEN by Iris Murdoch. 31 1 pages. Viking. $5.

From the time she first set up shop as a novelist eleven years ago, Irish-born Iris Murdoch was accorded a respectful acclaim. Because she was then a philosophy don at Oxford, nobody seemed overly concerned about whether her fiction writing was good or bad; as with Dr. Johnson's famous walking dog, there was only a happy wonderment that she did it at all. Because her prose was lucid, and sometimes even poetic, it was assumed that she deliberately kept her meanings opaque, and she was credited with a sense of mysticism. Because her characters usually were unbelievably outrageous, she was credited with a gift for satire.

The Red amd the Green, her ninth novel, is neither her best book nor her worst, but it is a revealing showcase for her wares. In writing a story of an Irish family during the tense week before the abortive Easter rising in 1916, she is perfectly at home with her surroundings and impressively knowledgeable about her history and the Irish character. The plot, if there is one, is not important, and Author Murdoch does not make the mistake of trying to make it so. The uprising fails somewhat comically, and nothing is changed much--not even the family caught up in it.

Author Murdoch is at her best when she delves into the Irish temperament, with its prudery, touchiness and vulgarity, and she displays poetic gifts approaching genius when she dwells lovingly on the sights and sounds of Dublin or describes the peculiar quality of Irish rain. But as usual, she comes a cropper with her characters. They are all, it seems, sexually confused, tortured by unexplained feelings of guilt, and totally ineffectual and unbelievable as human beings. An improbable seduction scene, which is the high point of the book, has all the furtive comings and goings but none of the hilarity of a French farce.

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