Access Today An Unofficial Rose Engineered By Iris Murdoch Compiled As EText

fairly typical Murdoch which is a good thing, imo, charting the tangled lives and reconfigured and unrequited relationships of family and friends, featuring a Svengalilike figure, and focusing on just a year or two.
Most of the characters are somewhat lonely and broken, with a tendency to introspection, no one is very happy for long, and few of the characters are very

likeable though all are intriguing.


One way in which it differs from some of Murdoch's other novels is that all but one of the women are strong and take the initiative one is the master puppeteer, but others have their own schemes and most of the men just watch or react, somewhat haphazardly.


CAST
Hugh has just been widowed, Years ago, he had a fling with his wife's childhood friend, Emma Sands, who now lives with her beautiful younger companion possibly more, Lindsay Rimmer.
Hugh and Fanny's daughter, Sally/Sarah lives in Australia with her husband and four children and another on the way, The oldest is Penn boy ofwho comes to stay with his uncle Randall, Randall's wife is the rather wet and pious Ann, They have a mysterious daughter, Miranda, aged, and recently lost their son, Steve who was roughly Penn's age, They have a large house and run a successful rosegrowing business their marriage is less successful,

Mildred and Humphrey Finch are friends, primarily of Hugh's, They have a happy but chaste marriage, and Mildred yearns for Hugh, Her brother, Felix, is interested in Lindsay and Ann, and the vicar has a bit of a crush on Ann, There is a frisson between Penn and Miranda, and there are fears that the gay Humphrey may have designs on Penn,

Clearly, no good can come of any of this, and as new relationships are tentatively formed, matters become more complex,

Penn is the obvious outsider, but each character is an outsider in some way, even to themselves, Hugh just bumbles along, largely oblivious to everything unless it's spelt out to him,

You could almost make a case for Hugh's Tintoretto as a character, "a pearl whose watery whiteness both reflected and resisted the soft surrounding honeycoloured shades".


PUPPETRY
Like most Murdoch books, this features someone more than one pulling strings in the lives of others, primarily for their twisted personal enjoyment.
Consequences don't seem to feature in their calculations: "There was in X's apprehension of things, . . nothing grossly predatory. They were like servants who run ahead of their master, symbols of a presence, almost sacraments, " One man is attracted by the "moral otherness" of one such schemer,

At times, the manipulation borders on the magical: "fear, attraction, puzzlement and hostility, which had once together compose a sort of enchantment" and "she has drawn me here, witchlike".


This theme is also reflected in the way Miranda still plays with dolls, Her grandfather ponders how she "managed to combine her Peter Pannish demeanour with a knowingness which made Hugh sometimes conjecture that it was all a sort of masquerade".
Even Randall still treasures his cuddly toys,

This gives a somewhat theatrical feel to the whole book, "positively enjoying the atmosphere of relaxed drama which surrounded Emma, It was as if Emma made her Ann exist more, . . she had an agreeable sense almost of being seduced, "

SEX VERSUS CHASTITY
There is sex, but largely offstage, What's more interesting is the relationships that endure but are apparently chaste, all for different reasons, Divorce was less common in, and some of the characters are sincerely trying to live Christian lives,

"He made of his quiet love, . . a sort of home He waited. "

"Their relationship was was intimate yet abstract, a frictionless machine which generated little warmth, but which functioned excellently,

"All sorts of catastrophes can happen inside a marriage without destroying it, . . Thank God marriages don't depend on love, "

"Perhaps in their days of happiness, their personalities had been too hazy for the question of whether they 'fitted' to arise, Now the haze had cleared and they had hardened into incompatible shapes, "

The daisychain of relationships seems neverending the relationships that seem to end, never really do, perhaps resurfacing as "a dark new passion" that "was like a mutual haunting".


MODERN SENSIBILITIES
Apart from less divorce and more Christianity inthan in, there are a couple of ideas that strike a wrong note now: the tacit assumption that homosexuality and pederasty are the same, and a jocular rape threat issued to a woman who is being a bit of a tease "I shall probably beat you and certainly rape you" if you don't change your mind.


