Deep Mist & Shallow Water

THE UNICORN (311 pp.)--Iris Murdoch--Viking ($5).

In a gesture that seems both apologetic and pompous, Graham Greene has insisted that his light novels (those in which God does not have a speaking part) should be called "entertainments." The tag does not fit all light novels, because it carries the implication that the author can write much more deeply when he cares to. But it suits exactly the books of Iris Murdoch, a professional philosopher and former Oxford don. whose only equal as an entertainment writer is Greene himself.

Murdoch entertainments are usually very witty and more than a little strange. Enthusiasts cherish such oddities as the scene in which two characters try to make love in a recumbent church bell. Further, the entertainments are pleasantly foggy with the mists that rise off deep psychological and intellectual waters. The characters rarely do more than waggle their toes in these depths, but the feeling is conveyed that they are all excellent swimmers. In The Unicorn, her seventh novel, the author unwisely grows impatient with toe dipping. She pitches her characters into the murkiest of the soul's dark waters, and leaps in after them. But the water proves to be not deep but merely cloudy.

Author Murdoch sets her novel in the form of a parody of 19th century romanticism. The heroine, a schoolteacher named Marian, agrees to take a job as governess in a country house on a remote British seacoast. When she alights from the train, the locals stare at her strangely; no, there is no taxi or bus that runs to Gaze Castle.

But a car appears, and Marian is conveyed to a gloomy, candlelit stone pile inhabited by a coven of skulkers who might have been left over from an Orson Welles production of Wuthering Heights. There is the hulking, rock-silent retainer, Scottow, a homosexual. There is the mad hag, Violet Evercreech. And there is the young mistress of the manor, Hannah Crean-Smith. It develops that there are no children for Marian to oversee; she has been hired, rather slyly, to read La Princesse de Cleves to Hannah. And what is wrong with Hannah? She is a prisoner, that's what. Seven years ago, goaded by the infidelities of her brutish husband Peter, she had an affair with the son of a neighboring squire. Peter found out and went into a rage; husband and wife struggled on the edge of a cliff, and over went Peter.

Though cruelly maimed in mind and body, Peter survived and laid a curse upon Hannah before exiling himself to New York: she was never, from that moment, to leave Gaze Castle. The curse tethers Hannah on a chain of neurosis, and she accepts its terms. As her lover watches her from afar with binoculars, she mournfully prowls the grounds of Gaze. Every living soul at Gaze Castle wallows vicariously in her entrapped shame.

This daring parable of guilt builds up to a pitch that is frightfully psychological but not very convincing. At one especially tense point, a character notices "a roaring in his ears which could not be the sea." The reader may well reflect that indeed it is not the sea, but the prose.

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