The Unicorn

Rating:
Summary: Flows Gracefully
Review: "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!

Rating:
Summary: Flows Gracefully
Review: "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!

Rating:
Summary: A good read
Review: Although it took me awhile to really get into this book, once "there" I was sucked in. It reminded of what Wilkie Collins said about writing, "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, and make 'em wait." Iris Murdoch does all of these things in The Unicorn. It is darkly romantic and mysterious as well as suspenseful.

Rating:
Summary: A Marvelous Modern Gothic
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Unicorn wades into a Gothic swamp...
Review: I was pleased with An Unofficial Rose by Dame Iris Murdoch. Her prose had an ethereal quality combined with the very best and elegant of the British reserve. So when The Unicorn beaconed from a shelf in a used bookstore, I happily succumbed.
I do love the fantastic and the fairytale genre, a great vehicle for great ideas.
The book starts out well enough, laying out the marshy grounds and casting enough fog for three Gothic horror stories. I could almost hear the growls of the Hound Of the Baskervilles while the characters wonder across the bog. The dim epicenter of the story is the beautiful, mysterious and of course aristocratic Hannah. She seems to be voluntarily enduring confinement in the familial castle. Her past as well as the past of her household is murkier then the flood waters in the local stream. Sleeping Beauty is cited more than once. Naturally, almost every character in the book, male or female, obsesses with Hannah and even tries on the shining armor of the rescuer prince. In other words, they all try to resuscitate her to normal life.
So far so good. Then the violent denouement comes and all of a sudden we have more corpses then a Shakesperean tragedy. The dialogue becomes less and less credible and while Shakespearean deaths are written in soul-shattering verse, Dame Iris succeeds in re-enacting the atmosphere of a daytime soap opera. I know the comparison is unfair, the gap is too wide between the tragic and melodramatic but I couldn't help myself.
Overall, an unsatisfying experience, a story unworthy of her otherwise eloquent voice.

Rating:
Summary: The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: it's a mystery.
Review: This is my second Iris Murdoch novel, after "The Sea, The Sea," and I'm still not sure if I've got the hang of her style. Maybe I am too conscious of her reputation as a Major Writer And Philosopher; I consciously look for any symbolic gesture, object or situation which might help me catch the underlying message, but so far in vain. I find her novels limp both in narrative and ideas. Her plot is often contrived, and her characters thoroughly unnatural. One wonders if the story is only meant to serve as a vehicle for the Grand Idea (and therefore not to be expected too much of! ), of which one catches a glimpse here and there - for instance in Max's elaboration on the Greek concept of Ate, which seems to be meant to apply to Hannah and the people surrounding her. However, the ideational component is too general, and the vessel (plot & characters) too detached from it, for the reader to fully comprehend and sympathize. I came away with a vague sense of dissatisfaction, both with the book and with myself. If I'm the only dense one here, let me know.

Rating:
Summary: The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch
Review: This novel can be summarized simply and briefly. If you like Jerry Springer, you'll love "The Unicorn". It is not even close to reality.