Rating: 
Summary: BORING
Review: I wish I could come up with a better and deeper headline than that but I couldn't. What a big sprawling pointless mass of largess this fifth novel by Iris Murdoch was. I though with the brevity of its pages this would be a little coldblooded shark of a book. That, plus its author, who I had read previously and been marvelouslly entertained, led me to the mistake of reading this.This novel centers on the marriage of Martin and Anotonia Lynch-Gibbons, the heirs to a prosperous wine merchant business. Well, that is, if you could call it a marriage. Martin carries on affairs with multiple women and doesn't have a second thought about it. In fact he feels that his needs can only be met by two women, his wife and his mistress Georgie, a professor of economics. He is going ahead with his "normal" life when his wife breaks down and admits she is having an affair and is madly in love with her psychiatrist, Palmer Anderson, and wants to get a divorce. This sends Martin into a space of hypocrisy hitherto unheard of. He is hurt and enraged at the exact same behaviors that he exhibits but holds back his tongue because he cannot be without his wife. It complicates things that Martin himself might be in love with Palmer. Martin starts down a road of masochistic love for everyone that does him wrong that makes a martyr look lazy. Everytime he sets his heart on committing to someone, he finds out that other person has someone they love that they were concealing from him. It almost becomes the book of Job starring Pepe le Pew. This book is peopled with confused men and women who would rather be in love with multiple people instead of risking all of their love on one. They are all cowardly and shy of taking risks and thereby put themselves in line for a lot of torture. As the book progresses we learn of affair within affair within affair like a chinese box toy. It is in this that the book begins to show its weakness. When anyone admits to an affair that person admits to an affair and then that person admits to an affair and ad infinitum. I know what farce is but this book goes a little too far. Another thing I didn't like about the book is that the descriptive passages and the dialogue seem to be from two different works of fiction. There is no unity. Murdoch at some times seems to be too worried about color of shoes or what two fingers someone is holding a cigarette between than telling a story. The dialogue seems totally removed and distant from the setting and the characters. You feel as if a play and a poem have been interspliced with no rationale. I would stay away from this book. Check out The Good Apprentice or The Italian Girl for better reads.
Rating: 
Summary: A Masterpiece of Sly Humour
Review: In "A Severed Head," Iris Murdoch takes the bedroom farce to a whole new level. It's a tangled tale of love, adultery, deception, self-deception, jealousy and attempted suicide, all rendered with deadpan humour and with just enough darkness lurking behind the scenes to make it even more interesting. Many of Murdoch's novels have a central character cast as the master manipulator, but here it's never clear who is manipulating whom. The portrayal of the ponderous, rather smug protagonist is a masterpiece of sly character assassination and the immortal Honor Klein is...well, you'll have to read the book to find out. Heartily recommended.
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece of Sly Humour
Review: In "A Severed Head," Iris Murdoch takes the bedroom farce to a whole new level. It's a tangled tale of love, adultery, deception, self-deception, jealousy and attempted suicide, all rendered with deadpan humour and with just enough darkness lurking behind the scenes to make it even more interesting. Many of Murdoch's novels have a central character cast as the master manipulator, but here it's never clear who is manipulating whom. The portrayal of the ponderous, rather smug protagonist is a masterpiece of sly character assassination and the immortal Honor Klein is...well, you'll have to read the book to find out. Heartily recommended.
Rating:
Summary: iris murdoch
Review: Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head is a fantastic read. During my commute to and from work my head was buried between the pages of this absorbing tale. Meanwhile, my mouth fell open and surprise twinkled in my eyes at what I had read. I will read it again.
Rating: 
Summary: Iris Murdoch is a literary genius
Review: Iris Murdoch, writer of over 25 plays, short stories, essays, and novels, writes about the relationships of Martin Lynch-Gibbons and his wife Antonia. The plot thinckens as Palmer Anderson and Honor Klein enter the scene... A satire on relationships. Truly a great book to read on a rainy night.
