A Dying Man’s Web of Spiders, Sons, and Lovers
The Old Man and His Spiders
The novel opens in the sickroom of Bruno Greensleave, an old man near the end of his life, attended in his final months by nurses and by the remnants of a family he has spent decades alienating. Bruno lies bedridden, his mind circling obsessively around two private passions that have organized his whole existence: spiders, which he has studied and collected with the devotion of an amateur naturalist, and postage stamps, the other great hobby of his solitary years. These fixations are not incidental decoration; Murdoch uses them as the imaginative material through which Bruno tries, and largely fails, to make sense of mortality, guilt, and the passage of time. Bruno’s memory drifts continually toward his dead wife Janie and toward his estranged son Miles, from whom he has been cut off for years by an old, half-forgotten quarrel whose details matter less than the fact of the silence itself.
Bruno’s physical decline is rendered with unflinching, almost clinical attention — the indignities of the sickbed, the dependence on others for the most basic functions, the slow narrowing of a life that once contained ambition, marriage, and fatherhood into a single room and a handful of remembered images. His preoccupation with spiders becomes a kind of private theology: he ponders their patience, their webs, the way they wait at the center of an invisible structure for something to arrive. This image of the web — a network of fine, nearly invisible threads connecting creatures who cannot see one another clearly — becomes the novel’s organizing metaphor, made explicit in Bruno’s own drowsy meditations on the parallel between the spider’s world and the human one he is leaving. He also returns obsessively to the question of reconciliation: he wants, before he dies, to see Miles again, to repair what has been broken, though he is too proud, too frightened, or too enfeebled to say so plainly to anyone who might help him do it.
Around Bruno’s bed circulate the people who will, in different ways, determine whether his last wish is honored. Chief among them is Danby Odell, Bruno’s son-in-law, the widower of Bruno’s daughter Gwen, who died years before the novel’s present action. Danby has taken over the running of Bruno’s old printing business and has, almost by default, become the household’s manager — paying for nurses, tolerating Bruno’s demands, and drifting through his own diminished life with a kind of amiable, guilty passivity. It is through Danby’s eyes, as much as through Bruno’s own fading consciousness, that the reader first grasps the domestic world Bruno’s illness has created: a house full of people bound to one another less by affection than by proximity, obligation, and the accidents of family history.
Bruno’s spiders are never merely quaint eccentricity; they are the novel’s key to its central idea, that human beings, like spiders, spin connections they cannot fully perceive, and that these connections — desire, guilt, old promises — hold people fast to one another even when love itself has failed or gone cold.
Danby Odell and the Household of Women
Danby Odell stands at the center of the domestic entanglement that gives the novel its narrative energy, a man whose good-natured drift through life has left him attached, in different registers, to several women at once. Since Gwen’s death he has taken Adelaide, the household’s maid, as his mistress, a relationship conducted with a mixture of tenderness and casual exploitation that neither party fully names aloud. Adelaide, working-class, watchful, and increasingly humiliated by her ambiguous position in the house — neither wife nor stranger, neither fully servant nor fully lover — represents one pole of Danby’s emotional carelessness, the cost of his amiability paid by someone with far less power than he has.
Into this arrangement comes Lisa, sister of Miles’s wife Diana, a former nun who has left her religious order and now works, austerely and without evident joy, among the poor. Lisa’s arrival in the household, ostensibly to help nurse Bruno, disturbs the fragile equilibrium Danby has constructed for himself; her seriousness, her history of renunciation, and her evident capacity for a different, harder kind of moral seriousness make her simultaneously an object of fascination and unease for Danby, who begins to fall toward her with the same drifting, half-conscious desire that governs his attachment to Adelaide. Murdoch draws Lisa as a figure of austere goodness whose very self-denial becomes, paradoxically, a source of erotic and spiritual pull for the people around her — she has renounced the world, and this renunciation makes her, in Danby’s confused perception, more desirable rather than less.
