The Good Apprentice. Iris Murdoch. London: death, the death of his own self-conceit, his illu• Chatto ir Windus 1985. Pp.522. sions. Thomas McCaskerville, the psychiatrist who tells Edward this (and who is married to "Each man kills the thing he loves," at least, Edward's young Aunt Midge) thinks of such in the world of Iris Murdoch — and "man" is, deaths — "death in life, life in death, life after for once, the appropiate word. She writes death" — as his "special subject". It is also the continually about the way love and goodness are special subject of this novel, and indeed of much thwarted not so much by actual evil but by a kind of Iris Murdoch's more recent work. The last of blindness to the reality of other people, and so part of The Good Apprentice is entitled "Life in her novels death often comes at least partly after Death", — life, that is, after the death of through the preoccupation, carelessness, vanity Edward's illusions, and also after the death of or inadequacy of a close friend, a lover or a Edward's father. brother (only once, I believe, in the early Flight from the Enchanter (1956) is a woman the For Edward does learn to stop maddening "killer"). The most obvious cases perhaps, are himself by running away from the truth, and he Hilary Burde of A Word Child, who scores two learns it partly by running away from London, fatal accidents and two suicides, and Cato, the to meet his extraordinary unknown father, Jesse, apostate priest, who coshes and kills the beauti• "a painter, an architect, a sculptor, a socialist, ful delinquent boy he loves. Henry and Cato and a Don Juan," as one of Edward's women (1977) ends with Cato lost in guilt and despair, friends says with awe. At this point the novel which is where this latest novel begins. Edward moves away from the realism of the London Baltram, a London student, is sick with reactive sequences into a different mode, a sort of semi depression over the death of his beloved friend, mythic narrative similar to that of The Unicorn Mark, who fell from a window having been left or The Sea, The Sea. Jesse Baltram turns out to alone to suffer the aftermath of a dose of LSD, be half sick and half crazed, living in the tower of surreptitiously administered by Edward. So the Seegard, the fantastic house he built in the fens, novel moves immediately into a new entangle• imprisoned by — or perhaps imprisoning — ment of love and guilt and death. three strange and beautiful women, his wife and two daughters. Edward's release from the worst The Good Apprentice portrays with painful of his despair comes partly from his father and accuracy the dark and stifling mental world of his ability to accept — or invent — their mutual depression. Iris Murdoch understands the com• love. It also comes from a meeting with Mark's plicated traps and mechanisms of the human sister, Brownie, the first person to ask Edward mind, and Edward here is shown as mechani• the two simple questions — Why did he give cally and lifelessly stuck in a futile yearning to Mark the drug? Why did he leave Mark alone in undo the past, refusing to accept the finality of his drugged sleep? — which enable Edward to death, living entirely in his mental conversa• face the simple truth of his guilt and its conse• tions with Mark, endlessly explaining to Mark, quences. He becomes the good apprentice; he endlessly asking Mark's forgiveness. "I'm a has learnt from death ("The Great Teacher" of machine," he says to his stepbrother, "I say the Henry ir Cato) something about life. same things to myself a thousand times a day, I see the same things, I enact the same things. But Edward is not the only, or even the most Nothingcan help me now, nothing." Likeother obvious, good apprentice. His stepbrother, depressives, he conspires with his own misery; he Stuart, falls in love with the idea of goodness, clings to it and protects it. Acceptance of Mark's gives up his promising academic career to teach death would involve him in another painful small children and decides to remain celibate. Much of the humour in this novel arises from the ate. This novel is good — funny, intelligent, total lack of comprehension of their friends and perceptive, subtle, absorbing. All the same a vital family about Edward's misery or Stuart's element is missing: The Good Apprentice lacks motives. They offer Edward chocolate and good a perspective, an anchor in reality, so to speak. advice and project on to Stuart all their own All the characters in this novel are wealthy and unease about their own compromises. Like priviledged, all part of one prosperous and intel• Edward, Stuart is a good apprentice, not only in ligent