Like a mix of PG Wodehouse and English country house mystery on West End stage, with religious symbolism (unicorn=purity) thrown in. Unsettlingly creepy, but subtle and thought-provoking.

I love this book so much, but don't know what to make of it at all. It really is very like a unicorn itself: you try to explain it and you just sound crazy. How seriously should you take it? And yet is it not the very most serious thing that ever was?This is my first Murdoch. I'm reading her because I read an interesting article recently that suggested that she and I have some overlapping ideas about morality. Reading this book, I suspect it's more than that. We have some overlapping and interse...

My theory is that anyone who reads this novel without first seeing the name of the author, would recognise just how bad it is. Did anyone get anything out of this book about power, guilt or captivity? This book failed not only in capturing truth about any of these subjects, but also in producing convincing character studies. Marian is a husk, and while Effingham is more complicated, the author doesn't place him in a setting where his character can be examined.The second half of the book dissolve...

4.5 *I don't know what to make of this yet, but it is excellently written. The philosophical touches and the eerie atmosphere are a delight and as always with Murdoch, I finish reading the last page of the book and I cannot stop thinking about the themes, the symbols and the big questions she raises.

I read this book due to its inclusion in the 2019 Mookes Madness tournament – my first book by Iris Murdoch.The plot of the book is summarised in this link in Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uni...) But overall this is a novel which reminded me a little of a going on a lengthy car journey in a vintage car which exhibits clunky changes of gear, and with a driver who likes to share their observations of each stage of the journey.The book starts almost as a satire of a Gothic novel – M...

This is the eighth novel I have read by Iris Murdoch. As usual I am reading them in order of publication. I find it hard to believe she did not win the Booker Prize until 1978, for her novel The Sea, The Sea. I have been impressed and entertained by each one I have read so far.The Unicorn is Gothic in feel and setting. It includes her preoccupation with infidelity as well as her philosophic approach to human relationships. A young woman takes a post as governess at Gaze Castle, remote and ancie

I couldn't put this one down - read it all Thanksgiving weekend. I'm kicking myself for not picking up Murdoch until now. She's a genius!! Heck, who can deny an author w/ a unifying theme across her works? She's similar to D.H. Lawrence in this respect (or Ayn Rand or Walker Percy); according to a paper I read, Murdoch is a follower of Plato (and a rejector of many Freudian theories), and there are many references to both Plato and Freud in this book. She's especially interested in morality, in

The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch (1963)“Everyone here is involved in guilt.”The Unicorn is the first novel by Iris Murdoch that I have read. The narrative weaves in elements of the Gothic, the allegorical, and the mythical, and it does so within the framework of suspense. There’s a lot going on in this novel, and by the end, Murdoch leaves it up to the reader to determine what it all means. Some readers will be frustrated by Murdoch’s ambiguity and that the meaning of the story is open to a wide vari...

About 3/4rd through this book, I would've written a raving review bursting with exclamation marks and superlatives. However, the tragic occurrences and incidents just kept piling up and started to flood the pages, spilling across the paper, nearly drowning the reader in their (melo)drama. Although I appreciate the death of one of your characters as a dramatic tool, it can also be quite exhausting (and even tedious!) for the reader to have nearly each chapter introduce a new death. Nevertheless,

Excuse me, Ms. Murdoch, but your philosophy slip is showing :-) I found this slim novel pretty delightful, although I’m pretty sure I didn’t really understand a lot of the existential philosophy getting bandied about. However, that didn’t detract at all from the storyline for me—I knew it was making my poor brain work a little harder to find clarity.Murdoch has created quite the allegorical and mythological gothic story, full of allusions to unicorns, vampires, mermaids, Maid Marian, Christ, a c...

Marian Taylor applies for a job as a private tutor at a remote country house, knowing nothing more about the job than that. When she gets there, she finds she isn’t to be teaching a child, but more or less acting as a companion to Mrs Hannah Crean-Smith, who doesn’t leave the grounds of her large house, Gaze, which sits between a treacherous bog and some black sandstone cliffs overlooking an even more dangerous sea. Why doesn’t Hannah leave the grounds? Slowly, Marian learns the ever-deepening s...

