Volume 26, Number 1 · February 8, 1979
The Corruption of Love
By Rosemary Dinnage
The Sea, The Sea
by Iris Murdoch
Viking Press, 502 pp., $10.95
Praxis
by Fay Weldon
Summit Books, 251 pp., $9.95
The good, Plato says, is what 'every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does all that it does, with some intuition of its nature, and yet also baffled.' Iris Murdoch has quoted this elsewhere in a discussion of art, how it may transcend illusion and fantasy and participate in the detachment of pure goodness. In The Sea, The Sea she tells us that there were once two cousins who grew up each in his own way to pursue the good—baffled, but with some intuition of its nature: a saint and a sinner, one to pursue it through religion and the other through art. Both became to some degree enlightened, to some degree fell into the error of confusing their chosen good with power—magically strong, fatally corrupting. One of them died, the other lived on. The story, though rich in typically Murdochian devices, is a passionately moral one, and it gains from this, becomes more than the heartless tinkling of some of her other novels. Its metaphor is the stage, that most showy, illusive, and traditionally dangerous form of art, the narrator is a successful producer and play-wright. His stage is set against the background of the sea, the morally indifferent force that can kill or caress, be ugly or beautiful, the great uncaring reservoir of natural energy.
Review, 2987 words
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