First of all, I’m sorry this is a little later than planned – I have had a funny old month and a poor reading month, with a great big biography and a reviewing commitment taking up a load of reading time and energy. I hope you haven’t all been waiting anxiously to post your reviews!
Oh – and do please share any cover images you’ve got of your copies of this one – inexplicably, I’ve only got ONE copy of this, and I’d love to see what’s on yours. Tweet them to me, pop them on Facebook for my attention or use the email address you can find on my Contact Form.
On to the review. I had some interesting thoughts on the different ways I’ve read this one and my different allegiances to characters as I’ve read and re-read it over the years …
Iris Murdoch – “The Flight from the Enchanter”
(14 October 2017)
What a dense, absorbing read this was. I found it more of a succession of scenes concentrating on one particular character or strand rather than the single coherent narrative that “Under the Net” provided, no doubt because we had an omniscient narrator rather than a character-as-narrator, so we were free to flit around London looking at what people were up to.
There are, of course, so many Murdochian themes – in this one, the sea, stones (Annette’s jewels and the pebbles on the beach), doublings (two suicide/attempts, two arms in water, brothers, two pairs of brothers and sisters, plus Peter Saward and his dead sister, two burnings, two heads of department, two main ex-suffragettes, two breast-barings, two scenes in Annette’s green dress), siblings (as before), in fact breast-barings (there’s one in “The Italian Girl” and surely some more), women’s hair, either long and falling out of its pins, horribly constricted into weird waves or short and gamine, girls looking like boys, terribly messy rooms (Peter Saward’s almost-sapient study), netsuke (for the first time? They will reappear again and again), artificial women (generally “bad” rather than “good” characters, right?), and even fast cars!
“Tworavensrose” has posted an amazing report which I hope she’ll copy here about all the links with “Under the Net” but I was particularly struck by Jan and Stefan’s story of the schoolteacher they pursued being just visible in her white dress in the dark, like the woman Jake followed in Paris. I feel there is a link in all the running around London but the book is maybe more traditional and is certainly less philosophical in that there aren’t treatises and bits from books included. Murdoch’s love of detail and describing complicated physical arrangements is here again with Annette swinging on her chandelier in the first scene.
Who is the enchanter? Superficially, it’s Mischa, but Jan and Stefan are reliant on Rosa and she worries about her power over them, and Peter Saward seems to have power over Mischa, chiefly by telling him his own story (like naming someone in myth, perhaps?). Annette seems to cast some kind of spell over people but eventually runs from herself and everyone else and indeed spends most of her time flying from people. Or is it Marcia, who always seems to swoop in and make everything better, but never looks her husband in the eye or lets him know what she’s thinking? Peter is definitely the Saint, in my opinion. I loved his self-knowledge that he was “lost” in his researches, but in his acceptance of the loss of his study of hieroglyphics he is accepting rather than passing on defeat or “failure” and thus showing himself to be passive and “good”. He’s given the final word, “One reads the signs as best one can, and one may be totally misled. But it’s never certain that the evidence will turn up that makes everything plain. It was worth trying” (p. 287). Of course, he can’t be the enchanter, because he never uses his powers to affect or influence others, but they come to him – he’s the only character who remains static, with everyone else running around him.
There’s so much humour in this novel again. I loved the description of Annette “trying to catch in the depths of her large restless eyes the flicker of a tragic discontent” (p. 59)in the mirror and indeed the description of her by her headmistress is hilarious “Your style of entertaining is distinctly Continental , and as I had occasion to remark the other day, you still go upstairs on all fours like a dog” (p. 12). Rainborough, “had never been able to distinguish typist. They all looked to him exactly alike. He could see their smile, but no other features,” (p. 83) in the way that some people can’t tell undergraduates apart. Indeed, the rise of these women through SELIB is very funny, and something I kind of missed last time, I think. I particularly like the way that Miss Casement starts a trend and it repeats, but dimming, through all the other women. Miss Wingfield is often hilarious in her directness and you have to smile along with her, redoubtable to the end. And of course the scenes at the Artemis AGM are very funny – “This young man is under the impression that women have been emancipated!” (p. 173). Rainborough is often the butt of Murdoch’s jokes, always being undermined by taxi drivers, etc.
