The Green Knight, by Iris Murdoch. Penguin, 1993

This surrealistic novel by Murdoch took me awhile to get into. The cast of characters is large and you meet most of them right at the beginning; to make it worse, some have nicknames. They are an unruly group of old friends and family, beset with personal problems. The two characters who set the main events into motion, oddly enough, do not turn up right away.

Peter Mir is a man thought dead, thought, indeed to have been accidentally slain by Lucas. Lucas was, in fact, trying to kill his brother Clement when Mir intervened. For reasons that are never made clear, the fact of Mir's survival was never released to Lucas, Clement or the public, so when he turns up in their lives they don't know what to think of it. Mir- the fact that his name means 'peace' in Russian is pointed out to us rather clumsily- wants some sort of repayment from Lucas for his injury. He's not quite sure what he means by that, but part of it includes being included in the circle of friends and family that Clement and Lucas are part of. Having, in a sense, lost his own life, he seeks family and friends ready made. Mir is a mystery, a man whose true identity remains hidden for most of the novel. Because you know that a lot is hidden, I couldn't help but picture him as that Magritte painting of a man in a bowler hat whose face is obscured by an apple.

The aloof and villainous Lucas (who, if this book is ever made into a movie, should really be played by Alan Rickman) stands voluntarily apart from the group of friends and family. Feeling no need to apologize for trying to kill his brother, or for then trying to kill Mir, he goes on about his life of solitary study with no punishment, not even a word of rebuke from his brother. This is one of the amazing parts of the novel: that this tight group should remain blind to what is put right in front of them.

Meantime, while Lucas and Mir dance their pas de deux, the personal problems of the family circle become increasingly worse. All is tidied into neatness in the end, and most of them feel that they owe Mir for their endings, that he has somehow set them free.