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to banality.

      In Bruno’s Dream Bruno thinks, ‘I am dying…but what is it like?’ (300). It is everywhere apparent in her work that Murdoch repeatedly asked herself ‘What is it like?’ of many disparate phenomena. In asking what the aged Bruno’s experience might be like she came up with, among other things, a man who, though he would not object to being loved by someone new, has settled for the moment to looking forward to a new kind of jam. That touching, and, surely, true ‘new kind of jam’ might stand for an emblem of how superbly and watchfully she can inhabit other experience than her own. It is a symptom of her tender-heartedness that Bruno is rewarded by the new person too. In that novel Bruno’s puritanical and self-enclosed son Miles keeps a ‘Notebook of Particulars’ in which he tries to overcome the problems of description. ‘How hard it was to see things,’ he thinks, and chronicles some marvels: ‘the ecstatic flight of a pigeon, the communion of two discarded shoes, the pattern on a piece of processed cheese’ (55). Some of the most brilliant passages in The Black Prince appear as answers to the question ‘What is it like?’, and as her work proceeds the answers she solicits are to increasingly ordinary questions.

      In her early essay ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, which is ascribed as a book to the philosopher Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil thirty years later, Murdoch wrote of the ‘shyness’ of experience and the problems of ‘cornering’ it: ‘It is difficult to describe the smell of the Paris Metro or what it is like to hold a mouse in one’s hand.’ When the oafish Otto in The Italian Girl asks, ‘Has it ever struck you that we don’t eat anything blue?’ (39), the wholly unblue food we customarily, unthinkingly eat becomes invested with a kind of strange glamour, invoked as it is from so close, yet so happily alienated a perspective. A less successful example occurs in Crystal’s recounting of her seduction by the grief-stricken Gunnar in A Word Child, when, in the middle of a long and circumstantial narrative, she tells how Gunnar had spoken of Lapland, where the reindeer ‘like the smell of human water, urine’ (251). Here the improbable-but-true fact is used to authenticate the improbable and not quite plausible liaison. Finally in Nuns and Soldiers when the recently widowed and grief-stricken Gertrude, in trouble with young Tim with whom she finds herself falling in love, thinks of her dead husband, ‘I shall tell Guy about it, he will help me, he will know what to do’ (248), the moment is truthful as only high art can be.

      Murdoch called, citing Simone Weil, for a ‘vocabulary of attention’ (ad), and while it is other persons who are the worthiest objects of such skill, the natural world is always well-attended. In Bruno’s Dream Miles draws attention to the tiny sound of the cracking of swallows’ beaks as they snap up flies; in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Luca hears the minute crepitation of woodworm. The oddness of what we take for granted is insisted on throughout. In The Sea, The Sea Charles hears ‘a most extraordinary rhythmical shrieking sound’ (404) which it takes him a minute to recognise as his newly installed telephone. Similarly in The Time of the Angels Marcus, who has unknowingly fallen down a coal-hole, experiences the smell of the coal before he is able reassuringly to name it. In a variety of ways Murdoch’s work constantly draws attention to the holiness, or threat, of those minute particulars which dullness and self-absorption prevent us from experiencing afresh, and which language can hide or reveal.

      This is to take, in a particular way, a romantic view of the function of art. I would argue that Murdoch is, in the best and most positive sense of the word, a romantic writer – the sense in which John Bayley uses the word, in Romantic Survival, of Yeats and of Auden.¹² Both colonise the modern urban world and in so doing give it back to us afresh. One might mention here the special poetry Murdoch gets out of London, the inclusion of the half-built motorway along which David wanders in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, the disused, abandoned railway line where Peter and Morgan embrace in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and Hilda’s disintegrating telephone in the same book. She has a special gift for finding, or rather ‘seeing’, such places and objects. In Under the Net the cold-cure centre in which Jake and Hugo meet, or the hairdresser’s in which Jake and Sadie meet, are further instances. Hers is the gift for making the strange seem familiar (the cold-cure centre) and the familiar seem strange (the hairdresser’s). Like Shakespeare, in Johnson’s view of him, she ‘approximates the remote, and familiarises the wonderful; the event [she] represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would be as [she] has assigned’. ‘Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form’ (SG 86). One might quip here that it is easy enough to understand complex things: it is what is most simple that is most unyielding and mysterious. Wittgenstein pointed out that ‘the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes)’ (Investigations 129).

      In The Philosopher’s Pupil Rozanov describes philosophy as ‘the sublime ability to say the obvious, to exhibit what is closest’ (133). The same might be said, mutatis mutandis, about literature. The pleasure we get from Jake’s observation that if you try to direct a cat’s attention it will look at your finger or elsewhere, but not at what you are pointing to (19); the pleasure we get from his seeing Madge’s defence of Sammy as ‘an unhappy muddled sort of person’ as ‘a standard remark made by women about the men who have left them’ (173) – these seem to me high pleasures exactly because they are humbly true; and, while each belongs naturally within its context, it also works outside its context. If criticism finds no way of saying so, then so much the worse for criticism. Murdoch’s aficion about animals and persons, like the knowledge she incorporates about spiders in Bruno’s Dream, roses in An Unofficial Rose, or pubs and churches in Under the Net, are proper sources of readerly pleasure.

      She described herself in different interviews as both a ‘poet manqué and an ‘engineer manqué’.¹³ These are not necessarily to be construed as opposed interests. It is the poetry of irreducible fact that most interested her, a poetry excellently ascribed by Gillian Beer to Dickens, Carlyle and Hopkins as ‘romantic materialism’ – a belief in the palpable and particular, not as insufficient substitutes in some Platonic scheme for their own idea, but as sufficient and even ideal, in all their incompleteness and irreducibility.¹⁴ Murdoch’s Platonism is a this-worldly commodity, and she is concerned throughout her books to redirect the reader’s attention to the sensory world in which he is immersed: ‘I had forgotten about rain,’ says Jake at one point. The books remind us, often through that ‘defamiliarisation’ of the way things are described by the Russian formalist critic Shklovski, who argued that a leading function of art was to de-automatise perception through descriptions which made the ordinary strange and therefore fresh.¹⁵

      Lefty tells Jake in the Skinners’ Arms that ‘Nothing goes on for ever,’ and Jake, seeing his Jewish friend Dave at the bar, says, ‘Except the Jews.’ When Lefty concurs, Jake asks him, ‘So you do recognize certain mysteries?’ ‘Yes, I’m an empiricist,’ Lefty jokes (101). It is just such an empiricism, which finds miracle in what is most ordinary, that it is the book’s project, through its chief agent Hugo, to instil. For Hugo each thing is ‘astonishing, delightful, complicated and mysterious’ (58).

      Shortly after this passage in the Skinners’ Arms Lefty and Jake wander through the bombed City as the twilight falls.

      The evening was by now well advanced. The darkness hung in the air but spread out in a suspended powder which only made the vanishing colours more vivid. The zenith was a strong blue, the horizon a radiant amethyst. From the darkness and shade of St Paul’s Churchyard we came into Cheapside as into a bright arena and saw framed in the gap of a ruin the pale neat rectangles of St Nicholas Cole Abbey, standing alone away to the south of us on the other side of Cannon Street. In between the willow-herb waved over what remained of streets. In this desolation the

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