Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #399408 in Books
• Published on: 1987-01-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Customer Reviews

Yet more solid and compelling fiction from Murdoch
Murdoch was at the pinnacle of her art when she penned The Unicorn, a modern gothic work, published in 1963. I've read many of her other titles, A Severed Head being my favorite; however, if you'd like to start reading her, either book would be a great place to begin.

Murdoch takes a little while to warm up her readers but once you are fifty pages in or so, you can't easily lay her aside. This one is particularly savory in that regard.

The story here is about a gal, Marian Taylor by name, who is brought on as a companion to a rather strange woman in a remote and lonely castle. From the start, Marian has good reason to question her decision to take on this job.

Here's a quote which sort of explains the title as well as conveying a little about the woman who's the focus of the story:

"'I'm not sure that I understand,' said Effingham. 'I know one mustn't think of her as a legendary creature, a beautiful unicorn --.'

'The unicorn is also the image of Christ. But we have to do too with an ordinary guilty person.'

'Do you really see her as expiating a crime?'

'I'm not a Christian. By saying she's guilty I just mean she's like us. And if she FEELS no guilt, so much the better for her. Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves. We must just not forget that there WAS a crime. Exactly whose probably doesn't matter by now.'" (p.98)

This is good, solid period fiction, a type of which we see all too little today. Highly recommended.

Pretty awful, but she's done some great stuff too
I've read three Iris Murdoch novels and this is hands down the worst. The other two (The Nice and the Good, A Fairly Honourable Defeat) are very good indeed, but this one's tedious, over the top, and thoroughly inconsequential.

If there's meant to be a point, it seems to revolve around an abandoned wife presented as a Christ-like figure, patiently enduring martyrdom and inspiring the adoration of various humble devotees in the Wild Highlands. This works well if you can envision Christ as a simpering sado-masochist, alternating emotional seduction and subsequent betrayal of innocents with trembling submission to uber-abusers. Personally, I have trouble finding a resemblance to Christ in anyone so trifling and so vicious.

The other principal characters are almost equally preposterous. As the story opens, Miss Highland Thang is attended by the New Girl - a gullible companion / servant ripe for the psychological rack & thumbscrews - as well as her immediate predecessor in victimhood, a thoroughly beaten and bedazzled Boy, and the handsome, boy-raping Manservant who varies his recreational menu with the sexual taunting of whatever woman happens to be sublimating in the immediate vicinity. Waiting in the wings are other assorted neighborhood folk in a state of more or less chronic muddleheadedness.

The faintest rumor of the impending return of the demonic, wifebeating Dark Lord from across the deep, deep ocean throws all of these fine people into a Major Tizzy.

The thing runs on and on, and stuff happens, but it's all quite stupid, implausible, and ultimately meaningless. I guess that makes this an example of nihilist literature. It's certainly boring enough to qualify.

Philosophical discourse disguised as Gothic horror tale
Iris Murdoch is very clever. She takes the format of the traditional gothic mystery novel, full of romantic fools and dark sinisister characters and weaves a tale that is as rich as a Renaissance tapestry with hidden spiders.

First, I would like to comment on the style of writing exemplified in this book. Ms. Murdoch is not of the school of minimal writing in which intentions and thoughts are discerned from actions and detail, which is the forte of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. Rather, she spends enormous amounts of the book exploring the inner thoughts and emotions of the characters, in particular the thoughts, impressions, and emotions of the young governess, Marian Taylor, and the civil servant, Effingham Cooper. However the book is not entirely devoted to in-depth psychological analysis of the characters. There are very fine passages where Ms. Murdoch describes the ever changing sea and cliffs and landscape in which the human characters interact. The sea is described with every color possible, from golden fire, to silvery smoky blue-grey, to purples and azure. Where sea meets shore she once describes as the swirl of black ink in cream. The finest writing in the novel is the chapter where Effingham Cooper walks into the bog and soon finds himself sinking slowly into the goo with an inability to pull his legs free from the mucky suction.

Ms. Murdoch has also constructed a geometric, classically proportioned plot, reminding me of the carefully constructed relationship structures of the works of Thomas Hardy. There are two grand houses in the remote countryside, that are within sight of each other. In one house there are three jailers who surround the real Hannah Crean-Smith, the beautiful fairy queen red haired alcoholic adulturous murderous pivotal character of the book. She is held captive by an overpowering masculine gay man, Gerald Scottow; his young subservient masochistic lover, Jamesie Evercreech; and Jamesie's vampirish lesbian sister, Violet Evercreech. The Evercreechs are distant cousins of Hannah and thus in line to inherit her wealth, giving them more motivation to be her jailers. This triangle surrounds the real physical Hannah.

In the other country manor lives Dr. Max Lejour, the philosophy professor and expert on Plato, his big-bonned botanist daughter, Alice; and his poet underachiving son, Pip. This triangle of characters tend to respond to an abstract and distant Hannah, on whom they project a range of emotions and thoughts. Pip was her young lover until discovered by Hannah's cousin-husband Peter Crean-Smith. He gazes toward her house with binoculars trying to see her, while spending his time fishing and writing poetry. Max, who has become reclusive to finish his great tome on Plato, sees her solitude and imprisonment through his own choice to become reclusive to a greater force than his own self interests. Alice, a thwarted romantic, suffers the lack of a lover and thus projects her loneliness onto Hannah.

Into this stable structure of 2 triangles, Murdoch inserts a triangle that serves as a catalyst for change. Miss Taylor has been hired to be Hannah's lady companion and she gradually learns the full story of Hannah's imprisonment. Effingham Cooper, an amazing egotist, comes to see himself as in love with Hannah and the prince that will save the sleeping beauty. Denis Nolan is the Celtic elfish man who worships Hannah as if she were the fairly queen and provides the information on which Marian Taylor and Effingham Cooper construct their rescue plot.

Iris Murdoch was a philosophy professior in addition to her outstanding career as a novelist. Philosophy gently emerges in two wonderful passages. In one passage she describes Ate, teh Greek concept regarding the ability of those in power to direct pain downward through the hierarchy or power structure. Another wonderful quote is from Aeschylus, "Zeus, who leads men into the ways of understanding, has established the rule that we must learn by suffering. As sad care, with memories of pain, comes dropping upon the heart in sleep, so even against our will does wisdom come upon us." Like Nietzche, Murdoch expresses the concept that human learning and knowledge do not make wisdom for learning, like mundane human life, is soon washed clean from the memory. Wisdom on the other hand comes only from painful experiences that can not be wiped clean from memory. Knowledge can be sought actively, but wisdom, since it is the product of painful experiences, comes to us involuntarily.

Like any gothic mystery, this one involves nieve characters who begin to put the puzzle pieces together to understand the mystery and then to become actors to resolve the tension or conflict. In this novel however, this traditional device becomes a tool for Murdoch to explore the fragility of human emotions and the ability to understand our own motivations and projections.

In keeping with her geometric structure of human relationships, Murdoch resolves the tensions and the plot with two murders and two suicides and five escapes from the bondage of Hannah's romantic imprisonment. Forthy five years have passed since this novel was first published and it retains the ability to entertain as we read a story of romantic images and archtypes projected upon the other players in the world by knowledgeable but all too fragile and self-absorbed human beings.