There’s also so much lovely and precise writing: I’m thinking of the descriptions of the sea, but also when Annette is making a long-distance phone call: “… beside her ear a long corridor of sound was opening out telescopically, section after section, and the last piece was to contain the voice of Nicholas” (p. 243).
The introduction, by Patricia Duncker, makes much of how you can’t really judge what you’re meant to think about the book, and quotes the passage said by Peter Saward that I quoted above. Well, that’s fine by me, as I’m not looking to be told by the author what to think, given my espousal of Death of the Author and reception theory. It claims that no one is changed by the book and that we don’t care about Nina’s fate, something I don’t necessarily agree with. It’s also horribly relevant in the portrayal of the refugee’s tenuous experience.
How has my reading of this changed? I had a lot more sympathy with the more middle-aged characters – I was slightly horrified to find that the “elderly” Peter Saward is in fact, at 44, a good year younger than me! When I first read this as an early teen, I found Annette the central and fascinating character, but now I find her precocious, arch and self-obsessed, and I even had more sympathy with the weird, damaged, two halves of a whole Calvin and Mischa, and with Rainborough and Peter. Well, not so much Rainborough, because he’s a bit of a weirdo, always lunging at women, and although he makes pronouncements about accepting randomness and contingency, I’m not sure he follows that through, but certainly Peter Saward, the central “good” character to my mind. I’d remembered the plot well and loved the old feminists as much as ever.
OK, over to you! Please either place your review in the comments, discuss mine or others’, or post a link to your review if you’ve posted it on your own blog, Goodreads, etc. I’d love to know how you’ve got on with this book and if you read it having read others of Murdoch’s novels or this was a reread, I’d love to hear your specific thoughts on those aspects, as well as if it’s your first one!
If you’re catching up or looking at the project as a whole, do take a look at the project page, where I list all the blog posts so far.
Adventures in reading, running and working from home 
Dec 21, 2017 @ 20:15:45
Reading Iris Murdoch: The Flight from the Enchanter (1956)
No. 2 in the Project! I first put these thoughts as a comment over on Liz’s other blog post, and copy them again here at her suggestion, for convenience. I had not read this book before. I found it a little bit challenging at first, not difficult to like, but there are a lot of characters, Murdoch introduces them all quite quickly, and I had a hard time getting them straight. (In fact, by the end of the novel I was still a little confused about exactly who a couple of these people are.) Here are some scattered thoughts about The Flight from the Enchanter.
The central thing with this novel is that everybody is fascinated with Mischa Fox. Mischa Fox, the Enchanter, remains mysterious. That is, you don’t get to know a lot about him or why he has this effect on so many people. Some of the characters, like Nina, an immigrant dressmaker, seem terrorized by him; others, like his male friends, a combination of adoring and resentful. The two main women, Rosa and Annette, find him compelling and are drawn to him. Annette, the ingenue, wants to be consumed by him, but Rosa, who has been in love with him, yet separated from him, for years, is exactly afraid of this.
Yet there are other enchanters in the novel. The Polish brothers Jan and Stefan have also enchanted Rosa. This family of refugees has already flown from war and danger but the two sons could not escape their ominous Baba Yaga of a mother, who is like a fairytale witch lurking just around the corner. When the electric fixture in her alcove shorts with a blue flash and a crackling pop, it is as if magic has been worked out of sight. The brothers’ ambivalent treatment of their mother shows how they await their own moment of flight and escape, which eventually comes and the brothers disappear from the story.
In fact, everyone in the book is escaping in some way or another. Within the first pages it can hardly be ignored that Annette and Rosa were running everywhere, literally in flight. Poor Nina escapes in the most tragic of ways. Rainborough escapes twice in a woman’s automobile.
In the beginning of the novel I noticed some small (and delightful) allusions to Under the Net and at least one to a novel yet to come. I wondered how much more of this kind of thing Murdoch does in her writing that I am not yet familiar enough to catch. All of these examples were in chapters 3–5:
• “The space flung itself out like a fisherman’s net and hung poised in an expanse of significant points.” This is the description of Peter Saward’s perception of a room as Rosa walks about in it. I felt it reflected back on the title of Under the Net.
• “Her hair began to come down and she could hear the hairpins one after another pattering onto the pavement behind her.” [I was reminded how in Under the Net Jake sends Finn to walk around looking for a hairpin to get him out of Sadie’s locked apartment because “even in these days one doesn’t have to walk far in the streets of London before coming on a hairpin.”]
