This is a review of Iris Murdoch's novel,The Nice and the Good(1968).

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century, and also an important figure in philosophy. In fact, she was a professor of philosophy at Oxford, and her collection of essaysThe Sovereignty of Good(1970) continues to stimulate discussion. Her novels reflect her philosophical views, but they are largely devoid of technical terminology. (A pedantic character in this novel uses the expression “sense datum” in conversation with a friend, who immediately mispronounces it as “sense of datum” [273].) Murdoch’s most fundamental claim is that humans are, by nature, deeply narcissistic. We are able to break out of our natural preoccupation with ourselves only through genuine love, be it love of beauty or love of what is genuinely good in another person. The characters in this exquisitely written and engagingly complex novel illustrate the various ways in which love can manifest itself, and the tension between that love and our selfishness.

The central narrative of the novel is set in motion by the death of Radeechy, a civil servant who has apparently committed suicide in his office at work, but without leaving any suicide note. Since Radeechy had access to classified information, the head of the office, Octavian Gray, assigns his subordinate John Ducane to investigate the death, and confirm that there is no security risk. Ducane is a talented, dedicated man, but one with a streak of “strict low church Glaswegian Protestantism,” which left him with “a devil of pride, a stiff Calvinistic Scottish devil, who was quite capable of bringing Ducane to utter damnation” (78). Of course, Radeechy’s suicide will turn out to be a complex matter, and the plot is quite engaging. Several times while reading I spontaneously muttered “Oh no,” out loud. But this is really a novel of characters, driven by the web of personal relationships that radiate out from Ducane and Octavian. As in any great novel, the characters just seem “right.” They are more real than real people, the way Sherlock Holmes or Michael Corleone seem to us. There is no easy way to summarize the cast of characters without sounding breathless, so bear with me for a moment.

屋大维和他的妻子凯特很富有，在伦敦郊外有一处小庄园。杜肯在工作上是屋大维的下属，也是屋大维家的朋友，所以他经常去格雷家，那里养着一群人。(这部小说吸引美国读者的一个方面是，它看到了一种我们没有类似的生活模式，这种生活模式可能在英国也不复存在了。)家里的一位朋友，玛丽·克洛蒂尔，就住在家里帮忙，就像个仆人一样。她是一个寡妇，爱上了犹太人大屠杀的幸存者威利·科斯特(Willy Kost)，他住在一间远离主屋的小屋里。然而，威利似乎在感情上受到了伤害，无法回报玛丽的爱。玛丽的儿子，皮尔斯，在这所房子里长大了。皮尔斯迷恋屋大维和凯特的女儿芭芭拉。她刚从瑞士完成学业回来，已经成长为一个适婚的年轻女士，但她对待皮尔斯冷酷的蔑视。在某种程度上，芭芭拉意识到她对皮尔斯太残忍了，但她很难适应成为成年人所需要的纯真的丧失:“当我年轻的时候，当我在报纸和书中读到关于非常讨厌的人、坏人的东西时，我觉得自己的内心完全是善良和无辜的，我觉得这些人与我完全不同，我永远不会变成坏人，或者表现得像他们那样糟糕。 …I’m afraid it’s all turning out to be much more difficult than I expected” (63). Another frequent visitor to the Gray household is Paula, a brilliant classicist who has a pair of preternaturally bright, pre-pubescent twins, Edward and Henrietta. Paula is divorced from Richard Biranne, who works in the same office with Octavian and Ducane. Biranne is known to be a rake, so everyone assumes that Paula divorced him. In fact, Biranne’s vices were part of his appeal to Paula: “Chaste Paula, cool Paula, bluestocking Paula, had found in her husband’s deviously lecherous nature a garden of undreamt delights” (147). The cause for the divorce was actually Paula’s affair with another man, Eric Sears, which ended so disastrously that Eric fled the country. But Eric has written that he is coming back. Paula does not want him to return, and she is now in a whirlwind of uncertainty about how to deal with him.

