A Midsummer Enchantment

In the great downsizing of 2020, thinking I was leaving Suffolk, I halved my personal library. In the event I didn’t move, but the exercise was cathartic. Shelves were cleared, spiders ejected, grumbling, from their webs. But in the manner of the dog that didn’t bark in the night, my greatest surprise was discovering what I couldn’t part with.

Chief amongst these, linking arms and refusing to be kettled into cardboard boxes, were the complete works of Iris Murdoch. This, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t looked at them for over thirty years. Yet suddenly they demanded my attention. My youthful reading had two main threads. I read many books about the choices – or lack of them – facing women navigating a male world. And I was completely devoted to the novels of Iris Murdoch. I loved them because, like Charles Dickens, she created her own world. The dilemmas facing her characters were moral ones: resisting self-knowledge would bring about the severest consequences. Her novels were also wonderfully written, often extremely funny and crammed, like George Eliot’s novels, with absorbing analysis of human behaviour. Fast-forward to 2020. I wanted to reread her. But where to start? With the joyous, anarchic Under the Net (1954), the reverberating and heartbreaking The Bell (1958), the Booker prize-winning  The Sea, the Sea (1978)? Instead my hand went unerringly to the broken-spined and much-sellotaped hardback A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). I know I’m not alone in finding this relatively minor work one of Murdoch’s most moving and affecting novels. Before writing it, she had spent four years immersing herself in Shakespeare’s plays. This explains the novel’s strong echoes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – the story could be described as a Midsummer enchantment. The book opens with Rupert and Hilda Foster awaiting guests to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary. It’s early summer in Chelsea. Champagne is at the ready, the swimming pool glints enticingly, and the air is heavy with the scent of roses (Albertine and Little White Pet – if, like me and the author, you’re interested in roses). It’s the scene of a luxuriant and self- satisfied status quo. But this comfortable equilibrium is about to find itself under heavy attack. Julius King, a wealthy scientist and old friend of Rupert’s, is returning to London from America where he has had an affair with Morgan, Hilda’s younger sister. Morgan has not yet returned, perhaps unwilling to face her husband Tallis Brown, a harassed part-time political lecturer who has not been invited to the party. In stark contrast to the Fosters, he lives with his elderly father in unmitigated squalor at the wrong end of Notting Hill. Conspicuously absent from the gathering is Peter, Hilda and Rupert’s son, who has left Cambridge after a single year, and is living in Tallis’s house. Peter’s financial underpinning gives us the first clue that though his parents may congratulate themselves on their trans parent and truthful marriage, this is not entirely true. Rupert is supporting his unemployed son with a generous allowance. Not quite generous enough, it seems, for Hilda is secretly paying Peter’s rent and also subbing her son with regular cheques. And even this isn’t enough for this angry and neglected boy. Tallis is the only one who’s grasped Peter’s perilous mental state. But all he can do is remark to the boy’s parents, obliquely, that ‘Peter doesn’t seem very clear on the mine and thine front’. The hint sails past them. So, unimpeded, Peter continues his new career as a prolific shoplifter. The two other guests expected are Simon Foster, Rupert’s younger brother, and his older lover, Axel Nilsson, who is also a colleague of Rupert’s at the Treasury. Axel too is a friend of Julius King. The scene is set for the arrival of a man who causes fear and fascination in equal measure. Rightly so. Julius King’s is a familiar character in the Iris Murdoch canon: the enchanter, controlling, moneyed, seductive and completely amoral. His character has not aged well in terms of modern psychology. Nowadays he’d be seen as a sociopath without any gloss or glamour, often standing in the dock prior to a well-deserved prison sentence. But back in 1970, he was admired. True to form, and largely for his own amusement, Julius starts to make mischief. His idea of fun is to try to dismantle close relationships to show the protagonists how deluded they are. All human beings are simply puppets, he says, and any relationship, however strong, can be undone by creating jealousy. Rupert, who has been working on a quasi-philosophical treatise for six years, sub scribes strongly to the view that love can triumph over all adversity. Julius hoots with derision. He believes love is just enlightened self- interest. He sets out to prove it by engineering two unrelated characters into believing they are in love with each other. To act as a counterweight to Julius’s machinations, there needs to be a good man, a man of little ego with no inflated view of himself. The nearest to that ideal is Tallis Brown, though his goodness is of a sobering kind. Saints are not always the easiest people to live with. A telling detail in Tallis’s domestic life: his front door won’t shut. He’s not bothered. There’s always someone needing help. Often at 2 a.m. Iris Murdoch was supremely gifted at revealing characters through their domestic lives. We enjoy the discreetly moneyed, slightly smug domesticity chez Rupert and Hilda. We read with equal pleasure of Julius King’s sybaritic little bolt-hole in Mayfair. But in the scrupulous observation of how Tallis lives, there is no satirical note. The appalling disorder is offered as evidence of the stalled life of a depressed man. For me, the most heartbreaking manifestation of this is the pad of A4 on the kitchen table, permanently inscribed with the words ‘in my last lecture I’ which is never developed. And yet. This is the man who is sheltering and trying to protect Peter. Who loyally supports Leonard, his frankly terrifying father. Leonard doesn’t yet know he has terminal cancer. Tallis has the task of telling him and so far has found it completely beyond him. This is the man who is on the committee of every good cause in Notting Hill. When Julius visits the house and is aghast at what he finds, he asks, ‘Could the local Samaritans help?’ ‘I am the local Samaritans,’ is Tallis’s predict able reply. But what makes this book so much more than a highly entertaining comedy of manners is the relationship between Simon, Rupert’s younger brother, and his older lover, Axel Nilsson. Their love affair is the emotional heart of the book. Seen mostly through Simon’s eyes, their relationship is profoundly moving both in its ordinary everydayness and in its acknowledgement of how hard it is to make any relationship work, gay or otherwise. The date of this book’s publication is immensely significant, only three years after the legalization of sex between consenting gay men over the age of 21. Axel is in his forties and Simon ten years younger but historically they represent two different styles of being gay. Simon, a highly attractive but mod est and lovable young man, has always been completely at ease with his sexuality and enjoyed it. Axel is used to concealment and has kept himself scrupulously aloof from what he refers to as ‘that damned secret society’. Because of Axel, Simon has willingly abandoned the gay scene. Even so, Axel, knowing Simon’s colourful past and unable to believe his good fortune, cannot entirely bring himself to commit. We believe in their love and we share both characters’ constant pain and anxiety as to whether it can survive. By the end of the book, a more sobering status quo is in place. In three short chapters we see Julius going on his merry way, unrepentant at the chaos he has engineered. Tallis, though having demonstrated considerable personal courage, is still unable to tell his father that he has terminal cancer. But there is a happier outcome for Simon and Axel, and that happiness has been earned. Simon is the one who found the courage to break the spell of the enchanter. Axel has acknowledged that he has been too cowardly to commit and wants to change. Waiting for Axel to join him in the vine-shadowed garden of a small French hotel, we share Simon’s great pleasure in that moment in his life. ‘He was young. He was healthy. He loved and was loved in return.’ A Shakespearean outcome in which we can all rejoice.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Frances Donnelly 2026