• Rosa’s interlude as a factory worker reminded me of Jake’s as a hospital orderly — the description of the repetitive work as hypnotic, soothing, or mind-numbing, depending how you want to look at it. The hospital comes in again as a larger symbol, which I’ll mention later.
• “A cloud of tiredness and depression came down and covered her like a bell.” I thought this was an allusion ahead, to a future novel, The Bell. It seems Murdoch likes to “cover” her characters, trap or envelop them in some way. (But she also likes to set them free.)
“The hospital” from Under the Net, or at least the symbol of it, reappears in this book. It is next to Rainborough’s house, and expansion of a technology wing has claimed his garden wall and part of his garden. The imminent destruction of this wall and greenery weighs on Rainborough throughout, and parallels all the oppressive batting about and indecisiveness he endures with women and the idea of marriage. I couldn’t quite be sympathetic to him after his abortive assault on the young Annette (current events being what they are). But he isn’t brutal, he’s just an idiot, an unhappy idiot who has never learned to understand his own feelings, let alone someone else’s. He seems to put himself on course by the end of the book.
Here I’ll mention Annette, who begins the novel in flight from her stuffy school and ends in flight from all the people into whose midst her heedless parents have flung her, and again plucked her away from. Annette is tiresome as only vain young people can be. I wondered sometimes what Annette was supposed to “be” in this novel. There is some amount of doubling in the book, with events (for example, a burnt hand and a burnt forehead; Rainborough escaping twice in women’s cars) and characters (the Polish brothers; their old silent mother and the talkative Mrs Wingfield—both enchantresses of a kind), so Annette could be Rosa’s younger “double.” Like Rosa, she falls for Mischa Fox. Then I noticed that her name is “a net.”
I could be imagining this, but it’s not the only fun with names in the book. The brother and sister Hunter and Rosa Keepe have inherited the feminist periodical called Artemis. Having been charged to keep it, only one of them (Hunter) has really worked at this. He is frustrated and out of money but doesn’t want to sell it to Calvin Blick (who is working for Mischa Fox). It’s funny that the keeper of Artemis is named Hunter. Rosa decides to convince one of the shareholders to support the journal financially and chooses Mrs. Wingfield, who happens to live across the street (she has never noticed this). Mrs. Wingfield turns out to be a combination of Mad Hatter and Fairy Godmother.
I loved the shareholders altogether. Perhaps it’s because I’m an older lady myself. The young people’s dismissive treatment of these senior women was a costly error because it helped to paralyze them. Hunter and Rosa seemed to expect their elders to have carried on endlessly while they stood still wondering what to do. They complain that the shareholders haven’t paid attention or kept a hand in the business of Artemis. But from the shareholders’ view, they’ve done their part and it’s the younger people’s turn to make decisions and act. In the end, Mrs. Wingfield is “winged” indeed. She’s a messenger, a valkyrie, who strides about and accomplishes something with both money and advice. Though a trickster in her speech and behavior, she becomes a wise savior to the Keepes and to Artemis.
Rosa, who has resisted Mischa Fox, her “enchanter,” for so long, finally runs to him. It appears her long flight may have ended. But even when they are in the same place, they don’t seem to hurry to be in each other’s presence. Like Jake “chasing” Anna in the Tuileries, there is plenty of time. Rosa, however, has given in. She has followed Mischa to his villa in Italy. On the evening of her arrival, they have done nothing with any conviction. It’s the next morning and she is watching Mischa from the house, a small figure down on the beach. Calvin urges her away, she listens to him, becomes fearful, and leaves. Now, who has “flown” from the other? It seems most obvious that (once again) Rosa takes flight from Mischa the enchanter. But wasn’t Mischa the one who left the house? The one who “took flight” down to the beach? Was he forcing her to follow? Or making his own escape?
Rosa goes back to Peter Saward, the quiet scholarly man who throughout has remained in the background, preoccupied with an academic puzzle that cannot be solved. We find he has given it up. A new discovery has turned all his years of labor pointless. (In this, he resembles many fairy tale heroines who have been given endless and hopeless-seeming tasks like sorting seeds.) But rather than feeling angry or devastated, he is relieved and freed. Does Rosa really love Peter Saward? I don’t know. But in the final scenes Rosa’s hair lies like a net drying on Peter’s knees. Peter Saward is under Rosa’s net.
