A Severed Head, by Iris Murdoch

Knotty. Tangled. Twisted. Complicated. My head spun reading this novel, as Murdoch creates a maximum number of sexual affairs with a minimum number of characters. (I wonder if she wanted the tension of numerous adulterous relationships with the ease of relatively few characters to flesh--get it?--out.) The whole novel is like a middle-school math problem: between her six main characters, there are eight affairs. Martin and Antonia, Martin and Georgie, Martin and Honor; Palmer and Antonia, Palmer and Honor, Palmer and Georgie; Alexander and George, Alexander and Antonia. What's even worse, two of those six, I won't tell you who, are brother and sister.

Reading Murdoch is always a surprise to me, besides the head-spinning plot antics. Here's the thing: she's like Virginia Woolf in many ways. Her characters feel intense, complex emotions, the like of which I've never experienced, and have flashes of psychological penetration that, likewise, I've never known. Maybe I'm just not that insightful--and one could make a very good argument in this direction--but basing a plot on that sort of thing makes me rather skeptical. The average person, I sense, doesn't feel that way.

Murdoch, though, is unlike Woolf in several key respects. Where Woolf sets her characters free to see things in each other's eyes--"as she looked directly at him she realized that he was abused as a child and now suffers from an incredibly hard-to-explain complex, in which he wants to be his father to punish himself to marry his mother and blah blah blah"--Murdoch keeps hers firmly under the control of their intellects, their educations, and the tight reins of their society; that is, she keeps her characters, at all costs, British. (Strangely enough, the character with all the psychological penetration in this novel is American. Then again, he's also the one sleeping with his sister, using an entirely different kind of penetration, so maybe one should take his ideas about psychology with a grain of salt.) The characters in A Severed Head maintain that essential Britishness to a fault. Martin, left by his wife, behaves "sensibly" and "kindly," allowing her to remain his friend, and, what's more, to take care of him in his loneliness. He's suave, reasonable, and, above all else, civilized. He's also getting utterly screwed, but I guess, with all those affairs going on, that's kind of the point.

While this effort is not as rich or as visceral as her masterpiece, The Sea, The Sea, prose-wise, at least, this is a solid work. With her allusion-laden, description-rich, dialogue-poor prose, Murdoch is a literary foremother to one of my contemporary favorites, A.S. Byatt. She is, at heart, an intellectual, and it shows--not like a tacky slip or bra strap, but like small gold earrings under perfectly coiffed hair: quiet, elegant, tasteful. Though, presumably, her life is different from theirs, her style is her characters' style, tightly controlled and utterly civilized, like the tastefully furnished flats they live in. That's mostly what makes books like hers so delightful--beneath those perfect clothes, behind those expensive curtains, are rich inner lives, knotty psyches, and tangled woven webs, and that's where all the fun begins.