The Flight from the Enchanter

It's been said that you never get to know a writer by reading his or her books. What they show you isn't their self but their literary persona, the voice and authorial character that they've created for the page. It sometimes feels that Iris Murdoch took this one step further: her characters seem entirely artificial but feel nonetheless real. I don't know how far I'd go to defend this theory, but it'd suit a writer who buries her themes and meanings far deeper than most writers do. If escape, independence, and harmful attachments are recurring themes in "The Flight From the Enchanter", don't expect its characters to point you toward them. They're too busy with their own problems to think in those terms. This is an Iris Murdoch novel, so show more I can't say that it's always a lot of fun to read, but it is impressive. It takes a writer of absolutely phenomenal skill to pull off this sort of slight-of-hand, and Murdoch seems to do it without breaking a sweat.

I actually enjoyed "The Flight From the Enchanter" more than most of the other Murdoch novels I've read. There's something direct about it that I enjoyed. While its characters are, at some level, obvious literary creations, they still come off as more real than they do in Murdoch's more ornate novels -- such as "The Sea, the Sea" -- which sometimes seem to verge on camp. As for the enchanter of the title, an obvious candidate for the role pops up, but the thing about this one is that all of its characters seem stuck in some way or another. They're besotted with somebody, or dependent on another, or have just given up inside. Some manage to make a fresh start at the end of the novel while others don't, and this, more than any of the plot machinations, is what I think really interests the author here. What keeps us going? Can we ever break free of our situations, or of ourselves? These are all great questions, and she deals with them expertly here. More importantly, perhaps, she offers some very good answers by the time the novel's done. As might be expected, this one isn't easy going, but it's still recommended. show less

Murdoch's second novel masquerades as a straightforward bit of fifties English social satire, with an odd assortment of characters whose strategies for hiding from the unpleasant realities of life are somehow starting to unravel. And it comes with the kind of farcical set-pieces that belong to that sort of story: the disastrous party, the guest hidden in a cupboard when someone else turns up unexpectedly, the frustrated suicide attempt, the shareholders' meeting turned into a riot by a group of elderly Suffragettes, the quango whose male, civil-service minded managers are routed in a subtle administrative coup d'état plotted by the clever young women they brought into the organisation to do the typing...

But this is Iris Murdoch, even show more if it's very early Iris Murdoch, so we know there has to be something else going on. The title is one obvious clue - the enigmatic, charismatic press baron Mischa Fox, mysteriously connected to so many of the characters, seems to exert his influence more as a magus than as a businessman, and his slimy sidekick Calvin Blick is also more sorcerer's apprentice than henchman. And there's that puzzling dedication to Elias Canetti. Could it be that there's a (twisted) parallel being made to Die Blendung/Auto-da-fé? Admittedly, the only character whose little world survives the book unscathed is the scholar Peter Saward in his book-cave, but the story of Rainborough and his manipulative ex-typist, Miss Casement, definitely has a Canetti flavour to it, as does that (with the genders reversed) of Rosa and the Lusiewicz brothers.

And then there's that gloriously silly opening chapter, a parody of the opening of Vanity Fair, which seems to promise us that Annette will become a subversive, scheming Becky Sharp, but then turns round and shows us her impulsive playfulness as a mere regression to childhood. And much more: you could probably get two or three essays out of the character names alone. A very complicated book, with a lot of not-quite-hidden depths that don't for the moment detract from the entertaining comedy (with a couple of background patches of real tragedy) going on in the foreground. show less

It is interesting to hear what A.N. Wilson has to say about this book and the time it was written.
The novel has a dedication to Elias Canetti who Wilson maintains was of "immense importance...as a representative of what she wanted to do with her life: her intellectual and literary career."
Canetti was a cruel man who treated Murdoch with violence during sex - "incidents which often took place with his (Canetti's wife, Veza) in the next room (Veza was required to bring in trays of coffee afterwards)". He was mentally sadistic to Murdoch as well, and "openly mocked IM to their mutual friends".
And so one can see how Mischa Fox (Mister Fox perhaps), the Svengali to all the indecisive characters in this book, is likely to represent the spell show more that Canetti exercised over her.
Her novels, and "The Flight From the Enchanter (1955) is her second, "are often haunted by the spectre of a Magician, a Lord of Power who exercises spiritual or erotic dominion over the weaker characters in the book."

Quotes: A.N. Wilson, "Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her", (London 2003), pp.86-89 show less

It's a somewhat odd book, more like a rotating gallery of characters and their relationships than a proper "story"--although stuff happens galore, lots of it bizarre, comical, and terrible. The "enchanter" of the title is less of a physical presence than a mental oppressor to his many hapless victims--although why or how they came to be that is never clearly spelled out. Female characters are all put upon by men in various ways, with the exception of the troop of ancient suffragettes who show up cavalry-like at one point to save a faltering feminist magazine from falling into the hands of a declared misogynist.

The Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch. This was her second book, but it was my first introduction to my number-one writing hero, which made me long to also write about love and power and goodness and beauty and what makes up a human being. Suddenly, at the age of twenty, I wanted to say great things, like Murdoch, who, being a professor of philosophy, has a far greater claim to be able to write such things than I will ever have. However, if we can’t be inspired by the great exemplars, what hope is there?
Once I’d put down Enchanter, I went in search of all her other books, and then lay in constant wait for her to write the next, which she did, for years, every 18 or so months. Only her very last book, written while in the show more grip of Alzheimer’s, is not among my very favourite reads to this day. Enchanter isn’t her best book, for me that is The Sea The Sea, but it was the first I read. I loved Iris Murdoch from that moment on, and reading her made me think more deeply, write more avidly and dream great dreams. show less

Published in 1956 and set in England, this book tells several simultaneous intersecting stories. It contains a large cast of characters. A primary connecting character, Misha Fox, remains enigmatically in the background but retains a larger-than-life influence over the other storylines. Annette is a young woman who decides to leave school to start experiencing life. Hunter runs a small independent press that produces a magazine, which Fox wants to buy. Hunter’s sister, Rosa, is also involved in the business and tries to keep the sale from happening. She is (reluctantly) involved in a complicated relationship with two brothers, Jan and Stefan. There are many other characters that float in and out of the narrative. It reads as a show more pastiche of different people living in proximity to each other. I found it reasonably entertaining but disjointed. There is no overarching story arc. Themes include migration and emerging independent roles for women. I have read other novels by Iris Murdoch that I enjoyed more than this one. show less

I disliked all the characters (not really unusual for a Murdoch novel) in Flight From The Enchanter. Their faults are clearly laid out for us from the beginning, in particular the jealous and repressed but sexually aggressive Rainborough. My favourite scene in the novel came after Rainborough's interrupted rape (as I saw it) of one of the female characters, when he is seemingly confronted by the chief 'enchanter', Mischa Fox, who arrives at the front door but seems somehow aware of what has just happened. He makes Rainborough extremely uncomfortable in what he then says and does, and Murdoch's imagery with the moth is subtly powerful - a glimpse of her later writing. That said, Mischa Fox is himself a confused mixture of all-seeingly show more aloof, charismatically influential and yet unfathomably sensitive in other areas. I interpreted it as his deification and caring for all his creatures, but the characterization did not work for me.

This is very much Iris Murdoch finding her voice, and although the style is still recognizably bold and unafraid when discussing touchy areas (like sexuality and violence), it is patchy in construct and doesn't add up to the 'whole' created by her later novels. show less