Iris Murdoch is a conjuring kind of novelist. Her characters are upper middle class, mostly, with a sprinkling of intellectuals, artists and assorted Bohemians. Their language, tastes and habits are at the very blunted edge of contemporary Western civility.

And they are infested with passion; unpredictable and primitive and with lashings of pagan magic. Under the leather brogues the feet are cloven; under the tweed jacket is a fell. The cultivated English countenances have their fundament in a mermaid's tail or a centaur's haunches; the countryside and country towns are haunted.

The ostensible form of the Murdoch novel—she has written 21 by now—is the comedy or tragicomedy of manners. Each detail is precise, each social nuance is just so. The pleasures, pursuits, meals, anguishes and silly walks of her assorted English intelligentsia could not be more engagingly and dryly set down.

All this is carriage work and...