s that John Ducane, a civil-service lawyer, is asked by his superior to look into the apparent suicide of a colleague. Over the course of the novel, Ducane becomes entwined with the "nice" family of his superior, Octavian, only to extricate himself and thereby resolve his own moral ambivalence when he sees that so-called nice people are probably not at all good but instead (as in the case of Octavian Gray) hide their pettiness in personal and professional life behind a screen of "niceness." Murdoch uses the pathetic fallacy, or the device of enlisting nature to explain psychological states, to move the narrative. Just after the shot startles everyone in Whitehall, the text evokes a "hot st
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