An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch

I'm not wholeheartedly enthusiastic about this novel; on the one hand, I enjoyed, as usual, the magical and fantastic atmosphere that Murdoch creates, but on the other hand, I didn't feel like it cohered properly. There were just too many characters, and I had a hard time keeping them and their relationships straight in my head for probably the first third of the book. There were so many romantic permutations that they all fell into that it made me quite confused. A lot of it is really darkly funny, and I know that it's seen as a 'comic' novel, which I enjoyed, but as usual, the philosophical side made me quite bewildered. The novel takes place during the Korean War, and one of the characters, Ludwig, is both a British and an American citizen. He decides not to return to America to be drafted into the army, but instead gets a job at Oxford and gets engaged to an English girl. At the end, with his engagement broken, he decides to go back to America where he faces either the army or jail. I absolutely could not understand why he had to go back, it bothered me so much. The engagement was clearly a bad idea, but I don't understand why he couldn't have just stayed in Oxford, it seemed like the stupidest decision ever. It involved some sort of moral and ethical decision that was just way beyond me. What I really liked about the book was that gaps of time are often filled in with letters, through which we find out about multiple relationships between characters who aren't in the main action of the novel, but only turn up in the letters and in conversations. I also really liked the fact that amid the dizzying number of break-ups and romantic unions, there are quite a few same-sex couples, and Murdoch doesn't treat it like something to be made a fuss about at all, it's just part of the novel, and not a major theme. No one has a huge realisation that they're gay (I guess this theme was old even back in 1971), which I really liked, since so much literature around same-sex relationships focuses on how different they are from other ones, on revelatory and life-changing sexual self-discovery, which is something I don't believe in. Apart from that, I also didn't find any of the characters particularly interesting, they were all a bit boring and flat, it seems like interesting things happen to them, but they're not actually very remarkable. I was also quite confused about the character of Gracie, who seems to be pretty direct, cold and practical, but is absolutely heartbroken when her engagement ends. I couldn't decide whether she is actually callous towards people, or if she has some kind of wisdom that other, more emotional character lack. I felt quite uncertain about her, and uncertain what Murdoch wanted her readers to feel about her.