By lawrence graver

THE BLACK PRINCE By Iris Murdoch.

rudging admiration has long been a common response to Iris Murdoch's fiction. Most readers agree that she offers an unusual compound of pleasures: ingenious storytelling, elegant design, the provocations of myth and philosophy -- so many pleasures, in fact, that it may seem ungrateful to ask for still more. But as Frank Kermode has put it: each of her books contains "somewhere inside, the ghost of a major novel," and some people (although not Mr. Kermode) cannot quite forgive her for failing to make the spirit flesh.

This insubstantiality is usually traced to the thinness of Miss Murdoch's characters, an especially ironical linkage, since she is a famous critic of the narrow view of personality found in much of modern fiction. In several eloquent essays, she has asked that novels be houses "fit for free characters to live in," and has praised those 19th-century realists -- Balzac, Tolstoy, George Eliot -- who respected the impenetrability of individuals and the contingent world in which they move. Yet in practice, the more she talked about freedom and opaqueness, the more over-determined and transparent her novels seemed to become. Thinking back now on books like "The Unicorn," "The Red and the Green," "A Fairly Honourable Defeat" or "An Accidental Man," one is likely to remember situations not character, mechanisms not worlds. Despite the inventiveness of the situations and the brilliance of the design, Miss Murdoch's philosophy has recently seemed to do little more than make her people theoretically interesting.

Can an Iris Murdoch novel be a house for free characters to live in? Inevitably, "The Black Prince" raises the old question, but more than any Murdoch novel in years it gives something close to a reassuring answer. Not that Miss Murdoch is any less preoccupied with her special blend of magic and suspense. Doorbells still bring trouble, phone calls disaster, and omnipresent Eros has lost none of his disrespect for gender, age or custom. Scenes of domestic frenzy mingle with reflections about the nature of art, and to cap the antic festivities there is a last-page shock guaranteed to leave everyone gasping. But the intricately patterned plot and the audacious symbolism come closer to being functions of character and action than they usually do in Iris Murdoch's fiction. Unlike those recent books in which she handsomely manipulates dozens of puppet-like people in an ornate but diminishing design, "The Black Prince" has only six main characters and a psychologically complex hero-narrator whose growth we follow and about whose fate we care.

The main narrative section is presented to us by a fictional editor, P. Loxias, who has prepared for publication the long manuscript of his dead friend, Bradley Pearson. Bradley's narrative is a firstplace account of events that took place in the spring of his 58th year, when he retired as inspector for the Inland Revenue Service to devote full time to writing. Years before, Bradley had published two unpopular novels and a book of "Pensees"; now he is eager to get started on a long-contemplated, carefully patterned Flaubertian wok of fiction that he hopes will be his masterpiece. Obsessed by this ideal of perfection, he accepts the artistic calling as "a doom," a condemnation to a severe penalty and the true Last Judgment of his life.

As one might expect from Iris Murdoch, Bradley's doom turned out to be partly self-imposed, but different in nature from what he had anticipated. Instead of being allowed to get on with the novel, he is besieged by frantic callers at his London flat. Christian, his overpowering ex-wife, returns from America hoping for a reunion; Arnold Baffin, a best-selling novelist friend, has beaten up his wife, Rachel, and they both need help; Julian, Baffin's daughter, pleads for tutoring in literature; and Priscilla, Bradley's wretchedly married sister, flees her husband to call permanently on her brother's charity.

As these people make their hectic, unsettling claims on the self-absorbed Bradley, the relationship of his life and art becomes hopelessly tangled. Instead of writing his masterpiece, he hurts and gets hurt, quarrels with the Baffins, falls calamitously in love with Julian, and precipitates the brutal climax that lands him in jail for a crime he did not commit. There the "great book" that Loxias will later prepare for publication becomes the jagged story of the last years of Bradley's life.