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Dec 21, 2017 @ 21:43:44
Thank you for reposting this here, it’s an amazing report and adds lots to my experience of re-reading the book!
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Dec 22, 2017 @ 11:00:54
To my Shame I can remember practically nothing about Flight from the Enchanter. Great review.
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Dec 22, 2017 @ 11:27:19
It is only the second one. It’s the one that starts with Annette running away from school and swinging on a chandelier and has Mischa Fox, with one brown eye and one blue and his sideckick, Calvin Blick. A good read, and thanks for saying it was a great review.
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Dec 22, 2017 @ 12:47:33
Fascinating review Liz – had I had the time I would quite like to have joined in with this one. And yes – isn’t it odd how our attitudes change to the characters when we re-read in later life! 🙂
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Dec 22, 2017 @ 12:51:06
I always find this interesting, and I’m glad that Murdoch was always so important to me that I can pretty well remember my reactions to my first readings of all of the novels. Feel free to read it any time and pop your link here, though, if your’e tempted by it!
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Dec 22, 2017 @ 19:15:49
Elderly at 44: wow! That’s disheartening. *laughs* This is one which I’ve not been able to borrow locally and I’ve not come with any copies on a second-hand search either, but I’m still looking because I remember it was one which you recommended in particular at some point.
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Dec 22, 2017 @ 19:16:55
It is really good, what a shame you can’t track one down! It is the least readily available – its first edition is the rarest one of all of hers!
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Dec 29, 2017 @ 14:11:45
I’ve enjoyed both of the long reports above and they have given me much to consider. I first encountered this book when I was slightly beyond my elderly teens and have read it a couple of times since then.
This time around, given the focus on workplace harassment in the news, I could not help but look a little more closely at the chapter where Rainborough deliberately catches Miss Casement off guard by coming early to her apartment. Certainly there are some comic touches here along with the gamesmanship; but this is the first time we have seen Miss Casement outside the structure of the office, seen her “under the net” so to speak. And it’s a bit of chaos, curlers up, powder puffs falling, stockings burning (and handsomely paying Rainborough back for his intrusion). Through her description of the somewhat shabby one-room apartment with its “dusty smell mingled with the odor of gas and face powder,” and its narrow grate, I think Murdoch shows us some of the limitations of this very efficient woman’s world. But she also provides, in passing, the details of the small wooden and glass animals on the mantlepiece that suggest something more of her personal life that the reader will never really know and which even Rainborough finds touching. What I loved about the scene was Miss Casement’s attempts to soldier through the awkwardness of the situation and not let it get the better of her. They seemed very real to me. While Nina’s situation as a single working woman and also a refugee may feel even more limited and “pathetic,” it was this scene that spoke to me this time around.
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Dec 30, 2017 @ 17:41:34
Thank you for your comment, Peter. I have to say that the Rainborough / Miss Casement scenes had faded from my memory somewhat and felt confusing and a bit odd now. I did love those tiny touches, too, although felt IM was disapproving of her (I always feel she disapproves of artificially enhanced women, however clever they are, and praises plain and unadorned ones).
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Dec 31, 2017 @ 16:16:57
I would agree these scenes seem a bit odd now. Maybe that’s why this one stood out for me and made me linger over it. It’s certainly the first time I’ve felt much empathy for Miss Casement or thought much about her. No doubt current events had something to do with that.
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Dec 31, 2017 @ 18:45:51
I found The Flight from the Enchanter a more consistently amusing and coherent read than Under the Net.
The characters were all intriguing and felt more-or-less like rounded individuals, rather than ciphers for philosophical viewpoints. This applies even to those I would dread to meet in real life. Take a bow the Veruca Salt-esque Annette and that wet puddle of middle-aged resentment and sexual frustration Mr. Rainborough.
While the philosophical reflections on the nature of truth and the difficulty or impossibility of arriving at a correct or verifiable version of reality arrived quite naturally in the dialogue between Blick and Rosa toward the end of the novel.
Mischa was a very intriguing character. He seemed to be at once the spider at the centre of the web, possessed of total knowledge and infinite patience, and something of an absence, a non-character. For the other characters he was a blank canvas onto which they projected their fears and paranoias.
