Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire

Bayley scored an unexpected hit with last year's eloquent and deeply affecting Elegy for Iris, in which he spoke of his life with the celebrated novelist Iris Murdoch, both before and after she developed the Alzheimer's disease that finally, after five long years, killed her in February 1999. This new memoir appears in the wake of Murdoch's death and takes brief note of it, though much of it had been written by Bayley, while propped up beside his sleeping wife, in their last, desperate months together. As before, the details of how a loving mate deals with a complete mental withdrawal are at once horrific and touching, and blessed with Bayley's awkward grace. There is nothing much new to add to Elegy in the writing about their strange togetherness in the face of utmost adversity, however, and the title is more than a little misleading. What is new is the flights of memory that prompt Bayley to feel his way back to his own childhood and army days. The closeness and delicacy of his recall is almost hallucinatory--he brings long-forgotten prewar English landscapes and ways of life back with astounding vividness--and his accounts of wartime and peacetime life in the British army are as hilariously observant as the best of Evelyn Waugh, though quite without the undertone of bitter rancor. Bayley is a splendid memoirist, who has now said all that needs to be said about Murdoch. How about a new volume that is just about him? If this is anything to go by, it would be as compelling in its way as Angela's Ashes. (Nov.)