Is
it good to be nice, nice alone, or is it nice to be good?
Come
to think of it, our goodness almost at all times is an action, more so a
reaction. It is for a purpose, it expects, it judges, it is hardly forthcoming
and shies away from forgiveness. How miraculously difficult it is to be good to
someone not so good to you and how difficult it is to be so when one is in
control. As Murdoch quotes, “The only genuine way to be good is to be good ‘for
nothing’ in the midst of a scene where every “natural thing”, including one’s
own mind, is subject to chance, that is, to necessity. The good has nothing to
do with purpose”.
The
protagonists of ‘The Nice and the Good’ are lively, except for the dead
Radeechy of course, each managing through their intricate lives to communicate
to the reader their plights. The story begins with the enigmatic suicide of
Radeechy, a follower of necromancy and magic. This incident drags in John
Ducane, a colleague of Radeechy, to investigate and unveil the cause of this
suspicious death and to unfold if there is more to it. Octavian the Head of the
Department has assigned this to Ducane; Octavian who has herded in his huge
place by the sea many friends with broken hearts and broken lives; the same
Octavian who willingly and uncomplainingly witnesses the infidelity of his wife
Kate with Ducane. So, in the Trescombe cottage, we have the widowed Mary and
her adolescent child Pierce who is madly in love with Barbara, the beautiful
lass of Kate and Octavian, and there’s the divorced Paula with her twins, Theo,
Octavian’s brother and Willy Kost, a sufferer of war, a liver in the past than
now. Each one is fused but their eccentricities mark their individualism and
beautifully so. It’s a story of their discoveries of their own selves, getting
rid of the veils of niceness to discover the real good, the good for them.
John
Ducane is a civil servant of high regard, who his friends and companions look
up to, for his goodness, for his righteousness, his truthfulness. He
unconsciously likes to be in control or rather people who know him place the
reigns of their decisions and emotions in his trustworthy hands. As Ducane’s
investigation progresses parallel to the not so eventful happenings at the
Trescombe cottage, the lives of the sundry are strewn threadbare by their
intimate confessions to Ducane. Dark secrets, blackmails and a murder are
revealed. How much of it can Ducane make visible to others, how much is he
ready to? Richard Biranne, Paula’s divorced husband lies at the mercy of Ducane’s
decisiveness.
How
difficult it is to choose right over comfort, over that little safety that
everyone invariably desires to hide into, is something that Ducane will have to
struggle with to keep his goodness alive. How easy it is to plunge into
revenge, to shatter lives without a second thought when one is in control and
how unmanageable is it to surrender oneself to goodness and protect and let go
for the larger good, to see something as naïveté and give a second chance. Trapped
in a cave by the sea to save Pierce from his unwarranted foolishness and almost
thrown at the pangs of death, Ducane’s conscience makes some discoveries. Will
Ducane succeed in sustaining his rightfulness?
To
not realize love can well be termed as the ignorance of the mind than the heart
but to suppress it is a crime. The characters in this story, and quite a few at
that, ruefully and in some cases compromisingly bind themselves to what they
think are the obvious loves of their lives; only to chaotically discover ultimately
by the melancholic yet loud thundering of the right chords of their hearts that
they have been strumming the wrong strings all this time and the symphony of
mutuality lies somewhere else, with someone else. While the act of forgiveness
is almost a myth in real life, it isn’t in Iris Murdoch’s story as at the very end
everything and everyone falls in place and is on the verge of leading their ‘and
they lived happily’ lives. Wish this resembled vividly to us puppets in real
life too as we strain to comprehend our mere existence and the glories in the pain
that we undergo to find true love and then sustain it.
The
author writes in a simple manner and yet it has an enchanting effect. Not for a
single instance, did I feel weary of any of the characters and their endless
confusing emotions. The multitude of characters reminded me though of David
Lodge’s ‘Small World’, since, like here, his stories also end in ‘All’s well,
that ends well’, amidst a lot of confusion though!
A
few days back, out of the blue, I saw a thick rainbow in the sky. Literally out
of the blue! It was drizzling and the sky was a messy gray and then suddenly as
I chanced to look out of the unclear glass window, a clearing blue appeared and
then there it was, emanating from a tall concrete rise, this amative merging blue,
cushioned between the consummating violet, indigo and the other colors of the palette
that concluded it. It reminded me of
being in love, of a soothing gentleness, of happiness. That’s the goodness of
nature. It surprises and amazes. Without a reason, without a purpose!
My Rating: * * * * * * * * * * - 8/10
 |
| Iris Murdoch |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you or your comments.