Hanging by a Thread

BRUNO'S DREAM by Iris Murdoch. 311 pages. Viking Press. $5.95.

Even the English, who send CARE packages to needy sheep dogs, have never made house pets of spiders. But Iris Murdoch often deals even-headedly with oddities. This time she has spun a touching tale of wayward love and wanly threatening death, centered around a moribund octogenarian named Bruno Greensleave, whose twilight passion is for champagne and arachnids.

The metaphoric potential is splendid. Spiders are often deadly--and creative as well, spinning out of their own innards the structures of their salvation. Their lives, which sometimes hang by a thread, are delicately crosswebbed, like our own. The author tactfully does not press such parallels to extremes. Yet she is clearly an accomplished spider herself, capable of weaving metaphysical webs in fiction and enmeshing a whole gallery of ogres, Freudian and otherwise. Like the wily trapdoor spider, which retires to digest its kill behind a neat disklike door attached to its nest, Iris Murdoch is seldom visible, or visibly partisan, in her work. In Bruno's Dream, however, she seems more compassionately bemused than usual, though no less severely aware than ever that men and women are foolish creatures who neither know the world for what it is, nor themselves for what it makes of them.

Bruno dies on the last page. Much of the book is taken up with an intricately choreographed, totally absurd mating dance set in motion around his fusty deathbed, as various relatives pursue each other in preposterous shifting triangles like the occupants of a French bedroom farce. They even fight a mock duel. Most kinetic is a cheerful, kindly son-in-law named Danby in whose house Bruno is dying. Danby begins by sharing his bed with Adelaide the maid, then flirts with his brother-in-law's wife and finally consorts with an ex-nun named Lisa. She and a forbearing homosexual nurse called Nigel are the enigmatic characters, familiar in Murdoch fiction, who stir the emotional chemistry of the others into molecular groupings and regroupings.

These gyrations seem not so much foolish as pathetic when viewed next to Bruno's twilight world. As he declines, the perception that life is a kind of dream through which most men move like drunken tram conductors struggles in his mind with his fading recollections of the flesh. Bruno recalls the anguish of his early loves, his failure with his son, and cannot keep the distant memory of these trumpery things, even now, from shredding his heart.

No bleaker, more perceptive portrait of senility can ever have been written. Bruno wakes daily into pain. The small act of putting on his bathrobe must be thought out carefully in advance, as a gymnast plans a movement in a high-wire act. Bruno has become a monster and knows it. He lives for sips of champagne permitted him each evening and the exhilaration of using the telephone to call wrong numbers and know the thrill of human explanations and regrets. Murkily he perceives that death is a physical act.

Bruno and the figures grouped around him convey a shock like that intended by medieval woodcuts depicting the Art of Dying. In them man was presented in extremis, tempted by worldly little demons, teased by memories of seductive folly. Iris Murdoch's tableau is subtler but more rueful. Men only half live life. They are always in extremis but do not care to know it.

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