A.N. Wilson: Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Iris Murdoch - who, we might remember, was a novelist - was consumed with the idea of goodness. She was also intrigued, through her fiction and, as we now know, in her own life by "the human capacity to turn love into power-games ... She stared with wide-awake intensity into the muddied waters of our emotional lives, exposing our confusions, our need to deceive ourselves and other people".

So writes A.N. Wilson in the first chapter of his memoir of Murdoch.

And, goodness, what a lot of ill-feeling has come out of this latest attempt to make sense of Murdoch.

Because Wilson should have paid better attention to his motives, to his own need to expose his confusions, to the need for retribution for perceived deception.

In 1989 Wilson was asked by Murdoch to be her official biographer. As a project it did not get far - Murdoch, despite the approach, was at pains to be of no help whatsoever. There has since been a biography, by Peter J. Conradi. Wilson's memoir reads like that of a biographer spurned.

He wrote, early on, in his diary, that he had doubts about how to handle her many affairs.

"They were parents to me in some ways," writes Wilson of Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, his tutor at Oxford, and of Murdoch. And how does one write a biography about a promiscuous de facto mother?

By telling all, it seems, on the grounds that it has been told before.

And with venom. But Wilson's venom is reserved for Bayley, in particular for the trilogy Bayley wrote about his life with Iris which turned her in the Richard Eyre film adaptation, into "the Alzheimer's Lady". Wilson fairly laments that Murdoch has been so reduced.

Bayley, asserts Wilson, wrote from a position of "poisonously strong misogyny and outright hatred of his wife". That seems a bit strong, but he can't have been the only person to have been repelled - while reading on in avid, horrified fascination - by Bayley's description of, among other ghastly details, Murdoch's toilet habits.

Or the only person to wonder why Bayley felt the need to share this with us. But Wilson compounds the sin he accuses Bayley of: he takes us on a tour of a disgusting kitchen and even more revolting toilet.

There is a scene from Iris, the Eyre film adaptation, where Murdoch has a fleeting memory that she may have written books. Bayley responds, that indeed she did: "You wrote books. Wonderful, wonderful books."

And she did. The better part of Wilson's account is an attempt to grapple with Murdoch's place in literary history. The great shame - perhaps the greatest shame - about Wilson's attempt to give us back Iris Murdoch, the writer, is that it is unlikely to cause readers unfamiliar with Murdoch's writing to turn to her books.

It is more likely it will point people back in the direction from whence Wilson set out: to John Bayley's writing about Murdoch; and to the video of the film.

This could be cause for rage. But if that rage was, as Wilson states, his starting point for writing this clumsy, angry account in an attempt to square previous accounts, then he has failed.

Hutchinson, $59.95