0725 | A Severed Head | Iris Murdoch

I’m a big fan of Murdoch but this one just didn’t come up to her usual standards. To be fair to her, what I should say is that it doesn’t reach the standards that her later novels show (The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea in particular).

This isn’t unusual for great novelists though; just look at the difference between Woolf’s The Voyage Out and The Waves. In the same way, Murdoch starts out with Under the Net, moves on to The Bell and then A Severed Head. It’s definitely a step in the right direction. The characters are more sinister, more complex and more in need of a good hard slap in the face.

For a start, any protagonist with a double-barrelled surname in a Murdoch novel probably lacks a bit of perspective on anyone except himself. And so it proves. Martin Lynch-Gibbon is jilted in love and spends the rest of the novel attempting to come to terms with this, blind to the fact that his hypocrisy is laid bare by the fact that he was already having an affair at the time his wife confessed her own to him.

Events overtake him though (another theme that dominates later Murdoch novels) and he finds his wife, her lover and his own lover in alliance against him. At the same time, her lover’s enigmatic sister Honor Klein appears more and more frequently to lend a gothic air to everything.

It’s not hard to see what will happen in the end, but there are some twists along the way, notably in Cambridge (which, ironically, I have some personal experience of). The book moves at a fair pace, but it’s not the frenetic dash of The Sea, The Sea. Thus, we have an important Murdoch that shows traces of her later greatness.