MOURNING
All the characters are mourning people, opportunities and experiences, Ann feels "perpetually haunted and mocked by a music of happiness which came from some inaccessible elsewhere, "

Hugh is mourning Fanny, "his grief, . . came to him with a kind of healing intensity, He burned himself with that pure pain, But he knew too that he had been touched by, . . some leper touch, which would work out its own relentless chemistry, " He is also juggling that loss with the guilt of not being a better husband his longago affair and wistfulness at lost opportunities,

In the aftermath of Fanny's death, Hugh goes to stay with Randall's family, who are also still mourning Steve, but it affects them all very differently.
High finds it oppressive, "The big indifferent house, upon which the unhappiness of him and his had made so little impression, and where the phantoms of his sadness were without a resting place.
"

DICKENS
The opening is oddly reminiscent of the famous opening lines of Dickens' sitelinkA Christmas Carol, but I'm not sure whether to read further significance into it:
"Fanny Peronett was dead.
That much her husband Hugh Peronett was certain of as he stood in the rain beside the grave, "

HAPPINESS
The suggestion is that the best chance of happiness is from forgetting and reinventing,

QUOTES
"He could pass as a distinguished man, just as he could pass as a good husband, . . But the terror and the glory of life had passed him by, "
Unlike the living characters, "Poor Fanny had no secrets, She had been a woman without mystery, There had been no dark in her, "
"Miranda was as pale as her mother, but her face had the transparency of marble, where Ann's had the dullness of wax, "
"The sun was shining, but in a feeble unconvinced sort of way, "
"His expression of rapturous doubt joined with apprehension of a higher and inconceivably beneficent yet also dangerous world, . . Her tender, intent, ironical gaze gently toasted one side of his face, "
"Mildred set her feet apart in a patient yet stubborn pose which indicated with brutal clarity that she was waiting for Swann to go, "
"Remembering an infatuation, she "seemed in his memory to drip with colours almost too vivid to bear",
"A niche reserved for men of independent means and limited ambition, "
"The silence that followed began to coil and accumulate into a great white shell of eloquence and understanding",
Mother and daughter share "a tension, an excessive mutual consciousness, a hostile magnetism, "
I love Iris Murdoch, She is my favorite author, I savor every one of her books, even on repeated readings, Thus it was a bit of a surprise for me that I didn't love An Unofficial Rose,

It's a good book, It truly is. But it isn't her best, At times it almost felt formulaic yet again, she takes good people and manipulates the situation to see if truly good people will behave badly or if they will act against themselves due to their goodness.
Usually her characters are so interesting and unique that this process is fascinating, However, I didn't care about the characters in An Unofficial Rose, The characters were quirky, good, evil, duplicitous all of the expected character types were present, But in the end I didn't like any of them, Even worse, I found almost all of them differing degrees of boring,

Murdoch's use of language is as wonderful as ever in An Unofficial Rose, She has a way of creating beauty while describing the most mundane of scenes, There were passages I savored, but overall, the book didn't meet my expectations for Murdoch's novels, I wasnt exactly sucked in by the synopsis on the back of my Warner Library paperback issue of thisnovel, But Ive never been let down by an Iris Murdoch book yet, and this proved to be no exception, Its a novel of love and British manners among the upper crust of society, A Tintoretto painting is the centerpiece, along with a German dagger, One of the main characters of the novel is Hugh Peronett, a late middleaged widower whom many of the female characters often warmly refer to as a “simple ass.
” Ive been called an ass by women Ive admired, I could probably die happy if at some point in my life a powerful and attractive British woman called me an ass, But thats getting outside the review of this novel,

Back to Hugh who, thanks to the passing of his wife Fanny, is free to pursue a former mistress of his youth, Emma Sands.
Emma is one of those enigmatic souls who populate many of the Iris Murdoch novels Ive read, Emma writes detective novels, has never married, and lives in London with her beautiful assistant Lindsay Rimmer, Lindsay has caught the eye of Hughs son Randall, Randall writes unsuccessful plays while neglecting his nursery business, Randall wants to run away with Lindsay, But Randall is a married to Ann and together they are raising a troubled teenage daughter named Miranda,

But there are more unrequited love affairs in this book and furtive plots and secrets and agendas to keep things moving along quite nicely.
And there is the smooth grace of Murdochs writing keeping the reader happily in her world of both the sacred and the profane, Recommended for British Lit lovers,

.