Uncouples

By John Skow

THE SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE MACHINE

by IRIS MURDOCH

374 pages. Viking. $8.95.

Early in this glittering examination of love's disguises in the London suburbs, Novelist Iris Murdoch introduces Blaise Gavender, a successful psychotherapist whose practice is among the well-to-do. Murdoch's tone is aldous, which is to say it seems to promise an ever-so-dry, Huxleian sort of farce: "He received an early lesson from a patient who always wore gloves because she said she had the stigmata. It was a little while before it occurred to Blaise to ask her to remove the gloves. She had the stigmata, and was later successfully treated for hysteria."

Blaise is pompous, and a bit of a charlatan. His personal life is grotesque as the novel begins and rapidly grows more so. His trustful, loving wife Harriet, by whom he has a teen-age son, at first knows nothing of foul-tempered Emily, his mistress of nine years, nor of Luca, Emily's eight-year-old son by Blaise. He swindles time to visit Emily by saying that he is visiting a difficult nocturnal patient named Magnus Bowles.

Magnus has taken on vivid reality for Harriet, though he is the invention of a skilled detective-story writer named Montague Small, who, to the extent that he is a friend of anything, is a friend of the family. Each week Small supplies Blaise with newly elaborated symptoms. Magnus has supposed himself, for instance, to be a large egg and, during another crisis, has imagined that he is stalked by a wooden-legged bishop.

In some ways this is the customary Murdoch blend of incipient farce, domestic tragicomedy and intellectual soap opera. Baroque pratfalls occur as usual, but neither the release of laughter nor the expected snicker of superiority (what odd and frightful people!) follows. Blaise knows that his psychological theorizing is mostly cant, yet he does have a knack for helping his patients. His visits to sharp-tongued Emily's apartment are mixed blessings--it is a hate nest in which the girl spends a good deal of time demanding money to have her teeth fixed. Harriet at first seems too kind and innocent to live. But her unreflective goodness amounts almost to genius. When Blaise's second family comes to light and he begins to dash about with one foot in the trap of matrimony and the other in the bucket of illicit love, Harriet takes the edge off the hostility--and the hilarity--by befriending the illegitimate Luca, who is seriously disturbed and possibly retarded.

Morality Tale. If Novelist Murdoch is not playing for laughs, what is she up to? As the novel's title says explicitly, the author, who looked at love sentimentally in The Black Prince, is now coldly exploring its mechanistic aspect. In mockery she has made her central figure a psychologist, who supposedly manipulates the mind's mechanisms and who effects his cures by forming "love relationships" with his clients.

One other novelist, also much concerned with love, has attempted what appears to be a deliberately humorless antifarce. This is John Updike, who watched impassively in Couples as illicit lovers tumbled out of windows and popped in and out of adjoining bed rooms. How strangely and how helplessly we gyrate, seemed to be his thought. How absurd we are, how the machine crushes us, seems to be Iris Murdoch's. At the novel's end, Blaise and Emily are living together in sadomasochistic bliss. Harriet is dead of an airport terrorist's bullet, after trying to shield the boy Luca with her body. He is in a mental hospital. Like a Victorian morality tale done with a light touch, the book leaves its characters either dead of love or diminished by it. . John Skow

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