Spellbound
Emerson, Donald
Spellbound The Unicorn, by Iris Murdoch. Viking. 311 pp. $5. Reviewed by Donald Emerson Miss Murdoch's seventh novel resembles A Severed Head in its intricate pattern of personal relationships...
...The characters of The Unicorn tend more to the comparative shallowness typical of those of A Severed Head...
...Her conviction is as yet in advance of her practice, but it is a guarantee that her work will grow in power...
...Denis, corrupt in his own eyes because he attempted to fight evil with evil, carries away a guilt which will isolate him in suffering as for years Hannah was isolated...
...And though she is at pains to create her atmosphere, she does it at an even brisker pace than usual, with a plot abounding in the sudden reverses and revelations she always makes effective...
...It is even likely that if she will give more space to analysis of her characters, the play of her wonderful intelligence will reveal the completely life-like figures she has not yet achieved...
...Max has never seen her since the catastrophe which followed his son Philip's love affair with her seven years before, nor has Philip...
...When Hannah at last leaves the house of her own free will it is only to meet her fate in the general doom which brings her down along with Gerald, Philip, and her returning husband...
...In The Unicorn a mystical sense of the supernatural gives the violence a tragic inevitability in which the reader acquiesces...
...Max's old student, Effingham Cooper, pays his annual visit about the time of Marian's arrival at Gaze...
...In another Murdoch novel one of the characters declares that insoluble problems can be resolved only by violence...
...Nobody suffered in that brilliantly witty novel, because nobody was quite real...
...Effingham can even congratulate himself that he has been saved by his colossal egoism...
...Violence is inevitable in Miss Murdoch's world of the commonplace mixed with the strange...
...She is convinced at moments that Hannah is imprisoned most of all by her resignation to suffering as a spiritual duty...
...Marian is at first troubled to find Hannah Crean-Smith imprisoned as though by enchantment, and at last terrified to feel the spell subtly entrapping her also...
...Gerald Scottow, the chief jailer, provokes Marian's terror most of all by proving how easily he can bend her will...
...These are the principal inmates of Gaze Castle, spellbound about the spiritual sleeping beauty, Hannah...
...He connives with Marian in an unsuccessful attempt to spirit Hannah away...
...This is more serious than the intellectual game which Miss Murdoch played with her readers in A Severed Head...
...Into the strange setting of a house fixed on a cliff between a murderous sea and a treacherous bog she brings Marian Taylor, representative of the ordinary world of common-sense reality...
...But for all the family traits, this latest offspring has its own fey character...
...In the sole nearby house are Max Lejour and his grown children, who no more than Marian have been able to free Hannah...
...For the whole pattern is the resolution of a spell, or, to the philosopher Max, the fulfillment of an archetypal destiny...
...There was more solid characterization in An Unofficial Rose...
...She cannot decide whether Hannah is the innocent victim of her absent husband's vindic-tiveness or a profligate wife who allegedly attempted to murder Peter Crean-Smith years before...
...Miss Murdoch has lectured brilliantly on the importance of character portrayal in the novel...
...Denis Nolan, who alone loves and serves Hannah unpossessively, reluctantly conspires with Marian to aid her although he is convinced a destiny is preparing an obscure fate for them all...
...Reviewed by Donald Emerson Miss Murdoch's seventh novel resembles A Severed Head in its intricate pattern of personal relationships and An Unofficial Rose in the moral seriousness of its subject...
...Hannah, the central and crucial figure, is necessarily elusive, as befits her in her symbolic role...
...She cannot free Hannah, and part of her terror comes of her acquiescence in her own imprisonment...
...she does not want to save herself...
...In The Unicorn there is grim apprehension of destinies working out their patterns through individuals who grope for the significance of their troubled lives...
...She has almost no equal in skillful plotting, and she maintains a brisk and dramatic pace...
...No one can save her...
...The Celtic fatality which overhangs a little group nearly isolated in a wild coastal setting has been foreshadowed in earlier suggestions of strange powers...
...Marian, somewhat battered, escapes again to the normal world...
...in time she succumbs herself...
...Marian is not long in doubt of the identities of her great enemy and her staunch ally...
...She is never dull...
...Miss Murdoch has a deserved reputation as a humorist, but this time she restrains herself, even when she is showing up another of the egocentric characters she does so well...
...The powers of good and evil work through human agents, however, and Marian is never entirely certain whether Hannah is the blessed unicorn of Christian symbolism or a demonic enchantress who dooms everyone near her...
...But the others are not much better, and they acquire substance only from their patterned functions...
...In Ann Peronett Miss Murdoch attempted with considerable success to portray that most difficult type, a believable good woman...
...The result is not melodrama, however, because there is always a high purpose to Miss Murdoch's manipulations...
...Miss Murdoch even entitled one novel The Flight from the Enchanter...
...Marian cannot break the spell...
...She was undoubtedly speaking for her author...
Vol. 27 • July 1963 • No. 7
