Mirror of Dazzling Chaos

By Paul Gray

Author Iris Murdoch's devoted readers have learned, after 21 novels, to expect abstract, philosophic patterns beneath the beguiling surface of her fiction. The Good Apprentice, No. 22, seems designed to shake admirers out of such complacency. Murdoch includes most of her by now familiar clues to deeper meanings: constant references to God, lesser deities, the devil, good, evil, myths, legends, magic, and the power of elemental forces like water to nurture and destroy. But this time out, such allusions do not point toward an order underlying reality. They mirror instead a dazzling chaos of Murdoch's invention.

A television soap opera could run for years on the bare facts of this novel's characters and plot. The major developments all affect Harry Cuno, a handsome, charming dilettante who lives in a Bloomsbury house and whose dead father was once a popular highbrow novelist. Harry has had two wives, both of whom died young. For the past two years he has conducted a secret, passionate affair with his second wife's younger sister Midge, who is married to a Scottish, half-Jewish psychiatrist named Thomas McCaskerville. Harry wants Midge to leave her husband, and her stalling makes him fretful: "I love her, she loves me, yet we're in hell."

Two other problems discomfit him. Stuart, his son by his first wife, has suddenly dropped out of his university studies in mathematics, renounced sex, and proclaimed his intention to help others and to lead a good life. His cynical father comments, "He wants to be like Job, always in the wrong before God, only he's got to do it without God."

More troubling still is the case of Edward Baltram, Harry's stepson by his second wife. This young man has sneaked drugs into a good friend's sandwich, hoping to initiate him without his consent into the wonders of hallucinogenic insights. What happens instead is that the friend and victim, temporarily left alone by Edward, walks out of a window and falls to his death. Once the authorities and newspapers finish raking over the details of this tragic accident, "Edward passed out of the public eye into his private hell."

The central question posed by The Good Apprentice is whether Edward can be saved from his paralyzing depression. Harry gives him a pep talk: "You are having a nervous breakdown, you are ill, it is an illness, like pneumonia or scarlet fever, you will receive help, you will be given treatment . . . you will recover." McCaskerville has reservations about his profession, calling psychoanalysis a "mishmash of scientific ideas and mythology and literature and isolated facts and sympathy and intuition and love and appetite for power." Nevertheless, he tries to help Edward: "I'm not telling you not to feel remorse and guilt, only to feel it truthfully. Truthful remorse leads to the fruitful death of the self, not to its survival as a successful liar."

Edward eventually sees a glimmer of hope. He will seek out Jesse Baltram, his real father, a legendary painter who numbered Edward's mother among his many mistresses. He does not know exactly how Jesse can help him, but he feels irresistibly drawn, by a magic he claims not to believe, toward "the longed-for father, the healer, the hero-priest, the benevolent all-powerful king." No sooner does Edward conceive this idea than he receives an invitation from Jesse's wife to visit Seegard, the artist's house near a deserted stretch of English seacoast. He arrives to find himself welcomed by the wife and two beautiful daughters, who look "like three young mediaeval princesses." They introduce him to the strange, monastic routines of daily life at Seegard, all dictated by the artist who mysteriously fails to appear and greet his son.

Normally in Murdoch's fiction, isolated and frankly artificial settings help resolve dilemmas or at least recast them into familiar types of allegory. But Seegard adds to Edward's confusion and despair. Nothing here is quite what it seems, and the moment one set of deceptions is exposed, another takes its place. Edward finds Jesse, but the old man is apparently being held prisoner in his own house. He says the three dutiful acolytes have tried to poison him. The women tell Edward that Jesse is ill and deranged, a demigod whose powers have failed. The visitor wonders why he came and cannot seem to leave: "Is it just that, for some reason I shall never know, I have to take part in the final act of a drama...in which I shall be casually annihilated?"

Ultimately, all of the major characters in the novel get into trouble in this house. Stuart arrives, putting his charitable impulses to the test by trying to help Edward, and is driven out. Harry and Midge stumble into Seegard by mistake, which results in the exposure of their illicit affair. When he returns to the comparative serenity of London, Edward casts a baffled look backward at all he has experienced: "In a way it's all a muddle starting off with an accident: my breakdown, drugs, telepathy, my father's illness, cloistered neurotic women, people arriving unexpectedly, all sorts of things which happened by pure chance. At so many points anything being otherwise could have made everything be otherwise."

Edward accurately describes the novel in which he appears. The Good Apprentice is a tour de force of narrative energy. It also includes the provocative remarks ("If Newton hadn't believed in God he would have discovered relativity," or "Psychoanalysis attracts failed artists") that have become a hallmark of Murdoch's dialogue. But in raising expectations that all the frantic activity she describes will finally lead to some sort of understanding, the author finally sets herself up for a fall. A last word of sorts is left to Harry: "No one can avoid muddle." That is probably true. But Murdoch's fans are entitled to the wish that she had tried a bit harder to clarify her entertaining confusion. --By Paul Gray