The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 38

Books The Loafer The role of art. The meaning of life. But then her philosophy is Plato without the Socratic dialectic Plato answered, or at least tackled, all these big questions; Murdoch consists of obligingly allusive exposition of her master's voice. And why not? Alfred North Whitehead said that all subsequent philosophy con- Pointing to Plato Will anyone listen to Iris Murdoch's talk of Goodness, God and Love? Sovereignty of Good Over Other If they were unfashionable then, they are positively alien now. Terry Eagleton, for instance, damned her thus: "Murdoch's intelligence is constrained by her unconscious ideological prejudices, so that she seems incapable, unlike William Blake, of seeing the dangers of an ethics of selflessness.

To lay aside self-interest, to relinquish selfish desire, is the familiar advice given by the privileged." But here Eagleton is too peremptory: the familiar advice, rather, given by political philosophers from Hobbes to Rawls, is that we are selfish creatures whose baseness needs to be circumscribed by the state. Murdoch's philosophy represents an unfashionable alternative, an other-worldly milieu as odd to encounter forthe first time as the singular settings of her novels. Those books teem with fraught characters, whose philosophies and feelings are expressed so articulately that one doubts that they are as truly passionate as Murdoch intends. It's as though Murdoch were a god come down from Olympus, exasperated with ijie pettiness and human frailties of her co-deities, and determined to lure us to the straight and narrow of Platonic perfection. The result is a clutch of novels where characters called Bellamy, Clement, Louise, Jeremy and Emil jockey for attention on the same page.

Novels where even lovers speak with cool detachment when expressing the most powerful feelings. These books are the dramatisations of the philosophy that those who dare will find in Existentialists andMystics, where human passion is profound but endlessly unstable. Confronted with the histrionics of Murdochland, one yearns for the mellow dignity of Murdoch's philosophy. philosophy, who have dictated the public image if not the substance of the subject since the war, have published vast, valedictory volumes. First there was Isaiah Berlin, who in Febmary published a collection of hisliestphilosophicai essays entitled The Proper Study of Humanity at a time when his digressive, belle-lettrist prose, devoid of thorough argument, is inimical to current trends in philosophy.

Then there was Bryan Magee, who in May published Confessions of a Philosopher, his intellectual biography, the story of a man who brought philosophy, for good or ill, to television with his series Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers. It is the end of an era. At best this was the era in which philosophers were public figures, who could write attractively and so communicate their thoughts to a broader public than most anglophone philosophers this century have managed. Admittedly they wouldn't communicate very much Murdoch and Berlin, particularly, prefer to perform, to be dinner-party show-offs, alluding incessantly to their broad reading, rather than doing the harder work of philosophical argument. At least Murdoch's philosophy conceives of her task as to tackle grand issues.

Goodness. God. Love. iz Ziemska was noted last year for sending Andrew I Wvlie the gift of a cactus to ward off his wooing of Tibor Fischer. This year, while Fischer was in Los Angeles promoting his new hook The Collector Collector, Ms Ziemska fixed him up with another of her authors, a psychic named Tyger Kahn, to show Mm round.

Besides her undoubted metaphysical skills, Ms Kahn is also an expert in more fleshly pursuits, having penned a study of fellatio entitled Blowfish (due here soon from Simon Schuster). Fischer is understandably shy on the subject of what passed between them, but claims the book "is meant to be Or something. he anger of the Joyce estate over Danis Rose's edition of Ulysses was as nothing to the unbridled fury of Christopher Tolkien, son of JRR, at David Day's The Hobbit Companion. The Tolkien estate's threat of litigation first coerced Day's original publisher HarperCollins into cancelling its contract, and then forced Day himself into bankruptcy because of legal costs. But when Pavilion decided to publish and be damned, the estate finally capitulated.

Christopher Tolkien or "CRT" as he signs himself had to satisfy himself with an abusive letter which concluded: "Mr Day is in fact an ass." Fortunately, the law in this case was not. tt do retired chair persons of the Orange Prize iudeine oanel do? Well, if they're Lisa Jardine, they go off to pen columns tor the IJaily Telegraph. An ashen-faced Charles Moore, editor of the Torygraph, told her, his lips puckering with discomfort as he pronounced the words: "Apparently, 40 per cent of our readers voted Labour, so we need a dissident voice." Prof Jar-dine was only too happy to oblige. Speaking of political appointments, this week saw Random House chief exec Gail Rebuck join the new Department of Culture, Media and Sport's "Creative We've obviously come a long way from the time when trade union leaders would enjoy beer and sandwiches at No 10: under the new dispensation presumably itllbe champagne and canapes in Pimlico. 3 Book token St free delivery Send this token with your order to CultureShop.

