JACKSON'S DILEMMA, by Iris Murdoch. Viking, 249 pages, $22.95.
Critic Lindsay Tucker, with marvelous academic vagueness, calls Iris Murdoch "something of a phenomenon." Murdoch is one of the most prolific, diverse, and thoughtful writers around, with a canon that encompasses fiction (26 novels), drama (five plays), philosophy (five books), and poetry (a single collection). So wide and ambitious is her body of work that I should not be too surprised if the Iris Murdoch Dance Troupe popped up.
Her novels are suffused with her views on philosophy, religion, and aesthetics. They are also very creepy. (A friend says that her mother kept copies of The Sea, the Sea and A Severed Head on the highest shelf.) Reading Murdoch's work, one often has the sense that something awful, some ineffable horror, is looming just out of view. Anyone who has, for no apparent reason, desperately fumbled with a door key, or run madly up the last few basement stairs, will know what it feels like to have Murdoch play her mood tricks. And tricks they are: rarely is the threat realized -- Murdoch merely drags our own fears into the light.
Jackson's Dilemma, her new novel, centers on a group of friends -- upper-crust, with the time and inclination to sit around discussing Tolstoy and Heraclitus -- preparing for the wedding of Edward, "good-looking" and "polite," and "pretty young" Marian. A note arrives, wedding eve, left by an unknown messenger. Poof! Marian is gone. This event launches the group upon a chaotic odyssey, in which they attempt to discover Marian's whereabouts, but make discoveries about themselves, others, and, yes, the nature of being. This is an Iris Murdoch novel, after all.
The search is fruitless, consisting mainly of the friends phoning one another with the news that there is "no news," and flitting between London and their country retreats. (Murdoch may have initiated a new genre here: the commuting pastoral.) Fruitless also are their attempts to console one another. They are hapless, and, for me, unlikable. Here lies the failure, and the success, of the book: Murdoch, despite the magic and mystery within her novels, is a staunch realist. She is not portraying balanced individuals here -- they cannot suddenly see the light. If a character is a fool, a fool he must remain. The problem with this is that one too often feels the overwhelming urge to grab the fool and give him a good shake.
Then we have Jackson, the servant of Edward's closest friend, Benet. According to "legend," Benet found Jackson "curled up in a cardboard box." Murdoch, who has often struggled to reconcile making her good characters selfless and unassuming with making them interesting (her dilemma), overcomes this problem by keeping Jackson in the shadows (she goes even further with Benet's mystical uncle Tim, making him dead). Jackson is defined more by the imaginations of others ("our dark angel") than by his presence; he remains hidden until needed.
According to Murdoch, the good person (like Jackson) should act with as little fanfare as possible, and the good author (unlike Martin Amis) should refrain from stomping through his work with his AUTHOR badge on display. Murdoch has had a long-running, well-documented love affair with Shakespeare, based partly on her admiration for his inconspicuousness. But Murdoch is all too apparent in this book. Punctuating the friends' protracted lamentations are equally lengthy dialogues on the nature of good and evil, the benefits of Eastern religion, and the redemptive qualities of art. Although many of the views are not exactly Murdoch's, they deal with her ideas, and she cannot conceal herself simply by putting them into the mouths of the misguided.
Murdoch has said that to achieve authorial anonymity, the "ideal novel" should be "scattered, with many different centers." A narrative should not spring from a single omniscient source (the author), nor stay with a single character (the author), but constantly change perspectives as it shifts from one character to another. For much of this novel, however, the only one to whom we have privileged access is Benet. He is, for too long, the source of the narrative. Benet is a hand-wringer, Murdoch's neurotic, the victim of what she (no great admirer of Sartre) sees as our unfettered egoism. He mopes around the hallways of his home, muttering "Remorse, remorse." The theme of remorse recurs throughout, with each character harboring "very private griefs."
All this time Marian is dashing around London, nearly mad with (you guessed it) remorse. The plot, meanwhile, moves like treacle, nearly driving me mad. At last Jackson intervenes, discovering Marian's whereabouts and the secret of the note. The narrative breaks free from the paralyzed Benet and we enter the thoughts of the others, a shift that brings a welcome sense of connection and movement. Perceived as semi-divine, a Puck, able to pull off the most amazing feats (ironically, these often concern the mundane: fixing the lights, hanging the ivy), Jackson is all too human. We see that his discoveries are ultimately accidents. To reflect the world, Murdoch believes, a novel's events should be influenced not by plot, but by contingency. Things just happen. Things just are. We are not to be consoled by being shown otherwise, which would perpetuate old, illusory causes (Fate, God). All the same, Jackson is a fixer, a spiritual handyman, setting into motion the events that lead to the denouement (a skewed Shakespearean coming together). And he suffers for it.
The reader suffers from the familiarity of Murdoch's themes, the intrusive pontificating of her characters, the sometimes excruciating dialogue ("You are a child, a charming child. But please do not go on with this talk, it will lead us nowhere, it would just lead into the dark"). Jackson's Dilemma, though, still contains Murdoch's humor, horror, and pathos -- her eye for minute psychological detail, and the ability to tell a bloody good story. One scene, in which church icons seem alive, and another, reminiscent of Death in Venice, where Benet is confronted by a demonic figure, made my skin crawl. There are, above all, precious glimpses of distilled goodness: Jackson's understated, resolute compassion (racked by self-doubt and fatigue, he tenderly places a spider back in its web). Murdoch even helps us find goodness in ourselves. Jackson's quiet suffering, amid the histrionics of the others, cannot but inspire sympathy. Finally, there is a kind of redemption for us all.