The household’s tensions are sharpened by the fact that Danby is nominally in charge of everything — Bruno’s care, the printing firm, the domestic budget — while being emotionally the least stable person in it, sliding from Adelaide to Lisa and back again without ever resolving what he actually wants or owes to either woman. Adelaide, for her part, begins to sense her own diminishment in this triangle and starts contemplating an exit from a situation that has never given her the security or respect she might reasonably have expected from years of devotion. Her own attention turns, tentatively, toward Nigel, one of the young men hired to nurse Bruno, opening another thread in the web of substitutions and displaced longings that link nearly every character in the book to nearly every other.
This section of the novel establishes Murdoch’s recurring method: love here is rarely mutual, rarely stable, and almost never matched to its object; people fasten onto each other according to need, guilt, or the accident of proximity rather than any clear-eyed recognition of the other person, so that the household around the dying Bruno becomes itself a small model of the disordered, contingent bonds his spiders exemplify on a smaller scale.
Miles, Diana, and the Buried Quarrel
The estrangement between Bruno and his son Miles is the wound the whole novel works to expose and, eventually, to try to heal, and Murdoch turns to Miles’s own household to show what that old rupture has cost in the following generation. Miles is married to Diana, Lisa’s sister, and the marriage is presented as competent, settled, and quietly incomplete — a partnership that has survived without ever quite achieving the intimacy either partner might once have hoped for. Miles nurses a long-buried grief connected to an earlier attachment, a loss that predates his marriage to Diana and that continues to color his emotional life without his ever fully articulating it to her; this earlier loss functions as Miles’s own private version of Bruno’s guilt, another example of the past refusing to stay past.
Diana, aware of the limits of her marriage without being able to name them precisely, watches with a mixture of anxiety and reluctant fascination as her sister Lisa enters the orbit of Danby Odell. The two sisters are drawn as temperamental opposites — Diana practical, socially competent, invested in the ordinary comforts and routines of married life, Lisa austere, self-denying, carrying the residue of her monastic years even outside the convent’s walls — and Murdoch uses their contrasting responses to Danby’s attention to dramatize two different postures toward desire: Diana’s guarded, faintly jealous awareness of what she herself might have wanted, and Lisa’s unsettled, half-resisted susceptibility to a man she would, on principle, have expected to find unworthy of serious feeling.
Miles’s estrangement from his dying father hangs over this household as an unresolved moral debt. He resists visiting Bruno, resists the pressure exerted on him by Danby and by his own conscience, clinging to old grievances that the novel never allows the reader to see clearly enough to judge as either fully justified or merely stubborn pride — Murdoch is careful not to adjudicate the original quarrel, keeping the reader’s sympathy divided between father and son. What is clear is that Bruno’s approaching death forces the question of reconciliation into the open, making Miles’s continued refusal to visit an increasingly visible moral failure, one that Diana, Danby, and eventually Lisa all press him, in different ways, to correct before it becomes irreversible.
This thread of the novel insists that the failure to reconcile is itself a kind of death that precedes the literal one, and that the web connecting Bruno to Miles — thin, nearly invisible, but never actually severed — is exactly the kind of bond the novel’s spider imagery has already taught the reader to notice.
Nigel appears in the novel as Bruno’s night nurse, a figure whose ministrations to the dying old man are shadowed by something unsettling in his manner — an intimacy with sickness and decay that goes beyond professional competence into a kind of fascinated attachment. He tends to Bruno’s body, manages the details of an old man’s failing physical existence, and in doing so becomes one of the few people permitted close, continuous contact with Bruno in his last months, a proximity that gives him an odd authority within the household even though he is, by rank, only hired help. His twin brother Will stands in almost comic contrast: where Nigel haunts the sickroom, Will postures as a romantic, a self-styled duelist whose passions attach themselves to Diana with a theatrical, faintly absurd intensity that nonetheless carries real feeling underneath its posturing.
The twinship itself becomes one of the novel’s many doublings, echoing the mirrored, symmetrical relationships that recur throughout the book — Bruno and Miles, Danby and Diana, Diana and Lisa — as if the narrative wants to keep showing the same emotional configurations refracted through different pairs of people. Will’s infatuation with Diana pushes him toward absurd gestures of chivalric devotion, including talk of duels and honor that belongs to an earlier, more theatrical age of courtship, and that sits oddly against the shabby, unheroic reality of the household he has attached himself to. Nigel, meanwhile, watches everything — Bruno’s decline, the comings and goings of Danby and Miles and the women who orbit them — with an attentiveness that the novel repeatedly marks as faintly predatory, as though he too were one of Bruno’s spiders, spinning himself into the fabric of the dying man’s last days.
