How can one live properly when the beginning of one's actions seem so inevitable and justified while the ends are so completely unpredictable and unexpected?
--Morgan's thoughts in A Fairly Honorable Defeat by Iris Murdoch (Viking Press, 1970)
Murdoch is something of a moral philosopher underneath her mordantly funny tale of intellectuals and aristocrats --homosexual and heterosexual -- in London. In its use of a symbolic Christlike character-- Tallis (interesting name with religious significance, including a composer of that name who wrote Anglican liturgical music) Murdoch's novel reminds one of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868) and Balthazar(a donkey) in Robert Bresson's film Au Hasard, Balthazar(1966), Christlike characters who take on the burdens of the suffering of others. And in her satires of upper class intellectuals Murdoch reminds one of Wodehouse and Waugh.
The devil in A Fairly Honorable Defeat, Julius King, takes great pleasure in interfering in the marriage of Hilda and Rupert Foster by tricking Rupert into thinking that he is loved by Hilda's sister Morgan and tricking Morgan into thinking Rupert loves her. Meanwhile Julius is subtly breaking up lovers Axel and Simon (Rupert's brother) and Peter, the Foster's son, has dropped out of Cambridge and moved in with Tallis, Morgan's former husband, and Tallis's misanthropic father Leonard, who is dying of cancer.
A complex plot with complex characters and complex dialogue are the pleasures of this, and other Murdoch novels, the amusing contrivances always at the service, beneath the surface, of moral observations, functioning as a Shakespearean comedy of errors (" A Midsummer Night's Dream", for instance) as well as a comedy of human behavior, as in the novels of Tobias Smollett.
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