"Art," Miss Murdoch once said, "has got to have form whereas life need not," and the main movement of "The Black Prince" follows Bradley's struggle to give a truthful order to the "foul contingency" of his experience. The design of his manuscript emerges gradually from his effort to interweave scenes dramatizing in the invasion of the callers with discursive reflections on mutual motives and the hazards of creative art. The scenes are often grating, farcical, outrageous, fierce -- Feydeau mixed with Strindberg and a touch of Muriel Spark.

In action, Bradley is like E. M. Forster's Mrs. Moore -- he likes mysteries but dislikes muddle. Faced by exposed human misery, he desires to do good, but is priggish, censorious, easily disgusted, quickly unmanned. In meditation, however, he admits these faults and tries to submit his impulses and motives to just scrutiny; but since he is human, his account is often sententious, comically self-deceiving, and unreliable. Thus the reader is forced constantly to revise and reevaluate much of what he hears, and a good part of the challenge and pleasure of the narrative comes from his active role in a kind of epistemological detective story.

Bradley himself provides a summary of the difficulty of the operation: "There is... an eternal discrepancy between the self-knowledge which we gain by observing ourselves objectively and the self-awareness which we have of ourselves subjectively; a discrepancy which probably makes it impossible for us ever to arrive at the truth. Our self-knowledge is too abstract, our self-awareness is too intimate and swoony and dazed. Perhaps some kind of integrity of the imagination, a sort of moral genius, could verify the scene, producing minute sensibility and control of the movement as a function of some much larger consciousness. Can there be a natural, as it were Shakespearean, felicity in the moral life?"

Bradley does achieve a brief but radiant felicity in his relationship with the 20-year-old Julian, a naive, shallow, but eager girl whom he transforms by love. A tutorial on "Hamlet" triggers Bradley's passion, and the scenes that follow are a precisely registered account of the creative and destructive furies of late-middle-aged sexuality. Hamlet is the Black Prince, but so, when she dresses up as the Dane, is Julian; and so is Black Eros, the mysterious source of love and art; and so, perhaps, is Bradley Pearson himself, whose initials at least teasingly qualify him as a candidate.

The passion for Julian inspires Bradley, and his life -- which had been "as hard and tight and small as a nut" -- becomes all "luminous and spread out and huge." But only for a matter of days (and then only in his imagination). Through his own deceit and "a swooning relationship to time," he loses her; but his narrative is an effort to achieve in art the felicity he could so briefly sustain in life. That we should respond to his account with admiring sympathy, but also with skepticism and irony is essential to Miss Murdoch's own intricate design, and a major source of the novel's fascination.

The Black Prince business sounds pretentious in summary, and some of it is pretentious in the book. Not all the talk about Black Eros being consubstantial with greater and more terrible godheads is supported by the action; but the remarks about "Hamlet" are both comically and seriously suggestive. At one point, Bradley tells Julian that Shakespeare, writing "Hamlet," made "the crisis of his own identity into the very central stuff of his art." Mutatis mutandis -- so does Bradley Pearson. Also pertinent and funny are an intricate set of allusions to earlier English novels hat treat similar subjects. Bradley Pearson and Arnold Baffin are linked to Bradley Headstone and Mr. Boffin in Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend," and to Harold Biffin, of Gissing's "New Grub Street" (another story of the writing life"). Bradley's passion for Julian flares at a performance of "Rosenkavalier," as does Paul Morel's for Clara at "La Dame aux Camelias," in that classic study of the link between sexuality and art, "Sons and Lovers."

Here and there "The Black Prince" is weakened by familiar Murdoch blemishes: too great a strain on adjectives and plausibility; in some places, a bit too much pointing; elsewhere, an irritating vagueness. The ending really is a whopper; and an overly elaborate scaffolding of postscripts is appended to Bradley's narrative, written successively by Christian, her brother Francis, Rachel, Julian and Loxias, the accounts batter home the theme that reality is subjective and relative -- a point that came through clearly enough from Bradley's story.

But, all in all, fertile invention is put to the service of an expansive sense of character; and since "The Black Prince" also has Miss Murdoch's usual narrative energy and intellectual weight, it is the best novel she has written in years.

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