There comes a point in many an Iris Murdoch novel when the enchantment sours, or cloys, and the hitherto rapt reader succumbs to the suspicion that some justice lies in the customary criticisms with which her faithfully produced fictions are faithfully belabored; e.g., that her prose can be as careless as it is abundant, and that her worthy preoccupation with the metamorphoses worked by ubiquitous, tireless Eros leads her to overillustrate her thesis and to produce a mechanical, farcical effect. On page 296 of her most recent and in many ways marvellous novel, "Nuns and Soldiers" …, we are told, having persuasively experienced one heroine's typically Murdochian immersion in an unlikely but ineluctable passion, that another heroine is promptly in line for the same strenuous treatment…. The language is desperate, perhaps, because one of Miss Murdoch's central couples has been so firmly linked and married by the amorous alchemics...