Reading [Nuns and Soldiers] is a romp, it goes by in a flash; and we can be most seriously engaged by the ideas even while we are gasping like eleven-year-olds to know what will happen next. For the length of the story the thing just comes off, and I find a real reluctance in myself to take it apart and look at the mechanism.

Perhaps because there is so much mechanism; perhaps because the innards of Murdoch's novels turn out to be the same ones every time, in slightly different combinations; perhaps because the unity of each book is so fragile and splits so quickly in half, into ideas and narrative. An example of too much mechanism: the first word of Nuns and Soldiers is "'Wittgenstein—'"; and I am rather crossly aware that this must be an important clue that I could only follow up by reading...