Little England

By M.D.

AN ACCIDENTAL MAN

by IRIS MURDOCH 442 pages. Viking. $7.95.

The publisher wants us to know that Iris Murdoch, who has published 14 novels in 18 years, took a whole year's breather between her last book and this one. In some ways the vacation shows to advantage. The tone is calmer and the events more reasonable here than in her other recent novels. But the fact remains that Miss Murdoch is now writing urbane soap opera. The huge U.S. women's market should not be put off by her other career as an Oxford don (which she has given up). One feels that if she ever fixed on a basic set of characters she could go on writing serials about them indefinitely.

The new book's flyleaf lists 25 prominent characters (in fact there are at least 27), and they belong to two camps: the Tisbournes, among whom there is money, and the Gibson Greys, among whom there is none. They are all variously articulate, nosy, telephone-calling, letter-writing Londoners who are profoundly preoccupied with themselves.

The round of events begins when old Alison Tisbourne dies, leaving her entire Ulster linen fortune to a beautiful granddaughter named Gracie. That is too bad for everyone because Gracie, while she is the stupidest of her clan, is also the most grasping. She is engaged to Ludwig Leferrier, an idealistic young American who refuses to fight in Viet Nam and faces prosecution if he goes home. In love, Ludwig comes to prize his fiancee's "nerve and calm ignorance." Indeed, she is the best literary creation in the book, scot-free of altruistic impulse, a blithe compendium of pinchy little maxims about avoiding anyone who is in the slightest trouble: "Bad luck is a sort of wickedness in some people."

Around this ill-matched pair cluster ranks of middle-aged lovers and seekers, winners and mostly losers, caught in the "horrible, messy world of quarreling and forgiving." As the book runs its course, there are endless realliances of romance and necessity, suicide attempts, fatal mishaps, missing persons, blackmail. Cutting from character to character in short sequences, the author builds suspense reliably and often ingeniously. In the end, however, only Ludwig, who must choose between "unreason and dishonor," seems to have faced a true crisis. In leaving Gracie and sailing home, he achieves integrity after a long struggle.

By comparison, the woes of the others seem somehow pathetic and finally enervating, partly because they are so deeply selfish. If nothing else, Miss Murdoch has pulled one new switch in this book by replacing the complacent American, so often a carefully drawn figure in British comedy, with a cast of smug Englishmen whose horizons have shrunk to little-England dimensions.

qed M.D.

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