A few friends meet on a midsummer night, the eve of a wedding they have long been working for. It will unite two people they all love and two English country houses that have stood near each other but at sword-point for centuries. After her and toasts to the morrow they wander out in pairs into the starlit garden of one of the houses, the Quaker house, Penndean, full of admiration for each other. They are creating the future like gods, extending their ‘Being’. But Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Iris Murdoch once said that what every writer is really trying to do is to write as well as Shakespeare, and it is Shakespeare who informs this, her twenty-fifth novel, throughout. The remorse in which most of her characters seem to swim like treacle is described several times with reference to Othello and Macbeth. Jackson the mysterious servant, when he is not reminding us of Christ or Antichrist or Krishna or the Admirable Chrichton or a spiritual edition of Jeeves, reminds us of Puck, particularly last year’s RSC Puck who was brooding and tall and Indian and difficult. The imagery of the book is as watermarked as Murdoch: Shakespeare-struck The Tempest, with its killing waves and lucid fountains. its mysterious streams. Jackson’s true element is water. He was found ‘like a snake’ curled inside a cardboard box on the Thames embankment. Even the local pub is called The Sea Kings, although ‘far from the sea’, a ‘mysterious name it has borne for centuries’. It is a pebble thrown up by the sea on a coast in Brittany that ‘starts the action’ of the book in South London. The sea, the sea.

The other pulsating image of Jackson’s Dilemma is of darkness and light, as in Macbeth, and the comedy of hell’s gate porter is echoed in the quite dotty farce, played over at least twice, about people trying to get back into bed after they’ve turned the light out. There are several of these eerie metaphorical fuse-box disturbances that Jackson, a good electrician (maybe he is also Ariel?), sets right. Jackson is all over London with his bag of tricks, helping everybody, bolstering the faint-hearted, straightening out the messy past, bravely, dangerously, bringing together young lovers. Some of the ‘grow see him as a black shadow, and Benet, the kindest, a rather grannyish part-time philosopher, ‘fears him, even sacks him, finds he cannot live without him and crawls to him for mercy. ‘That lot!’ Jackson calls them. Puck again. For a philosopher, Iris Murdoch can be merry.

Jackson’s Dilemma is a beautiful, exciting, fast-moving, distilled short book that continues the explorations of Murdoch’s recent heavy tomes, The Philosopher’s Pupil and The Message to the Planet, into the problems of penitence, the comforts of magic, the burden of Jewishness since the Holocaust, the state of twentieth-century religion and the cleansing of sin in the waters of holiness. It also continues to examine the philosophical idea of her first book of some forty years ago, Under the Net, where the hero is paralysed by the philosophical idea that conceptualising and theorising in fact divide you from the thing that is the object of attention. Benet, a not very intellectually powerful figure, late of the Civil Service, rich and lonely in his old house with its perfect servants, is also paralysed. He agonises over his book on Heidegger, who began by seeing humanity as ‘shepherds of Being’ and ended by supporting Hitler. Can consciousness – must it – separate us from goodness? But without consciousness where and what is goodness? ‘Remorse’, he keeps crying. Another of the group, Tuan, a Jew, tells a most terrible story of his grandfather’s ‘sin’ at the start of the Holocaust which he believes he must spend the rest of his life expiating. Edward, the very marriageable bridegroom, relives the horror and remorse of what he believes to be his great guilt at letting his brother drown. The bride, a shining but footloose sort of girl, goes shrieking round London, driven almost mad by the knowledge that she has betrayed everybody.

Although guilt and remorse and awareness of evil flow through the book like a tide, there is also a lovely, benign light, a love not only for the characters (who incidentally are almost dementedly loving of each other) but for all living things in their vicinity – birds, insects, flowers growing in the cracks of stones, spiders in their webs, faithful old horses who stand for generations in meadows, patient and mute; for weather, stars, the English landscape. Fearless as Shakespeare, Iris Murdoch bathes all this landscape in magic, the ‘pure, profound, gentle magic’ of the old house, the ‘absolutely childish’ magic of saint-like Uncle Tim, who is in touch with the mysticism of India, the magic in the empty church on the wedding morning – the cross on its altar, strangely damp, the lips of the stone knight on his tomb, moving under the young girl’s fingers. There is the dark magic of Venice. where the flashing canals present Benet with watery visions of Moses in the bulrushes as he moans ‘So much evil’, and the golden magic that emanates from the books in Penndean’s librarv which give off ‘a silence as of a matchless presence, a comforting, noiseless breath’. As the book ends, there is an uneasy magic, terror just out of the frame, the image of ‘the much-disputed fragile bridge’ and the marvellous boy, who has seemed secure at last, running near it. Jackson sits above on the river bank, exhausted. Will he be called upon by his gods again? Can he go on? He carefully lifts a spider in the grass beside him back into its web.