Their presence at the edges of the main household drama matters because it keeps the reader aware that Bruno’s death is not simply a private family matter unfolding in isolation; it draws in outsiders, hangers-on, people whose motives are murkier and less examined than those of the family members at the center. Nigel’s clinical intimacy with death and Will’s inflated romantic performance both serve as distorted mirrors of the more serious business of love and mortality that Bruno, Miles, Diana, and Danby are working through, reminding the reader that the web Bruno spins in his dreams catches minor as well as major figures.
Diana, married to Miles but drawn increasingly toward Danby, occupies one corner of a triangle that shifts and complicates as the novel proceeds, her marriage to Miles marked by an emotional distance that Danby’s warmth and vitality throw into relief. Where Miles has retreated into a kind of guarded self-containment, nursing old griefs and old loyalties, Danby moves through the household with an appetite for life and for women that makes him magnetic to both Diana and, increasingly, to her sister Lisa, who has lived within the household in a role that is partly companion, partly dependent, and partly — as the novel makes clear — a woman whose own desires have been quietly suppressed for the sake of everyone else’s convenience. The attraction that develops between Danby and Lisa complicates the already strained arrangement between Danby and Diana, turning the household into a small theater of shifting allegiances conducted, for the most part, beneath a surface of politeness and domestic routine.
Diana’s position becomes increasingly exposed as her sister’s involvement with Danby deepens, forcing her to confront both her own drift away from Miles and the discomfort of watching a man she has come to depend on turn his attention elsewhere. Lisa, for her part, is presented as someone whose long habit of self-denial — of living in the margins of other people’s marriages and needs — makes her sudden claim on her own desire for Danby feel both liberating and destabilizing, unsettling the domestic economy that has kept Diana, Miles, and Lisa in an uneasy but functioning balance. The novel does not resolve this triangle quickly or cleanly; it lets the tension accumulate alongside Bruno’s decline, so that the question of who will end up with whom runs in counterpoint to the more solemn question of whether Miles will make peace with his father before it is too late.
This entanglement matters within the book’s larger design because it demonstrates, on the level of ordinary erotic life, the same themes that Bruno’s deathbed makes explicit on the level of mortality: that human attachments are rarely stable, that loyalty and desire pull against each other in ways people cannot fully control, and that the “web” imagery attached to Bruno’s spiders extends outward to catch the living as surely as it catches the dying, binding Diana, Lisa, Danby, and Miles into a single structure of need and evasion that none of them can see whole from the inside.
As Bruno’s condition worsens, the pressure toward reconciliation that has been building throughout the novel finally reaches its point of no return, and Miles is brought, at last, to his father’s bedside. The visit does not undo the years of estrangement or supply a tidy resolution of the old quarrel; instead it offers something more modest and more characteristic of the novel’s moral realism — a final, imperfect meeting between father and son, conducted under the shadow of imminent death, in which old grievances are neither fully forgiven nor fully re-argued but simply set aside in favor of a last, human contact. Bruno, weakened, preoccupied still with his spiders and his stamps and the fragments of memory that have absorbed him throughout his illness, is shown reaching for something like peace, not through eloquent reconciliation speeches but through the bare fact of his son’s presence in the room.
Bruno’s death itself, when it comes, closes the novel’s central movement, but Murdoch declines to let it function as a simple release or resolution; the aftermath scatters among the surviving characters — Miles, Diana, Lisa, Danby — each carrying forward some portion of the disorder that Bruno’s illness had exposed rather than settled. The romantic entanglements among Danby, Diana, and Lisa remain unresolved in any final sense, and the novel’s ending gestures toward continuation rather than closure, suggesting that the web of relationships Bruno’s dying had drawn taut will go on shifting and reforming after he is gone, just as spiders continue spinning long after any single web has been abandoned.
