Henry and Cato
by Viking, $10.00
Writing about England seems a melancholy business these days, what with the cozy, impeccable old values going down all around in ignominious defeat. Even drawing-room comedy confronts the facts of modern life, and threatens to verge into tragedy.
Iris Murdoch’s latest novel, her eighteenth, introduces Henry Marshalson and Cato Forbes, a pair of young men suffering from the new English malaise. Both of them have rejected tradition but seem at a loss to deal competently with its alternative. Henry, a second-rate academic practicing in America, returns to England to claim the family estate, full of vague plans for evicting his mother, selling the place, and blowing the guilty proceeds on a philanthropic spree.
His old friend Cato, a convert to Roman Catholicism and a priest, works at a settlement house and finds himself developing a passion for one of its teenage habitués, a sadistic thug known as Beautiful Joe. Will Henry sell Laxlinden Hall to the land developers to spite the country gentry? Will Cato abandon his faith and strike up a homosexual liaison with a juvenile delinquent? And how will their decisions affect the aging poet, the dowager, the tart, and the virgin who fill out the cast of characters?
Having raised the question of the problems afflicting the newly diminished England– criminal violence, money troubles, general loss of faith Iris Murdoch is neither honest nor thorough in dealing with them. But then, one doesn’t read Iris Murdoch for her social realism. The fun of reading a Murdoch novel comes from watching the intricate plot unravel to reveal the characters in neat if frequently unlikely pairs at the end. Though happy endings are increasingly difficult to come by, Henry and Cato manages a happy, or at any rate a tidy, ending, in the reliable Murdoch fashion.
–Amanda Heller