A Midsummer Night's Madness THE BOOK AND THE BROTHERHOOD by Iris Murdoch Viking; 607 pages; $19.95

By Paul Gray

The Book and the Brotherhood is Iris Murdoch's 23rd novel. That number alone does not fully convey the amazing range of her productivity. For as seasoned Murdoch readers can attest, she has seldom been content simply to tell one story at a time. Her fiction typically doubles up, offering both explicit and subterranean tales. On the surface, civilized, well-educated characters move about in theoretical freedom, working out their destinies according to the dictates of reason and plausibility. But actually they are in thrall to hidden forces, submerged patterns, in danger of being swallowed up, say, by the plot of a gothic novel or the rigors of a Socratic dialogue. The outcome of such conflict can be comic or tragic or, when Murdoch is at her best, both. This time out, she is at her best.

The novel opens on a scene of riotous confusion: a midsummer night's ball at Oxford University, where a circle of friends who had met at college some 30 years earlier assemble to dance and drink until dawn. If this setting reminds anyone of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, so much the better, for many of the events in The Book and the Brotherhood make sense chiefly as manifestations of Renaissance romance: frantic and aimless wanderings, repeated instances of women falling suddenly, inexplicably in love with inappropriate men.

Daylight finally comes, "sending away the enchanted forest and all the magic of the night and revealing a scene, more resembling a battlefield, of trampled grass, empty bottles, broken glasses, upturned chairs, errant garments, and every sort of unattractive human debris." The revelers emerge the worse for wear. Gerard Hernshaw, the acknowledged leader of this elite band, has learned by phone that his ill father has died overnight. Gerard's oldest and closest friends, Jenkin Riderhood and Duncan Cambus, are drunk and disoriented. Although Duncan seldom needs a reason for such a condition, in the aftermath of this midsummer night's madness he can offer a good one. The dance has exposed his wife Jean to another meeting with a classmate, the Scottish-born David Crimond, who is now a charismatic and notorious Marxist philosopher. Once before, Jean had left Duncan for Crimond. This morning, she does so again.

Jean's defection confronts Gerard and his friends with a vexing dilemma. Although they fulminate at length against the predatory Crimond, they are bound to him by an old pact. Years earlier, they had formed a committee to subsidize Crimond so that he would be free to write what everyone then thought would be an important book of political philosophy. "We were all Marxists once," Gerard notes, but times and beliefs have changed. Still, their humane, liberal inclinations prevent the companions from going back on their word. As Gerard says, "There's nothing we can do except curse privately that we're all spending our money year after year to propagate ideas we detest!"

This conflict, pitting well-meaning but ineffectual people against a dedicated zealot, forms the central plot of The Book and the Brotherhood. For all of his unattractive, demonic qualities, Crimond radiates considerable power and rhetorical flair. Meeting with his now hostile benefactors to report on the progress of his book, he lashes out: "You think reality is ultimately good, and as you think you're good too you feel safe. You value yourselves because you're English. You live on books and conversation and mutual admiration and drink -- you're all alcoholics -- and sentimental ideas of virtue. You have no energy, you are lazy people."

Crimond's indictment is accurate but incomplete. He misses the inner anguishes and uncertainties of Gerard and his friends. For the golden youths who came down from Oxford with such high expectations are now suffering an advanced case of middle-aged blahs: "How little they had done, all of them, any of them, compared with the marvels which they had then hoped and intended!" Rose Curtland, who has waited decades in the expectation that Gerard would ask her to marry him, ponders the fact that the old friends are childless: "We are all without issue, all those hopeful family plans frustrated, we shall disappear without trace!" Gerard, Duncan and Jenkin feel cramped and restive. And hanging over everyone is an ominous sense that the struggle with Crimond must end in violence and death.

And, of course, it does. Murdoch is too canny a novelist to raise expectations without fulfilling them. But seldom in her distinguished career has she kept so many characters so busily and interestingly in motion. The Book and the Brotherhood hums with energy and implications, with the conviction that realistic, contemporary characters are in fact enacting old, mysterious myths. Late in the novel, Gerard reads an advance copy of Crimond's book and is, in spite of himself, favorably impressed. "It's a synthesis," he tells Rose. "It's immensely long, it's about everything." That is not a bad description of the novel in which it appears.