This is where the notion of the enchanter becomes very intriguing. Is Mischa enchanting Rosa and others, and are they fulfilling some desire to be enchanted within themselves through him. The complex relations between Rosa, Jan and Stefan is in similar territory. He is controlling who? Who is exploiting who?
Like @tworavensrose I adored the trustees of Artemis, and immediately recognised the portrait of these invincible women who are hard of hearing and firm of principle.
The foreword well described my feelings at the end of the novel. I felt satisfied having enjoyed the overlapping narratives, without any sense of closure or resolution beyond, in some cases, liberation from a corrosive addiction to an enchanting other.
To end by picking up on Liz’s point about the Murdoch’s humour, the vaguely Orwellian description of SELIB’s bureaucratic inertia and dysfunction was wryly amusing and worryingly accurate.
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Dec 31, 2017 @ 19:39:23
Thank you for your review, John, lots of good detail and overlap with others which is great to see. I have really gone off Annette now, whereas as a teenager I thought she was super! You’re right of course about the enchanters – are they created by their victims?
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“The Flight From the Enchanter” round-up and “The Sandcastle” preview #IMReadalong @IrisMurdoch | Adventures in reading, writing and working from home
Dec 31, 2017 @ 20:00:01
Jan 02, 2018 @ 01:30:43
I think I found elements of the novel more menacing than others as you can see from my goodreads review below. This is nowhere near as insightful as those above but I feel like I should share in this whole experience. The Sandcastle isn’t holding my interest as well as the first two, perhaps because of its slower pace and more conventional storytelling but I am persevering. Thanks again Liz for introducing me to Murdoch.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2215239223?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
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Jan 02, 2018 @ 08:23:28
Thank you so much for sharing your really insightful and perceptive review, Jo – I’m going to add the link to the round-up post. And please never apologise for being less qualified than others to state your opinion. Murdoch herself had lots to say about how academics and critics read her books! You say some really pertinent things about the book’s application to today’s specific times – it’s funny how you can read a book multiple times then it suddenly chimes in with the exact resonances of the day. The Sandcastle is a bit slower but I know you’re going to enjoy it as you get going!
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Jan 03, 2018 @ 18:44:18
Thankfully, I don’t feel quite as bad about my reading experience as I had first thought, now that I read a review. I also found myself a little lost with the characters, not so much lost as I felt I might need to re-read again(the next marathon) or just really try to read better. This month I really wanted to finish on time if not ahead..I seem to be so busy of late! I enjoyed this book and was very excited from Day 1. I am still uncertain about how some characters were related etc. Definitely a re-read one day. 🙂 My lines I loved from the book, I know I had a few, but this one came at the end and dare I say ,I maybe a little uncertain about it’s meaning?! LOL “”you will never know the truth, and you will read the signs in accordance with your deepest wishes. That is what we humans always have to do. Reality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones.”
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Jan 04, 2018 @ 08:19:14
It certainly takes a few goes to work out who is related to whom and they will all keep crossing paths! I have very definitely drawn diagrams in the backs of others of the books! And does it really matter in the end, apart from seeing people in their immediate contexts? I’m not sure. When I’m running with friend X, does it matter that she’s also friends with friend Y? I love that quote, too – esp because it bears out my Death of the Author theory that everyone reads each book as a different book.
I haven’t started The Sandcastle yet, but I aim to have it reviewed by the middle of the month …
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Jan 16, 2018 @ 11:40:16
Finally managed to finish Enchanter last night! Such an interesting read. I could not work out truly why Mischa had such a compelling hold (good and bad) over many of the characters, perhaps that was part of the mystery. But overall, very much enjoyed this book – more so than Under the Net. Even though the latter had a more coherent overall narrative, I was drawn more to the characters in FOTE – especially, as you and others have mentioned, the older ladies – marvellous! I have also enjoyed reading subsequently everyone’s reviews. On to The Sandcastle now!
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Jan 16, 2018 @ 17:46:08
I found that people almost created Mischa’s enchanter status themselves, with his air of mystery, funny eyes and dodgy henchman he was a creature of fascination. I’m glad you liked the elderly feminists! Have fun with the Sandcastle; my review should appear in a day or so.
