Books: Bad Spell in London

THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER (316 pp.)—Iris Murdoch—Viking ($3.75)..75).

Iris Murdoch, Oxford don, is as rare a thing in modern writing as Dr. Johnson's bipedally ambulatory dog. *She is not just a woman novelist, which is not rare, or a woman philosopher (teaching at Oxford's St. Anne's), which is somewhat rare, but a woman philosopher-novelist, which is very rare indeed.

In her second novel (her first: the widely praised Under the Net), Author Murdoch plays ducks and drakes with a madding crowd of English characters who have not fared well in the welfare state, members of that middling class of drab London sparrows...