Rating:
Summary: A Surrealist tale
Review: Martin Lynch-Gibbon thinks he has it all. He is envied by all by marrying Antonia, a beauty sought by many wealthy and influential men. He has a mistress named Georgie and is quite content with his life. Unfortunately, his wife drops a bombshell. She wants to leave him for her psychotherapist, a man Martin himself introduced her to! He tries to dissuade her by being very civilized about the whole thing. He says all right have an affair but let's forget all this nonsense about divorce. However, Antonia is adament. Martin finds to his dismay that he is to be part of a threesome (not sexual) between Antonio, Palmer and himself. He becomes angry at himself for allowing his emasculazation but rather than take it out on his tormenters, he "acts out" with the enigmatic Honor Klein, Palmer's half-sister. Nothing in this book is what you would imagine. Put aside all preconceptions and simply read it, not just for the story, which seems to move sideways rather than forward but for the character studies and be prepared - nothing is what you think. Iris Murdoch was a great novelist and her irony reminds me a bit of Jane Austin's, although it is of a different kind. While Austin's irony has more to do with words than situations, Murdoch's is more ironic in the situations she creates than the words she uses although her words are marvelous. The dialogues (both internal and external) the characters use are sly and witty. After Pride and Prejudice, I would have to say that this is my favorite book.
Rating:
Summary: Mirror game
Review: One of her shortest novels, A severed head is one of Murdoch's most playful books. It also has the moral weight of the others. What she relates is how our lives are nothing because are made of perceptions, and these peceptions can be false. The main character starts having everything he can guess of and ends entering a new life more real, more painful and new after confronting what he think with what it is. Incredibly written and amusing.
Rating:
Summary: The best book about the power of love...
Review: The best book about the power of love...
how the true love gives one the energy to do, act, overcome
how the true love takes away the fear, makes the conditions of life that you once thought to be insurmountable obstacles seem irrelevant
love that fills your life with a sense of purpose, lova that makes you live, not just exist
Rating:
Summary: love stories, like musical chairs - in a washing machine
Review: This is an unusual and enjoyable novel, full of struggling (largely unsympathetic) characters, delicious ironies, and understated mysteries that ply the readers' imagination even after it abruptly ends. The basic plot is about a marriage in crisis, but every time the reader thinks (s)he knows what's going on, more surprises - all horrendous and shocking - are just around the corner. Alliances and new life commitments are made and re-made in every chapter, to the point that just about every combination is eventually tried and tested and rejected, without ever reaching an equilibrium. The narrator is constantly confused and yet slogging ahead (with the help of a lot of drink) and trying to find a safe love along with total love, perhaps from more than one woman. The whole thing reads like a relentless parlor comedy, and often feels unrealistic, but the purpose of Murdock seems to be to get the reader to reconsider his/her life while laughing and yet horrified at the actions of the characters. It is, in my view, an exquisite balance of pain and ironic humor, a masterwork really. It also highlights how different the cultures are that share a language across the Atlantic: Brits really do have extremely different ideas about how to behave, including staying polite and nice in the face of the cruellest spousal betrayals and hypocrisy, though there are small eruptions of erotic violence. THe ending is just as confusing and unexpected as the rest of the book, and the trajectory that the characters will follow is totally unpredictable, which means they are vivid enough to live in the readers' mind. Warmly recommended. THis can be read and re-read with profit, and I certainly will. It is a great gift book for the discerning reader.
Rating:
Summary: English Decadence
Review: This is my first foray into Iris Murdoch territory and I must say I am quite impressed. She writes with wit and vitality and there is much wisdom here also. This story has to do with a group of people in contemporary (at least as of 1962, when the book was written), English aristocracy. They are all civilized and elegant and tasteful. The plot has to do with the various marital infidelities committed by each and every one of them, and their varying reactions to these discoveries. The inclination of these people is to treat these things in a very civilized, low-key way. For example, there is an amusing scene in which the husband goes to get champagne to celebrate the announcement that his wife has found happiness by carrying on with . . . well, better not say too much. This emerges as an interesting theme. At want point does civility itself become immoral, when faced with immoral behavior? Must one continue to wear the famous vaunted, stoic, brave English face while inside one is churning with pain? Well, one does if one recognizes that one is standing in the way of another's happiness. But what is happiness? Love? Perhaps, but another important theme of the novel is that love is not always what we think it is. Simple desire often clouds the issue, as does envy, or even baser motives, such as revenge. So how does civility fit in when faced with such complex and undefinable human emotions? Ms. Murdoch offers no easy answers. In fact, the somewhat ambiguous ending would seem to indicate that humans--or at least upper-class English humans--will always flout convention when pursuing happiness. Or love. Or the perception of these. This a fine novel. Although towards the end it careens into farce, one does not have to be an expert in the manners of mid-century English society to recognize what are, indeed, universal themes.
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