that novel by the tutor in moral philosophy raises an intriguing question . why has this face appeared among the best-sellers ? the book page - by Robert Pitman . perhaps you recognise that heavy and somewhat sullen face on the left . if you are fond of being in the fashion you certainly ought to . for weeks now those thick-lidded and decidedly untwinkling eyes have stared out at the readers of a succession of heavy literary magazines and review pages . for weeks the owner of the face has had her name at the top of the list of best-selling novelists . she is Miss Iris Murdoch , tutor in moral philosophy at St Anne &apos;s College , Oxford ; wife of Mr John Bayley , a fellow don ; and author of a severed head , which was published in June amid a loud cooing of intellectual approval . Miss Murdoch is the author of several books . yet suddenly , with her fifth novel , she has been sifted out by the priests of culture for their own honours list . her name has acquired an almost visible halo . for those who wish to impress , it can now be plopped confidently into a conversation like French seasoning upon a salad . soon those who can not quite afford Scandinavian cutlery or furniture from Heals will have the latest Iris Murdoch in their sitting-rooms instead . and soon , no doubt , an interviewer from the B.B.C programme monitor will be leading TV cameras around Miss Murdoch &apos;s house at Steeple Aston outside Oxford with the awed , hushed tread appropriate to a cathedral . degenerate . yet , despite all this attention , no one has mentioned the really outstanding characteristic of Miss Murdoch &apos;s new novel . it is not its style , which is often pretentious and sometimes a little lame . it is not its characters , which are unbelievable , nor its background , which is inaccurate and unreal . it is the fact that this story from the Oxford moral philosophy department is , by the standards of most people , utterly degenerate . that is an epithet I rarely use on this page . even when it is justified the best criticism is usually silence . there are too many booksellers , not all by any means in the back streets , who gloat over condemnation of their wares with the relish with which some film distributors greet an X certificate . yet a severed head has already been given its X by the mandarin reviewers . their coy or leering references to its plot have kept it selling well for weeks on end . I do not feel it out of place to offer a corrective . pleased . a severed head is the story of a wine merchant named Martin Lynch-Gibbon . we meet him first of all watching his mistress , Georgie Hands , while ( with a tense demure consciousness of his gaze ) she draws on the peacock-blue stockings which Lynch-Gibbon has given her . Lynch-Gibbon is pleased with life . his wife Antonia , though a few years older than he is , is beautiful , intellectually stimulating - and knows nothing about Georgie . then , piece by piece , Lynch-Gibbon &apos;s complacency is shattered . Antonia falls in love with her American psychiatrist and goes to live with him . the psychiatrist &apos;s ugly but mysterious half-sister , Honor Klein , also upsets Lynch-Gibbon by finding out about Georgie and telling Antonia . a penitent Lynch-Gibbon is severely rebuked by his wife and her psychiatrist lover for deceiving them over Georgie . then Lynch-Gibbon has a fight with Honor Klein in a cellar ( she came against me with both hands pushing and clawing , and endeavoured to drive her knee into my stomach . ) . after this encounter , Lynch-Gibbon decides that he is fascinated with the rather repellent Miss Klein . he goes to her house in Cambridge , gets in through an open door , and finds her in bed with her psychiatrist half-brother . before the book ends Georgie gives herself first to Lynch-Gibbon &apos;s brother , Alexander , and then to the psychiatrist . Antonia leaves the psychiatrist for her brother-in-law Alexander . and Lynch-Gibbon is left with the incestuous , slightly-moustached Miss Klein . I should also mention that in addition to all these humourless couplings Lynch-Gibbon suffers from a homosexual liking for the psychiatrist too . such is the novel which Mr Cyril Connolly greeted as a heaven-sent gift and which led Mr Alan Pryce-Jones to exclaim she triumphs , and Mr Kenneth Allsop , the tonight interviewer , to give as his judgment : she has the rare universal eye of the great novelist . which , I believe you will decide , is all my rare universal eye and Betty Martin . so wrong . true , the praise has not been unrelieved . Mr Connolly himself pointed out that Miss Murdoch , having chosen a wine merchant as a hero , goes wrong over almost every detail concerning wine . Mr Philip Toynbee , with some justice , wrote : though she does not wish us to admire any of the characters , except Honor , she does demand of us a credulity , a sympathy , and a concern which I have found quite impossible to give . Mr Peter Forster likened Miss Murdoch &apos;s dialogue to Ethel M Dell . yet the striking thing is that none of these critics challenged Miss Murdoch &apos;s novel on moral grounds . I would not ask them to denounce it as pornography . a severed head is not pornography . it is so stuffed with turgid and often meaningless symbolism that only an extreme masochist could drive himself to read it for the kicks . nor is it propagandist as Lolita was . it does not enthuse over incest or homosexuality . it does not enthuse . it does worse - it merely yawns . it enshrines the bored and disgusted-by-nothing attitude of that shallow but influential clique which dominates the literary weeklies and the B.B.C brains trust and which tries to make normal , human , shockable people feel like country cousins or like the pi little boys who dare to remain mute while the rest of the dormitory is giggling over dirty stories . the critics who praised Lolita defended the author &apos;s moral notions . but there was no such defence of Miss Murdoch - the critics were so sophisticated that they saw nothing which needed defending . the observer wrote : she is serious , leftish , and high-minded , with a sharp brain tempered by good sense : an English university seems just the right background for her . but is high the most apt word for Miss Murdoch &apos;s mind ? for this is not her only puzzling novel . in her often brilliantly funny second book , flight from the enchanter , Rosa , a sensible upper-middle-class young lady , befriends two Poles whom she meets in a factory . she teaches them English in their sordid room in Pimlico while their aged mother , lying on a mattress on the floor , looks on . occasionally the brothers dance round the mother or prod her with their feet . one cries : you old rubbish ! you old sack ! we soon kill you , we put you under floorboards , you not stink there worse than here ! watching . one day Rosa goes to meet the brothers and finds only one of them , Stefan , waiting for her . he takes her to the room where he says : we make love now , Rosa . it is time . your mother ! exclaims Rosa , noticing the old lady &apos;s watching eyes . she not see , not hear , is the reply . the next day Rosa finds only the other brother , Jan , waiting . in the room at Pimlico , Rosa asks : you know about Stefan ? Jan replies sternly : of course . and now is me . of this incident one critic has written : - this whole episode is a brutal commentary on the equivocal nature of pity : the revulsion of feeling which an unequal relationship inspires . it may be , of course , that the stud-farm entanglements of Miss Murdoch &apos;s latest book are also a brutal commentary on something &apos;s equivocal nature . unfortunately , if they are , even Miss Murdoch &apos;s most distinguished admirers seem unable to discover exactly what that something is . Miss Murdoch &apos;s publishers claim that a severed head is as exciting as treasure island . in the ultra-sophisticated society in which comparisons like that can be made and in which people like Miss Murdoch are not just the rebels but the teachers , it is little wonder that the young are occasionally more interested in yellow golliwogs than in the works of old squares like R L Stevenson . disturbing - this novel about a top tory . now for another disturbing novel . it is the Minister ( Hamish Hamilton , 16 s ) by Maurice Edelman , the suave , culture-loving and luxuriantly good-looking M.P who represents the car-workers of Coventry North . Mr Edelman has himself made an intense study of British political novels . to literary societies he has lectured in languorous tones about John Galt , who wrote the borough ( subject : political jobbery ) in 1832 , and about A E W Mason , best-known for the four feathers but also the author of the turnstile ( based on Mason &apos;s own brief career as liberal M.P for Coventry ) . now , in the Minister I believe that Edelman has produced a novel which itself deserves a very high place indeed in the roll of political fiction . it is certainly the novel which I have enjoyed most in 1961 . a reservation . it tells how Melville , a tory Minister , achieves the aim of every tory Minister . he becomes tory Prime Minister . but his public triumph is hollow since he has simultaneously discovered that his plain but well-loved wife has also allowed herself to be well loved by his own brother and perhaps by other friends as well . set against this theme is the story of how Melville , having said : I want the African to be my brother , adds in an indiscreet whisper , but not my brother-in-law . the pretty lady at whom the indiscretion is directed is the mistress of an opposition leader . duly circulated and printed in the press , it stirs riots in Africa and almost wrecks Melville &apos;s career . why do I call the novel disturbing ? it is not because of Edelman &apos;s approach to morals which - unlike Miss Murdoch &apos;s - is both adult and real . no , the disturbing thing about the Minister is that far from being artificial , it too often rings frighteningly true . no malice . for it portrays a tory leadership whose aim , above all , is to be free from any supposedly naive , old-fashioned notions about patriotism or empire or national greatness . a leadership which thinks it oh-so-civilised and cultured to be just a little weary and cynical about everything . socialist Edelman does not present this portrait with political malice . indeed , it is clear that , despite his Coventry connections the Melville attitude is his attitude too . but I must draw attention to one fairy-tale element in this otherwise true-to-life novel . in avoiding any appearance of party prejudice , Edelman goes so far as to put epigrams - yes , actual epigrams - into the mouths of everyday tory back-benchers . from a new book , an intriguing account of life in the land of mists . the sad , macabre tale of the bride they called Miss Fuegia Basket . the book page . by Robert Pitman . just north of the seas that surge and shriek round Cape Horn , the land mass which we call America tails away in a region of mist , sleet , and death . the people who live there , scratching a bare living from the rocks or wading into the ice-cold surf to collect limpets , are still among the most wretched on earth . not long ago their life was even more desolate . in Britain today it is fashionable to discuss the problem of old age . during the last century it was reported that the people north of Cape Horn had solved the problem of what to do with the old folk . in times of famine they ate them . it is not surprising , therefore , that out of that sleet and mist comes one of the saddest and most macabre little stories that I have ever read . I take it from the wonders of life on earth by the editors of life and Lincoln Barnett ( Prentice-Hall , 70 s ) . you would be wrong to shudder at the price . for a family with a budding biologist in its midst the book is more than worth it . in wonderful photographs and paintings it parades the bizarre quirks of evolution - such as the dawn-flying silk moth , with its absurdly long wing-filaments which rustle while it flies . the filaments act like the tin-foil dropped by bombers to deceive radar . 