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Jan 16, 2018 @ 18:27:46
I look forward to it! 🙂
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Jan 21, 2018 @ 23:45:43
Am puzzled as I was sure I had written something here and Liz had asked if I had read Philippa Gregory’s intro. So I came back to reply and say no, there was no intro in my copy. I had written about charting the strength of connections between all the characters. I think it does matter a lot who relates to whom as every relationship changes the protagonists dynamically!
So are all the posts not here, then. It took ages tracking down this page, too as no mention of ‘Flight…’ in the side-bars, now that we are on to ‘The sandcastle’.
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Jan 22, 2018 @ 08:12:36
Thank you for your comment. You posted your comments about “The Flight from the Enchanter” on the introductory post here https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2017/11/30/under-the-net-round-up-and-the-flight-from-the-enchanter-preview-imreadalong-irismurdoch/
As for difficulty tracking down the posts with reviews, etc. there is a page which collects together links to all the different posts. Each book has three posts: a) an introductory one the day before its month starts, b) a review post somewhere in the middle of the month, where I encourage people to share their reviews in either comments or links to their blogs (if they have them) and c) a round-up post at the end of the month, where I link to other people’s blog posts and summarise the discussion. This main page can be found here: https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/the-great-iris-murdoch-readalong-november-2017-december-2019/ and you can always find it in the menu along the top of the page (on a PC or Mac or laptop) or in the drop-down menu on the left of the page (on a phone or tablet). I hope that helps and makes sense.
I’m sorry you didn’t have an intro, although basically this one said the book was confusing and that was about it!
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Jan 25, 2018 @ 18:04:08
Thanks, Liz …….I have made a note of that and hope all will be smoother next time I go hunting you all down! Have to try to say something on The Sandcastle but it wont be much!
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Jan 25, 2018 @ 18:06:22
I am putting the links to my posts on the main page as soon as I publish them, so it should all be reasonably clear and findable as I link to the page on the menus and on every review post about the project!
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Feb 09, 2018 @ 08:04:35
Finally caught up with my reading and reviewing of the Murdoch’s that I own…will endeavour to stay on track when we get to The Sea, The Sea and The Book and the Brotherhood – the other 2 Murdoch’s on my TBR shelf.
http://bronasbooks.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/the-flight-from-enchanter-by-iris.html
I enjoyed TFFTE far more than UTN. Could be just than I’m getting into the swing of Murdoch’s style, but I think that the Enchanter is a more substantial and fascinating story in general.
Thanks for hosting this readalong and finally getting me to read some Murdoch.
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Feb 09, 2018 @ 08:14:23
Great stuff, I will pop over and read that now, and will put a link in my round-up post. Thank you for your contributions so far and I’ll look forward to you joining us again for The Sea, The Sea, and The Book and the Brotherhood, both crackers!
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Jul 28, 2020 @ 14:42:37
The term ‘Dickensian’ should be used sparingly, if at all. Yet it is difficult to resist labelling the extraordinary characters in this novel as anything other. Their portraits are, for me, the chief joys (but by no means the only ones) of this exceptionally enjoyable work of art. The reader is intended to like some of these characters, and to hate (or at any rate to fear) others; and whichever response Murdoch wants to provoke, she does so in prose which is consistently inventive and surprising. Evelyn Waugh once said that he admired PG Wodehouse because he never used a familiar simile; that is one of the many reasons why I read and enjoy both Waugh and Wodehouse, and even though I am in my early days of Murdoch, I know I am embarking on a journey which will sparkle with similar delights.
As an example, here is the old crone who sits in the corner of the bed-sitting room in Pimlico which she shares with her two sons. She does not utter a word throughout the novel (at least, not one English word – being Polish, she occasionally spits out what may be a sentence at her sons), and so the portrait, unusually, relies solely on the descriptions of her physical properties. Despite this lack of speech, she is brought vividly alive in passages such as this:
‘It was indeed like being in the presence of a native god, in which one does not believe but which can terrify one all the same. The mother was yellow in colour and her skin resembled leather. On her face and neck it was crossed with innumerable deep wrinkles until it was almost impossible to descry her features, so many other dark lines distracted the eye. Her cheeks were furrowed with deep cracks, like a vessel that had been broken and stuck roughly together again. The lower part of her face had fallen in, so that her mouth and chin hung like a flabby bag from the bony protruberances above. Only her plentiful grey hair seemed to be alive, and her eyes, which were large and dark and moist, and lived in their jagged caves like a pair of jellyfish, their wet and lustrous surface contrasting oddly with the extreme aridity of their surroundings.’
