Iris Murdoch, The Flight From the Enchanter, Penguin pb, 1962; first published 1956. 287 pp.
Just back last week from a three-week trip to Canada and Alaska, which was wonderful. That’s why there’s be nothing posted here for a while. Still haven’t recovered fully from jet lag, so this may be a bit less coherent than usual.
The first book I finished while travelling was this strange novel by Iris Murdoch – the first of hers that I’ve read (I think – might have forgotten one from years ago). I enjoyed it as it went along, but it left me at the end thinking, so what?
As days went by afterwards, I reflected some more, and it began to reassemble itself, in a way, in my thinking, and I became less dismissive. I’ll try and explain, but it’s difficult.
The plot and characters are borderline surreal or magical-realist. Different threads develop seemingly unconnected. Some seem to go nowhere, signify nothing. But afterwards a kind of fuzzy coherence becomes apparent.
A young woman leaves her posh finishing school and celebrates by swinging on the chandelier in the staffroom. She’s determined to learn in the ‘school of life’ – but what follows seems to teach her little. Her resistance to the conventions of the system, her quest for fulfilment and freedom, is celebrated, if not her rather immature character and privileged background.
If there’s a central storyline it’s the attempt by a shady, possibly east European press magnate called Mischa Fox (apt name), to buy out a failing literary-political magazine founded by suffragettes. Its current owner-editor, Hunter (all the names are apt), resists this attempt, appalled by the personality and reputation of Fox and his ruthlessly amoral fixer, Calvin Blick – who blackmails him into compliance.
He does this by taking compromising photos of Hunter’s sister Rosa, who’s engaged in a bizarre love triangle with two Polish brothers who work in the same factory as her (why is a nice middle-class girl of the 1950s working there? It’s one of many weird details that drift by.) She, and several of the other female characters, all succumb to the seductive charms of Fox.
That’s sort of it. Summarising the plot doesn’t begin to do justice to the strange incandescence of this unusual novel. It hints at all kinds of symbolic significance (I think). There’s also a scholar engaged in a noble but quixotic quest to decode a set of ancient texts written in a kind of cuneiform or hieroglyphic script – does he represent the futility of aimless research, or the purity and integrity of the seeker after truth and clarity? What, after all, is truth?
A civil servant vegetates in a pointless bureaucratic system, resentful of the rise of the young women who increasingly challenge complacent dinosaurs like him: there’s quite a lot of this kind of thing, celebrating the struggle of women to liberate themselves from submission to the patriarchy – hence that magazine founded by suffragettes; btw, that’s the word IM uses, rather than ‘suffragists’. The magazine takeover is resisted by an ageing group of the women who helped found it.
Other themes, related in part to the above, include other kinds of struggle for freedom, as so many people live a life of deprivation, confinement, restriction of opportunity, and even oppression. The flight from the titular enchanter, Fox, represents a variation on that theme. A surprisingly contemporary corollary of this is the depiction of immigrants, possibly illegal, terrified by the prospect of deportation. One such character takes the most extreme way out.
There are some aspects of the novel that show some dated attitudes, including a rather nasty sexual assault on a young woman. Fox himself shows an attitude to the women who find him (unaccountably, it seems to me) irresistible that’s not a million miles away from some of the high-profile sexual predators who have come to public attention in the last few years.
But I don’t want to end on a negative note. Murdoch’s writing is elegant, witty and satisfyingly rich and full of layers of significance, as I hope I’ve (not too clearly) suggested. Although some parts of it haven’t dated well, it’s one of the most unusual, original and cerebral novels I’ve read in a while.