Although Iris Murdoch was one of the most distinguished British novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, her work has been almost completely ignored by the cinema. "A Severed Head" is the only one of her twenty-six novels to have been made into a feature film. (Two others, "An Unofficial Rose" and "The Bell", have been serialised for television).
The story, a study of adultery among the wealthy upper middle classes of London, put me in mind of Dorothy Parker's celebrated bon mot about the Bloomsbury Group, namely that they lived in squares and loved in triangles, although you would need a more complicated figure than the humble triangle to do justice to the amatory geometry of Iris Murdoch's characters. Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a well-to-do wine merchant, thinks that he has it all- plenty of money, a house in an exclusive part of London, a beautiful wife, Antonia, and a beautiful younger mistress, Georgie. Martin's world, however, is rocked when Antonia informs him that she wants a divorce. The reason is not Martin's affair with Georgie; at this stage in the proceedings Antonia is still unaware of his infidelity. The reason is that Antonia herself has been having an affair with her psychoanalyst Palmer Anderson, a good friend of Martin.
The film then chronicles the various developments and revelations ensuing from Antonia's announcement. These involve Martin, Antonia, Palmer, Georgie and two further characters, Martin's brother Alexander, a sculptor, and Palmer's half-sister Honor Klein, a lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge. Although the film is based on a short novel, of only just over two hundred pages in my edition, there is certainly insufficient space in this review to set out all the plot twists. The characters in the novel, and this is reflected in the film as well, see themselves as "civilised", a word which for them means "blasé about sexual misconduct"- something else they have in common with the Bloomsbury group, who likewise prided themselves on their ability to rise above conventional morality, at least as far as sex is concerned. Palmer is particularly concerned that everyone involved in the tangled web of relationships should be as "civilised" as possible, even when their activities stray into illegal territory. (Besides his affair with Antonia, Palmer is also sleeping with Honor. He claims that because she is only his half-sister they are not committing incest, but the law would not recognise that as a defence).
Watching the film made me realise a possible reason why Murdoch is not the cinema's favourite author. An outline of her plots might make them seem like standard "adultery in Hampstead" literary fare, but actually they are a lot more complicated than that. Murdoch mades great use of visual and verbal imagery and raises complex psychological and philosophical themes. It can be difficult for film-makers to find a cinematic equivalent to these matters, and the makers of "A Severed Head" never really seem to try.
A couple of examples will show what I mean. The action of the novel takes place in December and January, and the weather plays an important part. The earlier scenes take place against a backdrop of mist, haze or dense fog. Towards the end of the novel, however, the weather clears, and fog and haze give way to sunlight. Murdoch's descriptions of the weather are not simply coincidental; they also have symbolic importance, representing Martin's progress from ignorance towards knowledge. The film-makers, however, do not seem to have realised this point, and shot the whole film in summer sunshine.
In the novel the image of the "severed head" has a number of interlinked meanings, too complicated to set out here. The film script keeps Murdoch's title, but makes no attempt to explain the complex meaning which she gives it, with the result that viewers will probably be baffled why the film is called that. I can, however, reassure those who dislike gore and bloodshed in the movies that nobody's head actually gets severed, although one character does threaten another with a sword.
The novel is told in the first person, with Martin as narrator, and can be seen as his journey from a complacent hedonism to a growing awareness that life is not always as simple as his "civilised" system of values and that he cannot just dismiss morality as an irrelevance. He is not in love with either Antonia or Georgie, but carries on his double life because it suits his purposes, without ever considering the emotional cost to the two women. The film dispenses with a narrator and also with much of Murdoch's more serious themes; it ends up like a Brian Rix style bedroom farce interspersed with occasional more serious moments such as an attempted suicide.
The result is a filleting of Murdoch's novel with much of her meaning removed. There are some well-known actors such as Richard Attenborough, Lee Remick and Claire Bloom among the cast, but none of them seem to be making much effort. "A Severed Head" is not my favourite Murdoch novel, but it deserved a better adaptation than this. Perhaps it is as well that the cinema has steered clear of Murdoch since 1971. 4/10.