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Valid until 1.9.97 7feGuardian iflf Like Berlin and Magee, her chief philosophical virtue is that she is a signpost. Berlin points to the neglected political thinkers Herzen and Vico. Magee points to Schopenhauer. Murdoch nods her Shirley Williams-style hairdo decorously in Plato's direction. With all three one feels one would do better to read the real thing.

And yet Murdoch is a fascinating study. In an age of rampant selfishness, she preaches a climb from the dark Platonic cave of human delusion to the sun of goodness! "Humility is a rare virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is often hard to discern. Only rarely does one meet somebody in whom it positively shines, in whom one apprehends with amazement the absence of avaricious tentacles of the self." Murdoch wrote these words 30 years ago for a lecture called "The Iris Murdoch dangers of the ethics of selflessness as she eloquently describes, is the greatest enemy of the long-distance swimmer: all the warmth generated by the constant calorie-burning effort of 72 strokes a minute for hours on end is sucked away by the clammy embrace of the water, leaving the" swimmer chilled to the marrow and in a state of hypothermic confusion. But Friedman also writes about a chill which cannot be allayed by the layer of goose-grease the swimmer slaps on before venturing in the cold comfortlessness of bereavement. Swimming the Channel is anything but a simple book about swimming; it is an elegy for her dead husband.

The two strands are intertwined. Her husband Paul, though no swimmer himself, was an unstinting supporter of her ambition to make a Channel crossing. Friedman, one imagines, must be one of those enviably effortless swimmers who seem to glide over the surface of the water expending a minimum of effort: back in 1983 she broke the women's record for the Round Existentialists and Mystics: Essays on Philosophy and Literature by Iris Murdoch Stuart Jeffries xistentialists andMystics will certainly be Iris Murdochs last book of philosophy and, quite possibly, her last book. Murdoch, now 77, is suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and has recently expressed her fear that she will never be able to write again. It's a strange book.

Not that there is anything weird or unusual in a philosopher publishing a valedictory collection of essays. The volume includes writings from 1950 to 1986, from the 15-year period when she taught philosophy at Oxford to the years of her greatest literary triumphs. Rather, the appearance of Existentialists and Mystics is strange because it is nut clear why the book is worth publishing today. Who is it for? Her work is ignored by professional philosophers, and regarded as being as baggy and dubious as her worst novels. Even that surely dwindling breed of readers who love her fiction are unlikely to stray here.

The book comes in a year when the grand old personages of British How to Swimming the Channel by Sally Friedman 248pp, Seeker Warburg, 9-99 Matt Seaton must jje sometlung in the air. Or rather, in the water. Five minutes ago the pool was empty, its surface limpid; now it is filled with writers thrashing away wildly in the race to complete books about swimming. Oliver'Sacks, the psychiatrist author who never travels anywhere without a plastic bag containing his flippers, wrote recently in the New Yorker about the sensual joys of swimming, which he learnt from his champion distance-swimmer father. Roger Deakin, meanwhile, is working on a book for Chatto Windus about a swimming journey round Britain a writerly version of the formula derived from the Burt Lancaster classic, The Swimmer, and borrowed by the Levi's ad set to the tune of Mad About the Boy.

It was only a year or two ago that Charles Sprawson challenged us to stay afloat Manhattan race, a 28.5-mile swim through waters which, frankly, make the stomach churn just to think of. Swimming the Channel, then, was no mere flight of fancy. After her months of preparation, and on the eve of departure for England, Paul is killed by a truck running a red light on Eighth Avenue. What has been a training diary punctuated by personal reminiscences becomes a journal of her slow aYid painful journey through grief. The book loses some of its form and fluency at this point, and one cannot help feeling that the style of unselfconscious emotional disclosure does not translate across the Atlantic too well.

As Friedman herself observes, grief is essentially private, beyond articulation, and the words that people use in these circumstances are, by some cruel linguistic law, necessarily banal. What saves Swimming the Channel from mawkishness is the way that the theme of swimming resurfaces as metaphor. The loneliness of her plight, her sense of her griefs exceptionalism, is like the loneliness of the long-distance swimmer. If you don't swim, you sink: there's nothing for it but to push on through to the other side. think seriously about messing about in the river and paddling by the sea with his The Haunts of the Black Masseur.

An ambitiously interdisciplinary book, which tried to connect great literary swimmers like Byron (and, occasionally, notable non-swimmers like Shelley) to more prosaic, though otherwise remarkable, historical figures like Captain Matthew Webb, it read too much like a scrapbook but was still immensely suggestive. We must love water, at some primal level, perhaps because floating in it reminds us both of our prehistoric ancestry emerging from the ocean and of our own personal pre-histories of emerging from our little seas of amniotic fluid. How strange, then, that we Europeans and North Americans only learnt to swim properly by copying the Polynesian islanders' overarm crawl barely a century ago. Perhaps our water was too cold for people to experiment naturally by putting their faces in it. Temperature is one of the major preoccupations of Sally Friedman's Swimming the Channel.

The cold,.