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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps not Iris at her best: but still a good, fun read, 27 Feb 2001
By A Customer
'An Unofficial Rose' strikes me as a little different from Iris Murdoch's earlier work. Essentially the key subject of the book is a critical mid-life dilemma: whether to carry on living as you have for years, or to turn your back on it all for the sake of a new and passionate love. Randall Peronett, owner of a rose nursery, chooses to take the gamble, leaving his wife Ann to take off to Italy with the younger, glamorous Lindsay Rimmer; but he's only free to do so because his father, Hugh, regretting in part at least his own decision to stay with his late wife rather than leave her for the magnetic yet repellent Emma Sands, smoothes Randall's path for him. The deserted Ann agonises whether to continue carrying a torch for her errant husband or to accept the attention of Felix Meecham, who in turn must decide whether to abandon his career ambitions, and the prospect of marriage to his French girlfriend Marie-Laure Auboyer, in order to make a play for Ann. Hugh wonders whether it might still be possible to begin afresh with Emma. And Mildred Finch wonders whether to sacrifice her own desire for Hugh, and to remain content in her platonic marriage to the more or less openly gay Humphrey, in order to help Felix win Ann's love. As usual in Murdoch's early work therefore (I'm only six novels in or so) the plot consists of the various characters falling in love with one another, developing stratagems or weighing up whether to take risks, being frustrated by their inability to exercise choice, or disappointed by the choices they can make. As usual also the reader has a sense of a closed world peopled by a limited circle, all of whose relations to each other are examined. I say all this is 'usual', but actually the point here may be that this caricature of an Iris Murdoch novel seems a fairer summation of this book than any of the earlier ones. It's as though the early Murdoch formula has been stripped down to its essentials. There's none of the feeling of the size and life of London that we have when reading 'Under the Net' or even the sense we have in 'The Sandcastle' of the importance of the life of the school or the wider world of politics. In fact, the book can be criticised it seems to me for lacking the feel of the 'stuff of life' that, A.S. Byatt has written, is an important theoretical concern of Iris Murdoch's. The use of the rose as a symbol is good example. It works on the symbolic level, reinforcing the novel's thematic material by emphasising the ultimate 'truth' and irresistible beauty of the natural rose as against the always-unsatisfactory result of efforts to produce the perfect flower. But it doesn't work on the narrative level because we see nothing of the nursery at work, and can hardly believe Randall and Ann are really involved with roses at all. It's an almost empty literary device and it means Murdoch is arguably guilty of the kind of 'elegant patterning with leitmotivs' that, according to A.S. Byatt in her introduction to the current paperback edition of 'The Bell', Murdoch saw as a trap for the novelist, who ought primarily to be a storyteller. My other main complaint would be that the novel is quite socially narrow. The world we are presented with is unremittingly upper middle class and rather remote from reality, with the characters owning Tintorettos and having what appear to be estates and residences, complete with servants, rather than houses and homes. However, after all this criticism it has to be said that this is a fun, fast read, satisfying and consistently entertaining. Well worth reading.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
There is more to it than that. There always is with roses., 4 Dec 2009
Fanny Perronet was dead. The opening line of "An Unofficial Rose" echoes that of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", and the novel itself deals with of events set in motion by Fanny's death. Her widower, Hugh, a retired civil servant, considers returning to Emma, his former mistress with whom he had an affair more than twenty years earlier. Hugh and Fanny's son Randall considers leaving his wife, Ann, for his own mistress, Lindsay, who is Emma's close friend and companion. Ann also has an admirer in the shape of Felix Meecham, an Army officer who has for many years been platonically in love with her. Felix's older sister Mildred, the unhappily married wife of Hugh's former colleague and neighbour Humphrey Finch, is in love with Hugh. Although the novel is relatively short, the plot is a complex one- too complex to be summarised here- but it revolves around Hugh's decision whether or not to sell a valuable painting.
