Human Beings Happening

A Severed Head is Iris Murdoch’s fifth novel to date, and as it should be, it is an assured, lucent, often funny, always intelligent piece of work. I suppose it might be called a comedy of manners—with the understanding that the manners are entirely concerned with how people behave when they are in love, or at least when they desire the exclusive possession of an object which happens to be another human being. Most of it goes on in London, in elegantly appointed apartments, and the characters are all upper-middle-class offbeats—a Cambridge lady don, a psychoanalyst, a literary business executive, a sculptor, and so forth. A good deal of the time, there is an air of “musical chairs,” and I saw one review which complained at the complicated plot. But given her intentions, I think Miss Murdoch handles it all with wonderful deftness and no more reader-confusion than Shakespeare risks in a play like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After all, there are six principals, three male and three female. This means a considerable number of possible combinations, and by the time things are wound up, Miss Murdoch has shown us how eight of them work out.

In the meantime, there is lots of talk. For all of these lovers are bright, articulate, and urgently inclined to parse their reasons why. Yet in the end, the effect of their story is to reveal how inconclusive all of their insights are, how impossible it is ever to know very much about love, and how wholly love amounts to what John Bayley calls “a condition of the personality, and vice versa,” rather than anything which can be ideated and reduced to something quotable in Bartlett’s.

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Peter Melik

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A Severed Head is Iris Murdoch’s fifth novel to date, and as it should be, it is an assured, lucent, often funny, always intelligent piece of work. I suppose it might be called a comedy of manners—with the understanding that the manners are entirely concerned with how people behave when they are in love, or at least when they desire the exclusive possession of an object which happens to be another human being. Most of it goes on in London, in elegantly appointed apartments, and the characters are all upper-middle-class offbeats—a Cambridge lady don, a psychoanalyst, a literary business executive, a sculptor, and so forth. A good deal of the time, there is an air of “musical chairs,” and I saw one review which complained at the complicated plot. But given her intentions, I think Miss Murdoch handles it all with wonderful deftness and no more reader-confusion than Shakespeare risks in a play like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After all, there are six principals, three male and three female. This means a considerable number of possible combinations, and by the time things are wound up, Miss Murdoch has shown us how eight of them work out.

In the meantime, there is lots of talk. For all of these lovers are bright, articulate, and urgently inclined to parse their reasons why. Yet in the end, the effect of their story is to reveal how inconclusive all of their insights are, how impossible it is ever to know very much about love, and how wholly love amounts to what John Bayley calls “a condition of the personality, and vice versa,” rather than anything which can be ideated and reduced to something quotable in Bartlett’s.