A Severed Head by Iris MurdochMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Iris Murdoch is the author of messy relationships, of typical 1960s “everybody sleeps with everybody” tales served with a grain of metaphysics and Sartrean philosophy. This is her wildest and funniest book, a bizarre study of human desire, complete with incest and spouse swapping. The main character is a middle-aged, upper middle class hedonist who believes he has his life well organized as he possesses both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover... until one day his existence is plunged into chaos, demonstrating how little we often are in control of our lives.
This is the story of the shifting relations between six people: a couple in their early forties, wine merchant (and hard drinker) Martin Lynch-Gibbon and his some years older, very beautiful wife Antonia; Martin's friend and Antonia's psychoanalyst, the benevolent Palmer Anderson; Palmer's half-sister, Honor Klein, an enigmatic small, dark woman who is lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University; Martin's brother Alexander, a sculptor who has always stolen Martin's girlfriends; and Martin's lover, Georgie, a young and rather sloppy academic in her twenties. (Another person in the novel is Martin's sister Rosemary, an effective organizer, but she takes no part in the love charade).
At the beginning of the story Martin reflects self-satisfied how well he has organized his double life, with a beautiful wife and a young lover, forgetting that his marriage is stale and that he is too much of an egoist to understand his lover Georgie's great devotion to him (which even includes an abortion). But he is shocked out of his complacency when that same day his wife informs him that she wants a divorce to marry Palmer with whom she has had an affair for some time now. The adulterer himself cuckolded... this may seem something you've read before. But the couplings in A Severed Head are surrealistic rather than realistic, and we still have several switches ahead of us.
First, Martin's affair with Georgie comes out (thanks to Honor Klein) which makes him in fact loose his love for her – now that he can marry Georgie, he has no interest anymore. But he falls violently in love with Honor, Palmer's sister, after assaulting and slapping her during an argument. This, however, is also no plain sailing as Martin next catches Honor in bed with her half-brother Palmer – apparently they have had a long incestuous relationship. Antonia, in the meantime, feels that Palmer's attitude towards her has changed and she makes things up with Martin, even starting to live together again. Martin's brother Alexander announces to everybody's surprise (and Antonia's shock) that he is going to marry Georgie. However, Georgie suddenly attempts suicide – thanks to again Honor Klein, she has found out something Antonia now also divulges to Martin, namely that she (Antonia) has been sleeping with Alexander since even before her marriage to Martin – undercutting even the security of the past. Georgie now flees into the all-accommodating arms of Palmer (who has slept with Martin's wife, girlfriend and wished-for girlfriend who is his own sister – thinking along Freudian lines, one would think these two men are secretly in love...).
At the end of the novel everyone is newly paired off: Antonia gets her long-term secret lover Alexander; Palmer takes Georgie with him and moves to America; and Martin finally is coupled with the enigmatic Honor, but as she warns him: this has nothing to do with happiness! (Don't worry, you have not been reading a romance!). And to get here, Martin's progress has been like a descent into hell. But this was necessary: he has paid with despair and anxiety for the growth of a fuller emotional and imaginative life. In the end, he accepts a more dangerous way of life. Both he and Honor will have to take a chance.
Despite that, all the time we have been in civilized society here, so the wild beast lurking behind the mask is kept carefully hidden. Dark feelings are hidden behind civilized exchanges of pleasantries.
Honor Klein compares herself to the “severed head” of the title, made up and painted, and used by wild tribes in some prophetic ritual. Tellingly, in one scene Honor plays with a Japanese sword, the ideal implement for cutting off heads. And of course “severed head” also refers to the Greek myth of the Medusa, a female with a hideous face and venomous snakes instead of hair. Everyone who saw her face was instantly turned into stone. The petrifying Medusa is of course also a Freudian symbol of castration. We could say that the doubleness of Martin's life has to be broken down, he has to “loose his head (and rationality)” before he can see how wrong his previous life was. In the same way, coming upon the incest between Honor and Palmer, has shaken Martin to his foundations, something necessary for him to get a new perspective and realize how strong the primitive mysteries of the flesh are.
Finally, with its shifting relationships, "A Severed Head" is also one of the great novels about the unknowability of other human beings.
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