Mirror of Dazzling Chaos THE GOOD APPRENTICE

Author Iris Murdoch's devoted readers have learned, after 21 novels, to expect abstract, philosophic patterns beneath the beguiling surface of her fiction. The Good Apprentice, No. 22, seems designed to shake admirers out of such complacency. Murdoch includes most of her by now familiar clues to deeper meanings: constant references to God, lesser deities, the devil, good, evil, myths, legends, magic, and the power of elemental forces like water to nurture and destroy. But this time out, such allusions do not point toward an order underlying reality. They mirror instead a dazzling chaos of Murdoch's invention.

A television soap opera could run for years on the bare facts of this novel's characters and plot. The major developments all affect Harry Cuno, a handsome, charming dilettante who lives in a Bloomsbury house and whose dead father was once a popular highbrow novelist. Harry has had two wives, both of whom died young. For the past two years he has conducted a secret, passionate affair with his second wife's younger sister Midge, who is married to a Scottish, half-Jewish psychiatrist named Thomas McCaskerville. Harry wants Midge to leave her husband, and her stalling makes him fretful: "I love her, she loves me, yet we're in hell."

Two other problems discomfit him. Stuart, his son by his first wife, has suddenly dropped out of his university studies in mathematics, renounced sex, and proclaimed his intention to help others and to lead a good life. His cynical father comments, "He wants to be like Job, always in the wrong before God, only he's got to do it without God."

More troubling still is the case of Edward Baltram, Harry's stepson by his second wife. This young man has sneaked drugs into a good friend's sandwich, hoping to initiate him without his consent into the wonders of hallucinogenic insights. What happens instead is that the friend and victim, temporarily left alone by Edward, walks out of a window and falls to his death. Once the authorities and newspapers finish raking over the details of this tragic accident, "Edward passed out of the public eye into his private hell."

The central question posed by The Good Apprentice is whether Edward can be saved from his paralyzing depression. Harry gives him a pep talk: "You are having a nervous breakdown, you are ill, it is an illness, like pneumonia or scarlet fever, you will receive help, you will be given treatment . . . you will recover." McCaskerville has reservations about his profession, calling psychoanalysis a "mishmash of scientific ideas and mythology and literature and isolated facts and sympathy and intuition and love and appetite for power." Nevertheless, he tries to help Edward: "I'm not telling you not to feel remorse and guilt, only to feel it truthfully. Truthful remorse leads to the fruitful death of the self, not to its survival as a successful liar."