Philosophical Pixy

THE SANDCASTLE (342 pp.) -- Iris Murdoch--Viking ($3.95).

At first blink, this seems to be one of those drab little British dramas in which an ill wind can be heard whistling across the raw clay of a new housing development. But there is an extra dimension: magic of sorts. At St. Bride's, a public school "of the second class," middle-aged Bill Mor wonders what to do with a life already half wasted in the chalky smog of history classrooms and hopelessly Potterized by his wife, a ruthless practitioner of "one-upmanship." The chance of liberation comes in the figure of a beautiful, boyish girl artist named Rain Carter, who is commissioned to paint the portrait of the school's worldly retired headmaster. She comprises all the values--art, gaiety, wisdom--that have passed Mor by.

The incomprehensible love affair that grows between the two is made plausible by Iris Murdoch's great tact with words. It is only when this serious novelist (she is a tutor in philosophy at Oxford's St. Anne's College) intrudes witchcraft into the plot that she seems to forget the difference between the reality of magic and the magic of reality. Mor's daughter Felicity, hoping to release her father from his enchantment, casts a spell and burns a figure (made of a nylon stocking stuffed with paper). Mother catches her at it: "Whatever were you burning? It smells very funny." Most readers will agree, but Daddy is recalled to his responsibilities, the Labor Party and Mother. Novelist Murdoch's plain moral: better a dull fate than an absurd adventure. But the figure of Rain, that Audrey Hepburn sprite, has become an obsessively recur rent character in Iris Murdoch's work, suggesting that inside every female philosopher there is a pixy struggling to be let out to play.

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