Iris Murdoch: a life Peter J Conradi HarperCollins, 706pp, £24.99 ISBN 0002571234

The first thing to be said about this book is that, although readable and well written, it is weirdly unbalanced. It begins with paternal and maternal family trees cataloguing Iris Murdoch's lineage back as far as the mid-17th century; it ends with a prolonged series of meditations from which the details of the subject's final years are almost wholly missing. Peter Conradi, a friend of Murdoch's, can reasonably say that these latter years are too recent and that, in any case, they have already been movingly recounted by John Bayley, Murdoch's husband. Nevertheless, the effect for the reader is weird.

But then, Murdoch is an odd and difficult subject. In both artistic and personal terms, she is a one-off. She does not fit comfortably into any literary history, and her life was a series of contradictions. Her 26 novels are occasionally great, often good and frequently bad. The best passages are dazzling syntheses of thought and art; the worst are empty ramblings that cry out for excision. Influences - Sartre, Dostoevsky, Henry James, Wittgenstein, Weil - come and go seemingly at random, and it is probably true to say that Murdoch never sufficiently freed herself of these powerful voices to write the masterpiece of which she was undoubtedly capable.

Intellectually, she is now, thanks to Conradi's formidable work on her early years, more easily placed. She was, like many sensitive people in the 1930s, torn between religion and the apparently viable substitute of Marxism. Conradi quotes Napoleon to the effect that the best way to find out about someone is to ask: "How did the world look around the time they were 20?" Murdoch was 20 in 1939, when war began and the Hitler-Stalin pact was in place. The world looked like a mighty battleground between good and evil - the Murdoch imagination in a nutshell.

But, although good and evil were real enough, their presence in the world was not so easily defined. Murdoch thought that her comrades on the left were naive to ditch Stalin because of the pact; to her, it was all part of a wider plan. But she was the naive one and, as a result, she clung to communism for longer than was decent. It was an aspect of a certain childishness, a yearning to believe in the big answer. She always, in fact, seemed young for her age - at 27, she was still taken for a student. This ruined her as a political thinker, sustained her as a metaphysician and fired the romantic complexities of her novels. She was, said Isaiah Berlin, "a lady not known for the clarity of her views"; but in truth, it was her age that was unclear.

Above all, Murdoch's sense of good and evil kept her on the edge of religious belief. Perhaps her significance as an artist and thinker lies wholly in her wish to believe and her inability to do so. She thus becomes a transitional figure between a world contemplating with dismay the loss of faith and one happily embracing secularism. She wished, like many liberal theologians, to preserve the lineaments of faith in the absence of its literal foundations. For her, the ontological proof of the existence of God became proof of the sovereignty of good. She was good-stricken in the way that others are God-stricken; she saw, correctly, that if society is to do without the latter, then it must find new ways of establishing the former.

Conradi's greatest achievement in this book is so successfully to set the strange circumstances of her life and character against this intellectual background. An only child, Murdoch was, she confided to a friend, "brought up on love". The portraits of her father, Hughes (a mild, good man), and her mother, Irene, are affecting and convincing. They gave Iris confidence, as the best parents do, which, in her, became the head-girlish quality noted by many. Once the story gets under way, the parents seem to vanish disconcertingly, though the characters have been so well drawn that they still hover over the page.

The story is one of brilliance, romantic idealism and formidable promiscuity. She suavely reports that she has "parted company with my virginity" in a letter in January 1943 to Frank Thompson, who thought, at the time, that he was to be her husband. Her love life thereafter was conducted at the same level of startling insensitivity. One lover described her as "monumentally unfaithful", and she was still conducting lesbian affairs after marrying the faithfully devoted John Bayley. Throughout, she praised fidelity and monogamy, and damned the promiscuous.

The contradiction seems to have arisen because of the intensity with which she interpreted each affair. Each time, it was as if there was a new Iris to fit the new lover, and so, imaginatively, there was a kind of monogamy. Crudely, for example, she was a goddess and playmate to Bayley and a slave to the monstrous Elias Canetti. This partitioning of her sexual life seemed to her inevitable, even reasonable to the point where she seemed unable to grasp the damage she was doing. Or perhaps, as some observed, she was never quite there. Real sex had become almost fictional.

Real fiction, meanwhile, was her salvation. Conradi observes: "Iris could display in fiction an objectivity she had not achieved in life." It was not that her novels ordered life - no serious reader could claim that - but rather they realised it as an intense, romantic and metaphysical disquisition. In life, she seemed unable to apply meaning to the world and constantly succumbed to its contingency. But in art, meaning was inescapable, if always unresolved. Her characters glide and blunder through a landscape replete with significance. If, in her later work, she rambled, it was perhaps because this significance had made her novels entirely self-justifying processes. There was no necessary beginning, no inevitable end. Asked how much of a break she took between finishing one novel and starting another, Murdoch replied: "About half an hour." And, on both occasions I met her, she made it plain that she thought it would be a moral good if everybody wrote novels all the time.

Conradi's Life is, in short, an important, if provisional, book about a major figure. In philosophy, Murdoch had the nerve, against the spirit of the age, to reinject value into a language from which it had been disastrously evacuated. In fiction, she aspired, once more against the spirit of the age, to capture the supreme irreducibility of human experience. About her life, with its insensitivities and naiveties, it is hard to say anything quite so grand. But as she declined with Alzheimer's, the last coherent sentence she spoke was: "I wrote." As the clouds of dementia descended, it was nothing less than the redemptive truth.

Bryan Appleyard's most recent book is Brave New Worlds (HarperCollins, £8.99)

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