Customer Reviews

The Unicorn

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I've read a few of Iris Murdoch's early novels - Under the Net, Sandcastle, the Italian Girl, A Severed Head. The Unicorn was written after these, but still about the middle of Murdoch's oeuvre. As always, the characters are deliciously self-concious and enigmatic. The secrets of their pasts that underly their motivation are initially obscured and gradually revealed over the course of the novel. What makes the Unicorn different is the psychological depth at which the characters revealed. The Unicorn's characters are like the proverbial onion, and Murdoch, like a masochistic cook, peels the layers slowly.

The novel opens with the youthful and urbane Marian taking a post as a governace, with a altogether strange family in an entirely isolated coastal English community. She soon discovers that there aren't any children to look after, but that she is intended as a 'lady-companion' for Hannah, the mistress and virtual prisoner of the house. Marian slowly unravels the complicated web of relationships that bind the inhabitants of her strange new home together, in the process hatching a brave, if foolhardy, plot to rescue Hannah from self-imposed captivity.

To sum up, if you've never read any of her work, this may be a good place to dive into the novels of Iris Murdoch. It is a work that appeals both to fans of suspense, horror, and just good literature. Cheers

Both a gothic horror story and a heartbreaking character study, "The Unicorn" is quite possibly one of the best novels published in the english language in the latter part of the century.

With an angst-inducing atmosphere, the tale of Marian Taylor, restless, young and naïve, and the tormented Hannah (in a way, the Unicorn of the title)both exiled in a decrepit manse in rural England, close to the sea, but nowhere else, is a pilgrimage of the soul in search of freedom from the burden of [alleged] sin. But it seems, this cannot be.

Also, this book offers wisdom in many forms, including a quote that may very well make its way to the core of modern philosophy, as said by Marian: "Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, yet life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that is what i am experiencing just now."

Definitely a novel to be read many times and to be kept at hand for a long time to come.

"The Unicorn" has great pacing that makes you want to turn the page and see what happens next. It's slowed only by the characters' self-analysis. We might say there's a swamp of feeling that grows to a flood of feeling which paralells the weather within the story. Unicorn is set in a remote area of the British Isles by the sea. The story alternates characters through whom we see the story in its different parts: Marian, a teacher who comes to Gaze Castle and Effingham who's in love with 3 different women at different times, and who, through profuse self-analysis, is able to talk himself out of each of them. Both characters embody the yin and yang of uncertainty. It's their travel through waves of emotional uncertainty that gives the tale it's life-like feel. The supporting characters are delightfully distinct. Violet Evercreech is a judgmental oracle that made me picture Lily Tomlin running around the castle. Gerald Scottow is compex mix of opportunist and homosexual domineer. Denis is somber and taciturn, attracted briefly to Marian. The best chapter is Denis' rescue of Effingham. Jamsie, Scottow's boy toy, is delightfully weak. At the center of the storm is Hannah around whom Murdoch swirls the tale. Although the dead bodies tend to multiply quickly, we leave Unicorn with a bittersweet regret. This is one to savor! Enjoy!

The Unicorn reads easily, with a plot that the average reader can outline and follow: a young woman is hired as a governess to a remote, mysterious household on the English coastline -- Murdoch did have an enormous fascination with the ocean and the coast -- only to discover that there are no children to teach, but rather she has been secured to keep a young married woman, Hannah, company.

As the story progresses it is clear that Hannah is an extraordinary person in extraordinary circumstances. There are all the elements of a satisfying mystery novel -- deep dark secrets, rain and thunder, nighttime walks through the bog, odd personalities, spooky happenings.

But of course, it's a Murdoch novel, and that means a hefty undercurrent of psychological analysis, the fallibility of humans, the disastrous prognosis of sin, accidents of fate, and all the convoluted personality quirks Murdoch loved to inflict upon her characters. She gives the reader a full course meal of philosophical, theological and psychological food for thought all the while maintaining an entertaining story line and engaging characters.

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.

Marian Taylor has been engaged as governess at Gaze Castle, set on a remote and lonely faraway coastline. The tale begins with her growing sense of foreboding as she realizes that she been separated from the normal and understandable world. Instead, she finds herself in a web of murky forces, among a group of strange people living with a dark, unspoken secret.

At the center of the enchantment is Hannah Crean-Smith, the beautiful and mysterious lady of the castle. Marian soon learns that she is held in thrall, captive but willing, suffering but serene. While Marian's natural impulse is to fight for Hannah's freedom, she ultimately discovers that the forces of confinement are relentless, immovable, and overwhelming.

Murdoch portrays good and evil with a mastery that is uncanny and unsettling. And as always in her work, the writing in and of itself is powerful and evocative. The following description of a short trip from Gaze to a nearby town serves as an example...

"It was a clear day. The sea, at the horizon a hazier blue, faded away into azure light and became sky. To the north the bastions of limestone were a dark purple. To the south the land sloped now and the cliffs had ended. A few scattered cabins and tiny walled fields lined with blazing fuchsia appeared on the seaward shelves. Then there was the little harbour of Blackport with its yellow and black lighthouse and a cluster of sails and a long green headland beyond. Here the landscape was gentle, ordinary, human. It was the end of the appalling land."

The Unicorn resonates on many dimensions and makes for rich and rewarding reading.

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.

This is an older book by a great author that was a pleasure to read. The author draws you into the mysterious world and you are hooked until the dramatic conclusion. Beautiful descriptions of the land and bogs are plentiful.

I am a newcomer to the works of Iris Murdoch and I find her style enthralling. The title and cover description are misleading; this work is not metaphysical or etherial. It is about relationships and emotion.

Very enjoyable

Iris Murdoch's THE UNICORN is one of her more unusual experiments, an attempt to take the elements of Gothic fiction (including a governess hired to work at a lonely cliffside manor in the middle of nowhere) and add to them a serious philosophical underpinning. Unfortunately, it sounds much better than it reads. There are many terrific elements to this work, including a strikingly unusual setting on the West Coast of Ireland between the Cliffs of Moher and the Morren (here called "the Scarren"), and there is a wonderfully creepy scene when one of the central characters becomes lost at night and begins slowly to sink into a bog, sparking a marvelous existential crisis. But you get the sense here that Murdoch is not in full control of her story, and far too many events are told to characters by other characters in retrospect, and far too much depends on hatching wild plans not fully fleshed out and on characters acting against their own best interests because they are inexplicably compelled by someone else's personality. Worst of all,one of the characters is a philosopher working on a book on Plato that is painfully relevant to the events of the novel (you feel as if Murdoch doesn't trust you to figure out her philosophical concepts behind the story on your own).