Under the Symbol
The Unicorn. By Iris Murdoch. (Chatto and Windus, 21s.) BECAUSE Under the Net came out close to Hurry On Down and Lucky Jim, and was linked with them, Iris Murdoch is often still described as one of our social-realist novelists. In fact, she is a surrealist, a writer of mythic novels or romances (the romance showing, as Richard Chase has put it, freedom from verisimilitude and 'a tendency' towards melodrama and idyll'). She is evidently determined to prove the point once for all in The Unicorn, the least social, most nakedly mythical of all her novels. Her publishers compare it with Sheridan Le Fanu, and it is of Victorian romance that one straight- way thinks. The opening is familiar; a young girl, seeing her situation as 'romantic,' the new landscape and seascape around her as 'sublime,' goes as governess to an isolated household where all is not what it seems. What she finds at Gaze Castle, in her charge, is a prisoner, the shut- away wife of Victorian romance, the Sleeping Beauty, the Unicorn, the cluitelaine of the Courtly Love stories, thicketed with thorns. Thereafter the best gloss is C. S. Lewis's Allegory of Love, save that the allegory begins to shimmer and alter as the surrealist exposes herself.
As in some earlier Murdoch novels, the situa- tion is shaped around the Mars-Venus-Vulcan situation of lover, woman, twisted husband, and around the moment of stasis in the love ritual when everything stops and we see the objec- tivity of the impersonal universe. Hannah Crean-Smith, beautiful but scented with whisky, shut away by her deceived husband Peter, who dominates but is absent from the action, is the Unicorn—'our image of the significance of suffering. But we must also see her as real. And that will make us suffer too.' So says Max Lejour, the scholarly recluse at the neighbouring house- hold of Riders, whose son is Hannah's lover of seven years before and whose favourite student, on holiday there, is currently in love with her. Suffering and poised in suspension, associated with the idea of self-extinction in which alone we can reflect the objective universe, Hannah's role is given a religious connotation.
But the novel is romantic in another sense; Miss Murdoch explores her plot by presenting us, again as in previous books, with a large variety of shifting sexual relationships among a fixed, closed group of people—the community at Gaze Castle, tending Hannah, and the group at Riders. The essential surprises, of the action take place entirely in terms of sexual discoveries, of new relationships, hetero- and homo-sexual, and new forms of emotion. The intensity and real sensitivity with which Miss Murdoch always handles the contacts and emotions of love pro- vide her with an effective means of deception, since stability is the last thing to be characteristic of any affectionate relationship she shows. The sexual ritual is given half-ironically, but it is one of gradual discovery in which the various partners serve rather as stepping stones toward truth. The problem of Miss Murdoch's way of depicting love is that it can all too easily ,become a game an amusing pattern of change-rounds and surprises within a set of characters. And where in Under the Net we have London bohemia to interest us in the game, where in A Severed Head we have an ironic picture of Bloomsbury, in this book we depend entirely upon the symbolic meanings centred in Hannah and the sea of self-extinction that floods the novel at the end to distance and explain the action. There is an element of unsureness in the depiction of Hannah, and in the working-out of the action toward the close, that takes us away from this essentially anti-romantic centre of revelation. And it is this faint hint of the game, the love game which becomes all of A Severed Head when it is put onstage, which will worry the reader most in this remarkable book.
MALCOLM eaApauav
Previous page
