discussion about Irish history and nationalist politics throughout the novel, chiefly carried on by Christopher Bellman and Pat and Cathal Dumay. Murdoch does not show an obvious political bias, but the book leans toward "the liberal Irish patriotism of the Anglo-Irish". Incest is an important theme in the novel, and a common topic in Murdoch's fiction, in which a "quasi-incestuous competition of members of one family for a single beloved is ubiquitous" as are actual incestuous relationships. The baffling complexity of Andrew's family, a source of pride for his mother, is characterized by Millie as "practically incestuous". Besides going to bed with Andrew, who calls her "Aunt Millie", and trying to seduce her nephew Pat, she claims to have had a sexual relationship with her half brother, Andrew's father. Sexual initiation is one of the themes of the novel. Both Pat and Andrew are virgins who feel "a fear of sex and a fixation on long-suffering mothers", which the critic Declan Kiberd notes is a "complex of attitudes which was by the 1960s being recognized as a pathology". The novel has been characterized as part of Murdoch's "romantic phase" in which she was concerned with "the responsibilities, impositions and ties of marriage, or, in the case of The Red and the Green, of religious vocation". In this case Barnabas Drumm, while pining for Millie and resenting his virtuous wife Kathleen, is unable to give up his dream of a religious calling, and feels himself to be "by vocation a failed priest". Several chapters are devoted to Barney's religious crises, in which he wrestles with his feelings of guilt and ineffectually resolves to redeem himself. Reception The Red and the Green was widely reviewed in Ireland, Great Britain, the United States and elsewhere. The reviews were mixed, with several critics finding that the "bedroom farce aspect" centred on Millie was "fatal to the book". Christopher Ricks wrote in the New Statesman that Murdoch's attempt to "combine a flatly faithful account of what happened in Dublin in 1916 with a love-imbroglio" showed "honourable and gigantic ambition" but resulted in a failed novel in which the "sexual permutation game both withers and demeans Irish history". Ricks argued that her "clockwork" characters and contrived plot resulted in fiction that failed to live up to the demands of her own theories of literature. In the New York Times, John Bowen also characterized The Red and