Another female character, Miss Foy, has ‘wig-like hair, which resembled the interior of a mattress’, and dry skin which undulates as she speaks, ‘like the skin of an alligator’. Miss Foy is the housekeeper/companion to a bonkers old woman named Mrs Wingfield who could (to return to the earlier allusion) have come straight out of an Evelyn Waugh story. At the moment of her entry into the story, Miss Foy is doing the washing up. Mrs Wingfield explains why: ‘I only let her wash up once in three weeks. It takes that long for us to work through all our china. I hate Foy dashing away after a meal to wash up, it destroys my digestion. So we wait till there’s no china left and then Foy makes a day of it.’
‘I see. What a sensible arrangement,’ said Rosa.
‘It’s not a sensible arrangement,’ said Mrs Wingfield, ‘but it’s the arrangement we’ve adopted.’
Rosa has called on Mrs Wingfield to seek financial support for the learned feminist journal Artemis, which is struggling for the means to resist a takeover by a newspaper proprietor whose intentions and methods are, to say the least, unsympathetic. This mission, and the relationships between the proprietor (the Enchanter of the title) and those with whom he has dealings, constitute the plot. It is a novel with a dark heart, leavened by much humour and studded with brilliant prose. I adored the description of a London street after rain: ‘The night was enormous and silent, with an intensity which for a moment made her pause in awe. She was in an unfamiliar street. It was a damp night, with rare stars. It was not raining, but it had been, and a street lamp some way off streaked the roadway with reflections.’
I am beginning to appreciate that every one of Murdoch’s novels will provide at least one example, and doubtless very many, of her ability to describe even the most commonplace occurrence in words and with images which give it a new significance or enable me to see the world from a different perspective. Here is someone hanging on the telephone while a call is put through from London to the south of France (an operation which, when the novel was written in 1956, required human intervention along the route) : ‘Beside her ear, a long corridor of sound was opening out telescopically, section after section. English voices were speaking to each other in a space of sound. Annette imagined that she could hear the waves of the Channel breaking across the line. A voice in Paris was speaking to a voice in Provence. At last far away there was the sound of a telephone ringing, a French telephone, a telephone in a hotel in Cannes.’ I love ‘telescopically’ – the suggestion not only of a great distance covered, but of the preparation of the telescope by extending the collapsible tubes between the lenses, and the journey through the ‘space’ of sound. A damp night with rare stars … eyes like a pair of jellyfish in their jagged caves … these are images which might as easily have been produced by a poet as a novelist. There are so many such images, and so many remarkable characters, in this very excellent novel. I cannot wait to read it again.
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Jul 29, 2020 @ 12:14:10
I love your review, thank you for sharing it – great and interesting thoughts. I’ve always liked that description of the phone call myself – IM did like a telephone, too, didn’t she – lots of them, sometimes smashed, in the novels! I think Miss Wingfield could easily be in Barbara Pym somewhere, too. I’m so glad you got such a lot of out this one – it’s one I read fairly early and always like to return to.
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Jan 25, 2021 @ 21:52:18
The plot was gripping. The best part was Mischa’s party decending into a funny farce. The old ladies thwarting the baddies was also good. I struggled for a moral to the tale though. 99% of the decisions of the characters was wrong imho. Maybe the moral is think deeply about how many lives you affect when you make a decision. I don’t think any of the characters learnt anything by the end. Quite a lot of squashing of “lesser creatures” occured. One character’s negligence causes a death. Most of the characters are deeply deeply flawed. Rains-borough has a mystical garden experience but the hospital want a tiny piece for an xray machine (how dare they!) so he destroys it. The least flawed were – Hunter stuck in a job he hates ;”The dressmaker” stuck in her life” ; and Peter stuck alone in a room pointlessly looking up heiroglyphics. ” One reads the signs as best one can.”
Alternate title The fish! The fish!
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Jan 25, 2021 @ 21:54:36
I really like the elderly feminists, too. I think you’re onto it with “Maybe the moral is think deeply about how many lives you affect when you make a decision” – there is also a lot in IM about how to be good, which usually comes out as making as little impression on the world as you can and sort of disappearing, which fits with that. Good alternative title!
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