Murdoch's 26th and final novel, written as the dementia, still undiagnosed, was beginning to impinge on her mind, is strange, bittersweet, and mysterious. In some ways it's a redux of her preoccupying themes and motifs: Shakespeare, philosophy and its intersection with mysticism and religion, impulsiveness, fate, the unknowability of the self. It's shorter than most of her novels, but not less rich or complicated. It's a swirl of misguided, very obviously Shakespearian lovers disarranging each other and being re-arranged by an ineffable external force, the titular manservant who is introduced gradually, seemingly insidiously, by Murdoch into the book as he introduces himself into the lives of the other characters. At first Jackson reminded me of the malevolent, dependency-inducing butler in Robert Maugham's . But I should have known better. Instead he's a Prospero, a metaphor for the artist at the end of his (actually her) career, setting her artistic affairs in some sort of order and preparing to depart the stage. The book's poignancy comes from this, and it should probably be read the other 25 Murdoch novels (it's my ninth). But it's still a cleverer and more beguiling novel in its own right than most writers produce in a lifetime.