Novel: The Flight from the Enchanter

Overview
Iris Murdoch's The Flight from the Enchanter presents a fizzing, morally intense drama about power, fascination and escape. Set in mid-1950s London, the story orbits around the charismatic and secretive Max Sort, whose allure and authority draw a diverse circle of admirers, rivals and would-be rescuers. The narrative mixes satirical observation with mythic patterns and sustained psychological probing, producing a story that is as entertaining as it is unsettling.

Plot
The action begins as various characters find their lives altered by Max Sort's presence and by the rivalries and desires he provokes. Sort operates through influence rather than force, manipulating political, financial and emotional currents while remaining elusive about his motives. The plot follows attempts to understand, possess or escape his enchantment: alliances form and fracture, schemes are laid and thwarted, and several characters confront critical moral choices. The novel builds toward a series of confrontations that expose hidden ambitions and vulnerabilities, and that force some characters to seek release from Sort's magnetic control.

Characters and Relationships
Max Sort functions less as a conventional protagonist and more as an emblem of seductive power; he is at once admired as a visionary and feared as a corrupter. Surrounding him is a large ensemble whose connections are shifting and combustible: friends who want to learn his secrets, lovers who seek intimacy or possession, rivals who crave influence, and idealists who imagine moral resistance. The emotional and intellectual entanglements are portrayed with sympathetic acuity, so that even the most self-interested figures appear humanly complex and believable.

Themes and Motifs
At the heart lies a meditation on enchantment and escape. Power is shown as a kind of spell that can both organize and deform lives, and the title's idea of flight suggests multiple kinds of flight, physical departure, moral withdrawal, psychological dissociation. Murdoch interrogates desire as a force that blinds and motivates, while exploring how mythic images (the magician, the rescuer, the betrayer) recur within modern social arrangements. Satire and seriousness coexist: social manners and petty ambitions are handled with wit, while ethical dilemmas receive grave attention.

Style and Tone
Murdoch blends brisk comic energy with dense philosophical insight. The prose ranges from sprightly dialogue and sharp observational passages to reflective, interior sequences that probe conscience and motive. Narrative voice keeps a careful balance between ironic distance and compassionate scrutiny, allowing characters to appear both laughable and tragic. Mythic references and symbolic echoes are woven into everyday scenes, lending the novel a fable-like resonance without surrendering realism.

Legacy and Impact
The Flight from the Enchanter is often cited as an early demonstration of Murdoch's gifts for large-cast comedy and moral seriousness. It displays the author's growing concern with how personal magnetism shapes public life and how moral imagination can resist or be co-opted by charisma. Readers and critics have long admired the novel's energetic plotting, its tonal range from satire to pathos, and its willingness to treat philosophical questions through the entangled lives of vividly drawn characters.