A Fairly Honourable Defeat - Major Themes

Major Themes

The "defeat" of the title may be that of Tallis, failing to renew his relationship with his wife; however, in a sense, all the protagonists are comically defeated in one manner or another. Rather than a wicked or satanic character, Julius is a Loki-like mischief-maker who juxtaposes and undermines Tallis' moral standing. Ultimately, this is a novel about various forms of silence. It illustrates the paradoxical notion that what remains unsaid, what is kept secret, can emerge as a violent and dangerous undoing. Iris Murdoch puts realistic characters in contrived situations, and shows how their moral views and understandings affect their lives.

On the surface, Iris Murdoch is manipulating the pretensions of middle-class life and revealing how easy it is to make a good man fool himself into disaster once his vanity is aroused. Rupert ought to know better, is certainly intelligent enough to know better, and even Morgan, who is not unintelligent, ought to have more sense than to think that everyone in the world must naturally fall in love with her. Julius King makes good his boast of being able to turn people into puppets by appealing to their inclination to think far too well of themselves, even if innocently so. Good, in a sense, is no match for evil under such circumstances. Nor is it much consolation that King believes it necessary to confess his tricks to the really good man, Tallis Browne. Browne may order him to tell Hilda the truth, but it is sadly too late, and ordering him to leave London is not much punishment. Nor does the good man possess the power to draw his wife back to him or save his father from the inexorable horror of a painful death. In a sense, Tallis Browne’s home, a squalid mess, is a symbol of the nature of things, for however hard Browne tries, the mess goes on. There is some consolation in Axel and Simon, who illustrate the proposition that honesty and courage may be some defense against malevolence; malevolence is only partly defeated, however, and in Rupert’s case, it quite wins out.

Murdoch has ambitions beyond realism for this novel, and in a mix of parable, allegory, and farce, she is, on the secondary level, exploring the continuing battle between evil and good in the contemporary world. In an unsystematic way, which is not uncommon in Murdoch’s more ambitious novels, King can be seen as a Satan figure, Tallis Browne as a rather powerless Christ figure, and Leonard Browne as the dying God of Christianity, with Morgan, Hilda, and Rupert representing feckless humanity, constantly falling out of grace, despite good intentions. Some dim echoes of William Shakespeare are also present, and one can see Julius as an Iago, a debased Prospero, or any of the several manipulators of vain mortals in Shakespeare’s work. If The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and Othello seem to be floating about, it is quite intentional. Murdoch likes to pile literary, biblical, philosophical, and mythological images in and on, and this novel is loaded without restraint.

The novel’s title has to be considered with some care. It is a phrase which Murdoch uses again, in passing, in a later novel, A Word Child (1975), and is central to an understanding of how Murdoch sees human beings contending with the malevolent vagaries of life. In this work, it can be applied to at least three of the major characters. King clearly thinks he has done well, has managed some king of partial victory over the forces of sentimental do-gooders, and if in the end he must retreat before Tallis Browne, it is, in his eyes, an honorable defeat.

Tallis Browne is also partially defeated, barely capable of saving part of the situation for those whom King has so coldly manipulated. He, too, wins a bit and loses a bit. In his case, however, there is no question that he is on the side of right from the beginning, and he can take some satisfaction in stopping what has been going on. He is a good man always doing good work, but he cannot retrieve the Fosters completely, which is not surprising since he is conditioned to partial success, partial failure. He cannot solve all the social injustices of the city of London; he can only keep trying, aware that defeat is ever-present, however honorably he acts.

To a lesser, much sadder extent, Rupert is the victim of an honorable defeat. His vanity may be, in part, the reason for which he gets involved with Morgan, but his love for her as a relative and as a human being who, he thinks, needs him and whom he can help is also a predominating motive in his getting into the mess and makes it impossible for him to get out. Morgan is in trouble because of him, however innocent he may be in the matter, and it is his duty to practice what he has preached in his book. What he does not know is that it is a joke, but one which he takes so seriously that he is destroyed by it, defeated, albeit honorably. It is, perhaps, not insignificant, if ironically so, that he dies in such a small body of water. For all of his grand gestures of romantic heroism, he has proved to himself that he is a much smaller man than he thought.

“Muddle” is the word that Murdoch likes to use in characterizing human life, and that is exactly what this novel illustrates: that life, however practiced, for good or ill, is never quite as neat or responsive to theory as Murdoch’s characters would like it to be. The best and the worst laid plans go awry. Tallis Browne is left, in the end, still fighting gamely against the chaos of his kitchen.