The title, derived from Rupert Brooke's poem "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester", refers on a literal level to the fact that Randall and Ann run a successful rose-growing business. There is, however, more to it than that. There always is with roses in English literature. A daffodil or a chrysanthemum, a red campion or a viper's bugloss, can be just a flower; a rose has to have a symbolic meaning. It can be a symbol of love, of truth, of beauty, of transience, of Englishness. By an "unofficial" rose Brooke meant a wild rose of the hedgerows which he contrasts with the "official" cultivated flowers of the Berlin garden in which he is sitting, demonstrating his preference for the natural over the artificial.
In the context of Murdoch's novel, Brooke's unofficial rose becomes a complex symbol. All the five elements mentioned above play a part in the book. All the major characters, who are linked by an intricate network of inter-relationships, are in search of love, and some of them are in search of truth and beauty as well. Hugh, for example, is an art connoisseur, and Randall's one obsession, apart from his love for Lindsay, has been his quest to breed the perfect rose. The element of transience is also emphasised; several of the characters (Hugh, Emma, Mildred) are elderly, and are confronted with what may be their last chance of achieving love and happiness.
The unofficial/official distinction perhaps mirrors the division between those characters who act instinctively or spontaneously and those who are more reflective or calculating. Ann, instinctively loyal to her husband despite his infidelity and the younger generation, in the shape of Hugh's teenaged grandchildren Penn and Miranda, fall into the first category. Into the second can be placed characters such as Hugh, who carefully works through all the possible implications of the sale of the painting, and the mercenary Lindsay, who refuses to commit herself to Randall until his financial position has been secured through that sale.
The element of Englishness is not emphasised as strongly in the novel than it is in Brooke's poem, one of the finest evocations of homesickness in English literature. Nevertheless, this is, despite the fact that the author was born in Ireland, in many ways a very English novel, not only in its setting (the Kent countryside on the edge of Romney Marsh) but also in its reserve and delicacy; although it is concerned with strong emotions, these are for the most part expressed quietly, with few violent or dramatic events.
Besides that of the rose, another important image in the book is that of the soldier; Murdoch's choice of Felix's profession was not an accident. Felix states that one should "take life as a job. Just like the Army. Go where it sends one and take whatever comes next". Anthony Nuttall points out in his introduction that this metaphor is borrowed from Plato's "Phaedo", which describes the stoical way in which Socrates met death. In the novel this dutiful stoicism is exemplified not only by Felix, who refuses to declare his love for Ann until after her husband has abandoned her, but also by Ann herself, who accepts her husband's infidelity uncomplainingly. We also see something of this attitude in Emma, who is herself facing death as she is terminally ill.
The novel has been criticised as dealing with too narrow a social spectrum; all the major characters are drawn from the wealthy upper middle classes. (Indeed, with their servants and Tintorettos, they would in some countries be regarded as upper class, but the British have always been reluctant to use this term of anyone not possessed of an aristocratic title). Nevertheless, any novel dealing with personal relationships among a small group of people, especially when many of the characters are related by blood, is likely to be equally narrow in its social compass. If the author attempts to widen the social mix, the result is likely to be a very different kind of work, one dealing with class relationships rather than personal ones.
The book was written in the early sixties, and Murdoch probably deals with sexual matters less frankly than a modern writer would. She implies that there may be a lesbian relationship between Emma and Lindsay, although this is never made explicit. She is, however, more explicit about Humphrey's homosexuality- the reason why his marriage to Mildred is a hollow one- even though male homosexuality was still illegal at the time she was writing. Unlike some sixties writers, however, Murdoch was less concerned with sexual relationships than with emotional states of mind, and her skill in conveying these is masterly. "An Unofficial Rose" well demonstrates why she is regarded as one of the leading British novelists of the late twentieth century.
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by Iris Murdoch
by Iris Murdoch
by Iris Murdoch
by Iris Murdoch
by Iris Murdoch
