Iris Murdoch - The Unicorn

The first two thirds of The Unicorn seem to me to be among Iris Murdochs best work. The power of the narrative, the readers mere wish to know what happens next, embodies another strong development, from symbol through mystery to revelation. Both intensify from the strangeness of the opening, when Marian Taylor finds herself at an isolated railway station helpless and almost frightened, through the drive which takes her fifteen miles across a landscape which possesses both ones visual and ones symbolic imagination, to Gaze Castle, where the mystery which centres on its mistress, Hannah Crean-Smith, is elaborated without any single solution, until it issues in a revelation, Effingham Coopers vision of the death of self at the point of physical death in the bog. This part of the story reaches its peak after Effinghams rescue, when he sees the three handsome faces of Marian, of Hannah and of Alice Lejour, who has been unrequitedly in love with him for twenty years, as like an icon of the Trinity, and his vision seems to have been perhaps the truth, the very truth, which resided in [Hannah] in a sort of sleeping state and which made round about her the perpetual sense of a spiritual disturbance.

Immediately after this the pace of the narrative changes, as Gerald Scottow, the factor at Gaze, announces that Hannahs husband Peter, who has been absent for the seven years during which Hannahs mystery has built up, is coming home. The mystery is shattered in the remaining third of the book by a headlong series of events, seduction, murder and suicide, which slow down only when Effingham sees, in a counter to the icon of the Trinity, laid out in the drawing room at Gaze in the engraved twilight, as in a picture by Blake the three shrouded dead bodies of Hannah, Peter and Gerald. There is something over hasty in this whole sequence, which reaches its extreme in the next chapter, when Hannahs servant Denis Nolan confesses to Marian that he had murdered Peter Crean-Smith Because of what I saw at that other time. And what I feared for her. It is not even clear what that other time refers to, although the phrase ought to bind the two parts of the story together.

The contrast between the two parts is without much doubt deliberate, even if it has, as I think, been overdone in the second part. In December 1959, two or three years before she wrote The Unicorn, Iris had ended an essay called The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited by saying that A novel must be a house fit for free characters to live in; and to combine form with a respect for reality with all its odd contingent ways is the highest art of prose. Earlier in the same paragraph she had described the modern novelists quest for form as involving a temptation to imagine that the problem of a novel is solvedas soon as a form in the sense of a satisfactory myth has been evolved, at a moment which any artist both dreads and longs for the moment at which form irrevocably crystallises. This looks like an exact description of the first part of The Unicorn: and the second part is equally well described when she goes on There is then the much more difficult battle to prevent that form from becoming rigid, by the free expansion against it of the individual characters. Here above all the contingency of the characters must be respected. Contingency must be defended for it is the essence of personality. I guess that she was describing here her own experience of writing The Bell, her then most recently published novel (1958), in which form and respect for contingency seem to be effortlessly combined. In the immediately succeeding novels, A Severed Head, An Unofficial Rose, and The Unicorn itself, the battle between the two was always in danger of becoming too self-conscious, with a paradoxical tendency to turn towards a compelled contingency for her characters.