circle: Mark's mother knows Edward's that he is apprenticed to the good but also in his tutor's wife and Edward's tutor's son is in love effectiveness, which goes unnoticed even by with both Stuart and Mark's sister, and so on. It himself. Stuart, who is seen as looking like a is a small world which seems to lack all con• white grub, whose father, Harry, prefers his step• sciousness of its smallness or of the larger world, son Edward, who is constantly reviled as an a privileged world which is blind to the under• arrogant bungler, in fact does work towards privileged. Even Stuart, who wants to help other good. He leads Edward to visit and help Midge people, seems ot be more aware of his own need McCaskerville, torn between Harry, her lover, of a sense of goodness than of other people's and Thomas, her husband; he also helps to per• more immediately urgent needs. There is no suade Mark's distraught mother to forgive room for the homeless, the hungry, the deprived Edward. But this is shown so subtly that even the in this world. Times Literary Supplement's reviewer sees Stuart as a ridiculous failure. Stuart at the end of There is also not much room for women. Of the novel is reading Mansfield Park, and indeed course there are women characters, some of them he is a bit like Fanny Price, the timid heroine of intelligent professional women. But the only that novel, both in his rectitude and in his repel• woman character whose thoughts and experi• lent qualities. ences we share is Midge, a former model who spends her time hand sewing, buying flowers, The third apprentice is Thomas, the psychia• and conducting her love affair with Harry. All trist, a more complicated case. Having tried to her thoughts concern her relations with men: the help Edward and Stuart through the agonies of a impact of a second meeting with Jesse tosses her kind of rebirth, he finds himself suffering a sim• from Harry to Stuart temporarily, and then back ilar torture, when he learns about his beloved to Thomas and her son Meredith. She delights in wife's long-lived affair with Harry. He finds Harry assuming authority over her and tries to himself trapped like Edward in a dreary mechan• move Stuart into a similar position. There is no ical round of repeated thoughts and futile yearn• sense of Midge as an individual; she sometimes ings. The novel refers twice to the story of Mar- seems like a mere mechanism of the plot, put syas (the faun flayed by Apollo for daring to set there to afflict Thomas, to place Harry, and to himself up as a rival to the god of music) as if fail to understand Edward and Stuart. The prob• Marsyas' art was completed by his suffering. lem is that she is never placed as a woman in a Apollo is the god not only of music but also of male-dominated society. Perhaps Iris Murdoch healing arts, and Thomas the psychiatrist seems felt that Midge's actions and reactions place her to come through his misery to a new kind of adequately, but this is not so. And indeed, understanding, and even a new joy. although there are powerful women (like Honor Klein and Emma Sands) and women artist (like Iris Murdoch is the artist as cornucopia. The Rain Carter) elsewhere in Murdoch's work, a abundance of her work, the sheer number of her similar problem is felt in other novels: in Nuns novels, many of them rich and strange, is and Soldiers certainly the ex-nun, Anne delightful — for those whom she doesn't infuri• Cavidge, is shown as a thinking, feeling being, but the widowed Gertrude seems to be there only lives, Heyzer provides a brief theoretical over• for other people to love: she is an object, not a view of women and development, and estab• subject. Iris Murdoch is quite capable of stab• lishes her rationale for limiting her study to bing at sexism with brilliant sharpness. In women working within poverty. Then Heyzer Henry and Cato, while John Forbes thinks com• examines the forms and bases of women's subor• placently about his abhorrence of the domina• dination. Changes in agricultural production tion of men over women, he is at the same time are shown to weaken women's authority, increase remembering how he had pushed and manipu• their work burden, and exclude them from lated his daughter into an unwanted and unsuit• newly organized bureaucracies and institutions. able education. "He had always fought for Plantation agriculture, based on a need for male women's liberation," he thinks "...but there was migrant labour, forces women into sole respon• a kind of invincible stupidity in the other sex sibility for reproduction, social isolation, and which simply asked for bullying." Such stupid limited wage labour opportunities.