Iris Murdoch

A Severed Head

my intuitive curatorial instinct (picking this up after Between The Acts by Woolf and after watching Babygirl by Reijn) is kind of impeccable… new future dream syllabus in progress to come…

aisha

This characteristic of my beloved exasperated me, but since it was also a part, after all, of Georgie’s remarkable detachment and lack of worldly pretention, I adored it and loved it as well. It was, moreover, as I sometimes reflected, the very image and symbol of my relation to Georgie, my mode of possessing her, or more precisely the way in which I, as it were, failed to possess her . . . I did not possess Georgie. Georgie was simply there. 

‘Yes, to distraction. Do you love me?’

‘Not infinitely,’ said Georgie. ‘Let us be exact. Your love is great but finite quantity.’

We both knew what she referred to, but there were some topics which it was profitless to discuss, and this we both knew also.

M. Marques

what the hell did I just read


...

I think that if this plot had been read today, no literary agent would have thought "wow, this is brilliant, we shall publish it at once".

Ipek

As I came to appreciate the fierce and unapologetic intellectuality of A.S. Byatt's novels more and more this year, I thought I might give another try to her friend and mentor Iris Murdoch, whose only novel I read prior to this was Under the Net; having read it for my PhD qualifying exam some years ago, I remember very little of it except for some parts of the narrative taking place in hospital corridors, maybe? And the male narrator. 

A Severed Head, too, has a male narrator - a middle-aged (much as it pains me to call 40 middle-aged, I suppose in 1961 that was what it was), self-satisfied, bourgeois -- and well, just so smugly British and Britishly smug man; with the customary evening cocktails and antique furniture and outwardly bloodless reactions to everything. And for the large part, the novel is about how such self-satisfied, self-contained bourgeois lives are both titillated and threatened by those who are not like them -- by the young, earnest and working-class Georgie, by the snake oil salesman American Palmer Anderson, and by his sister, Honor Klein, whose Jewishness is a fixation, or some sort of mark of authenticity on the narrative's part. (view spoiler)[After a series of farcical partner-swappings among a group of five or six people, Honor does ultimately settle on Martin, telling him meanwhile that it "has nothing to do with happiness, nothing whatsoever," and that's a resolution, and a win for love, I guess but as long as the circus lasts, you (I) cannot help feeling - who are these people? Why do they do the things they do? Why don't they just walk out, or walk away? (hide spoiler)] Anyway, that's great literature for you - gives you the pleasure of observing the British in their natural habitat as some kind of fascinating subalterns, my dear.

Allison Dempsey

"Martin Lynch Gibbon believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional re-education. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendour at first repels him and late arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusae informs him, 'this is nothing to do with happiness.'"

A Severed Head

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