Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood

`It's dazzled you anyway. But if it's all about Plato and Augustine and Buddha I can't see it as a political bombshell.' `It's not all about – it's an attempt to see the whole of our civilised past in relation to the present and the future, it's pointed, as it were, at the revolution.'

`Oh that! Oh really!'

`Rose, I don't mean the proletarian revolution out of old-fashioned Marxism. I mean the whole human global revolution.'

`I didn't know there was one. Neither did you. You've just picked it up out of Crimond's book!'

`My dear!' Gerard began to laugh crazily, pouring himself out some more whisky.

`You're drunk. You said I was. Now we both are.'

`My dear girl, yes, I'm drunk, and I didn't "pick up" out of Crimond's book something which of course I knew before, but which I now see in a new light.'

`It's an illusion. Everything is just a muddle. That's what liberal democracy means.'

`Rose, you see, you understand. But a popular illusion is a great force – and even the maddest prediction can reveal things one hadn't dreamt of which are really there.'

`What do you mean, technology, Africa, nuclear war -?'

`Many many things which seem separate but are connected or will connect. The foundations are shifting, we're about to see the largest, deepest, fastest change, the most shattering revolution, in the history of civilisation.'

`I don't believe those things connect,' said Rose, 'that's mythology. I'm surprised at you! We have a lot of different problems with different solutions. Anyway, dear Gerard, we shall not see this exciting cataclysm. I hope and believe that iii what remains of my lifetime I shall still be able to go out ait, I buy half a pound of butter and a copy of The Times.'

`Who knows? Think what's happened already in our lives.'

`Hitler?'

`Yes, unpredictable, unimaginable things. Space travel. We are surrounded by a future we can't conceive of. We're like those natives in New Zealand who just went on fishing because they couldn't see Captain Cook's ship – there it was in the bay, but they couldn't conceptualise it.'

`I like that. But what you can't know you can't know.'

`Rose, human life is too short, not just that it's sad to spend so little time at the play, but it's too short for serious thinking-thinking needs a long training, a long discipline, a long concentration – even geniuses must have felt they were tiring too soon, giving up when they'd just begun to understand philosophy, perhaps human history, would be quite different if we all lived to be two hundred.'

`Our lives are quite long enough to have some fun, do some work, love a few people and try to be good.'

`Yes, yes, but we've got to, some of us have got to, try to think about what's happening, and to ,fight -'

`Against what?'

`Against – how can I put it – against history. All right, this sounds crazy – Rose, it's so difficult, I can't even pick it up yet – I feel like I felt in my first term of philosophy at Oxford, as if I were crawling round and round a slippery sphere and couldn't get inside.'

`Why bother to get inside? That might have been worth trying when you were a student, but why bother now?'

`You mean – well, yes, I was too young then – perhaps I'm too old now – that thought hurts terribly.'

`I don't mean to hurt you.'

`You're pouring on cold water, buckets and buckets of it, but that's right, one must be cool, one must be cold -'

`I don't understand. Is Crimond on the side of history?'

`Yes. History as a slaughterhouse, history as a wolf that wanders outside in the dark, an idea of history as something

that has to be, even if it's terrible, even if it's deadly.'

`I thought Marxists were optimists who thought the perfect society would soon emerge everywhere as the victory of socialism.'

`They used to be. Some still are, others are haggard with fear but hanging on. Crimond thinks we must purify our ideas with visions of utopia during a collapse of civilisation which he thinks is inevitable.'

`And looks forward to, no doubt! He's a determinist, as they all are.'

`He's a black determinist, that's the most dangerous and attractive kind. Marxism as despair, and as the only possible instrument of thought, the only philosophy that will be ready to look after a period of unavoidable authoritarian government.'

`And as the ark carrying the new values. All the old bourgeois ones will be extinct.'

`He's trying to grasp the whole problem – Of course I don't agree -'

`I don't think there is a whole problem, or that we can imagine the future, no one in the past managed it.'

`I can't convey it, the book is a huge interconnected argument, and it's not just pessimistic – it's very utilitarian, that's always been the nicest part of Marxism! It's about everything – there's a lot about ecology and kindness to animals -'

`Suitable for women!'

`Rose, it's a very high-minded book, about justice, about suffering -'

`I don't believe it. He wants to liquidate the bourgeois individual, that is the individual, and bourgeois values, that is values! He believes in the inevitability of cruelty.'

`It's a comprehensive attack on Marxism by a very intelligent Marxist, an attempt to think the whole thing through- you'll see -'

`I won't. I might look up ecology in the index, and animals, kindness to -'

`Rose, please don't just mock -'

`You seem to be overwhelmed because the book looks like "what the age requires", a new synthesis and all that, but if it’s just Marxism rules the world and utopia beyond, that’s not new, it's just the old dictatorship of the proletariat in modern dress – and it's everything that you detest anyway, so why are you so impressed? I don't believe in Crimond's ark, his boat which is going to shoot the rapids.'

'Well, what do you believe in?'

'I think we've got to protect the good things that we have,' 'But really – ahead – what do you see? Catastrophe? Apres nous le deluge?'

Rose was silent. Gerard had got up and was leaning over the back of his chair, his face illumined by a glare of excitement which seemed to Rose something comic, an intensification of his usual zany smile. At last, unwilling to say yes, she simply, nodded.

Gerard turned away and began to walk up and down tit, room. 'Rose, have you got any of those chocolate biscuits?'

'The dark ones, those very dry ones? Yes, I'll get them.'

The table still carried their plates covered in fragments, i I cheese and the plum cake, the apples in a pretty bowl.

'I'm still hungry. I'll have some of' the cake too. Is it Annushka's?'

As Rose, in the kitchen, found the tin with the chocolate biscuits, she reflected that what was enlivening her in tlwi argument with her old friend was physical desire, the debate was, for her, sex, her urgent agonising wish to be in bed with him transformed into repartee, as he said into mockery, jail that, and not the future of civilisation!

Gerard was eating the plum cake, now the biscuits, now attacking the cheese, walking about and dropping crumbs on the carpet. Watching him trampling in the crumbs Rose said in exasperation, 'You keep praising this book, but you say it's all wrong! If it's Marxism it must be. Isn't that the end of the matter?'

'No – no – it's the beginning. When you read it -'

'I'm not going to read it! I think it's a detestable book, I wish it didn't exist.'

'You've got to read it.'

‘Why?'

'For reasons I'll explain in a minute. In a way I wish it didn’t exist, itw ill encourage fools and knaves and have a lot of bad results, ye tI'm glad it exists too, it will for ce its opponents to think, it shows that people can have, just in this crucial area, new thoughts.'