Ducane himself is pursuing a relationship with Kate Gray. This relationship is not an affair as we would think of it, though. It is more like a Platonic love in the truest sense of that term, and the two never do more than kiss: “The wonderful thing about Kate was that she was unattainable; and this was what was to set him free forever” (104). Moreover, Octavian is fully aware of Ducane’s relationship with his wife. In fact, we learn that Kate and Octavian are titillated by her flirtations with other men, so much so that discussing it is part of their foreplay. Ducane’s relationship with Kate is complicated by the fact that Ducane himself has been trying to end a relationship with Jessica, an art teacher much younger than himself. Jessica’s “integrity took the form of a contempt for the fixed, the permanent, the solid, in general ‘the old’, a contempt which, as she grew older herself, became a sort of deep fear. So it was that some poor untutored craving in her for the Absolute, for that which after all is most fixed, most permanent, most solid and most old, had to express itself incognito” (84). Ducane became for her that Absolute, and she loves him to the point of idolatry. However, Ducane does not reciprocate her love. Ducane himself is, in many ways, a good man, but he faces “one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely that in order to become good it may be necessary to imagine oneself good, and yet such imagining may also be the very thing which renders improvement impossible either because of surreptitious complacency or because of some deeper blasphemous infection which is set up when goodness is thought about in the wrong way” (77). Well, that will do for now. There are more characters, but the preceding are most of the important ones, and the others I cannot explain without giving away plot points.

正如书名所示，小说的主题之一就是“善良”和“善良”之间的区别。具有讽刺意味的是，尽管故事的背景是典型的英国风格，但这个特别的主题对我们美国人来说却是一个特别重要的教训。有人曾经说过，美国人民真正的宗教是乐观和否认。我们经常把“积极的”、“不带偏见的”、“容易相处的”——简而言之，“好”——和做一个好人混为一谈。但两者在任何方面都不一样。凯特人很好，但这种好有一种内在的虚伪。杜肯说:“她的想法是我们的关系应该简单而阳光，而我必须忠实地使它简单而阳光”(138)。如果魔鬼存在，他无疑是非常好的:所有更好地引诱我们做坏事。相反，善良的人为了变得善良，有时会粗暴，有时会直率，有时会残忍。(对比一下电视角色豪斯和蔡斯。 Which is a nicer person? Which is a better person?) Murdoch also teaches us that to be good is not to be perfect. Willy Kost rebuffs Barbara’s request to tutor her: his motive is good, but it is good because he is aware he must protect her, and himself, from other motives that are not good (182-185).

如果说这本珍贵的小说有什么缺陷的话，那就是它的最终结论可能过于乐观了。这听起来像是对一本专注于人类在面对诱惑时的脆弱的小说的奇怪批评。这部小说充满了风流韵事。有时它们会带来灾难性的后果，但人们会觉得这是不可避免的，只要我们彼此原谅，一切都会好起来:“我们所能做的就是不断注意自己什么时候开始表现不好，遏制自己，回到过去，劝诱自己的弱点，激发自己的力量，呼唤那些我们知道也许只有名字的美德。”我们不是好人，我们所能期望的最好的就是温柔，原谅彼此，原谅过去，被原谅自己，并接受这种原谅，然后再次回到这个美丽而意外的陌生的世界”(198-199)。我们人类就像小说中描述的那样脆弱，宽恕就像小说中描述的那样美好，但人们不禁要问，这些真理是否已经变成了最终使人衰弱的合理化。正如威利警告别人的那样:“在地狱里，一个人没有精力去做任何好的改变。这确实是地狱的意义”(283)。(默多克自己的个人生活或许就说明了这种危险。See the moving filmIris[2001].)

One of the wonderful things about Murdoch was her openness to religious traditions as sources of spiritual inspiration, whether one is a believer or not. So it is not out of place to end this review by recalling that Jesus saves the adulteress from being stoned to death by challenging the crowd, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” (the forgiveness that comes with love). But let us also not forget that his final words to her are, “Go, and sin no more” (the strictness that comes with the law).