You gotta love the seventies. The blurb on the back of my used Avon paperback:"ONLY IRIS MURDOCH" (in super-ugly font) "could combine the popular Gothic tale with modern psychological insights to make a story which terrifies as it reveals the secret agonies of desire. In this remarkable novel, a young woman takes a governess' position because she is intrigued by the name of Castle Gaze. As she probes the" (what are secrets?*) "dark secrets of the castle's" (what are the residents?) "tortured res...

Of the three Iris Murdoch novels I've read, The Unicorn is the most fast-paced. As the heroine arrives on a train at the start of the book, so the reader feels they are on a train, moving towards some inexorable end. In The Unicorn, Murdoch takes tropes of the Gothic novel and makes them deliciously subversive. It's not just one kind of story: there are so many layers to it. Elements of fairy tales, legends, tragedy, and comedy mix to create a weird and wonderful brew.Marian Taylor answered an a...

i can't say i loved it but i will say i read it months ago, and it has stayed with me. while i read it, it haunted me. yes, the characters are for the most part preposterous, and yet... i love the old professor. --it's now been years, and it's still haunting me. i think i will re-read this again in 2013, and re-assess -- i suspect it will receive a higher rating now that i have a better understanding of murdoch's writing.

It took me a while to read this one because life kept getting in the way (not to mention the latest J.D. Robb), but once I got about halfway through I couldn't put it down. This is my first Iris Murdoch and definitely won't be my last. It is beautifully written, and evokes a memorable and atmospheric landscape. The Unicorn is a relatively short book, but it is one to be savoured. Highly enjoyable reading.

Gothic, wandering, full of landscapes of cold moors and bog and sea - so I loved that part. If it wanders too much in the draggy territory of simple philosophy and occasionally slips waist deep into melodrama, well, that's part of the fun of it too.

Mine is a second hand copy. I am reading in the sun but most of all enjoying the warm brown edges of the pages and thinking back to an old and empty Victorian house where perhaps it lay for years.Chap 6. In my kitchen light the page edges are hardly brown at at all. Could they be lightening up with exposure to the air.My wife’s blue denim dress always looks good on her especially with the bold jewelled necklace I bought in a Tiblisi market. “...one ought to cry out more for love, to ask for it.

the power that that has, the intelligence that that has, the clearance that that has, the access that that has, the influence that that has, the profile that that has, the international implications that that has

Atmospheric and eerie, and left me feeling deeply disoriented which is perhaps the point, but it was definitely not my cup of tea.

There’s a degree of philosophy and allegory in most of Iris Murdoch’s fiction, but in some novels it’s much more pronounced than others. The Unicorn is one of those in which the big themes are very much front and centre and, to my taste, laid on a bit thick. Her characters also tend to tread a fine line between being hilariously and compellingly larger than life versus irritatingly one dimensional and wet. Again, I felt the Unicorn fell the wrong side of the line on this one. Having said that, t...

You can also see my review at The Literary Sisters.The Virago Vintage Classics edition that I read started with an introduction by Stephen Medcalf, who was Iris Murdoch’s very own student. As he mentions in his introductory essay, The Unicorn is “set between two famous landmarks on the west coast of Ireland, the cliffs of Moher and the limestone country of the Burren”. I have never been to Ireland myself (yet), but merely looking at pictures of these places just to have the image in my head when...

i have not read much gothic, so i do not know how it uses gothic structures beyond the obvious:castle, sublime isolation, dangerous heath, bogs, rivers, sea, violent loves, emotional, irrational, religious motivations, mythic plot, dark legends, captive woman, semi-feudal, everyone has secrets, guilt…sounds like i could follow it? yes and no. is she writing a deconstruction, a postmodern take? i do not know. she moves in and out of a few characters well. some remain mysterious. all, towards the

The first two thirds of the book are intriguing and there is the exact minimum amount of action and revelations that will just about keep you interested. This section passes as an interesting read, which is why i have given 2 stars.However, you are left feeling as though something is about to happen, though little in fact ever does. We are left with unanswered questions and disappointment.The book tries to make the reader contemplate morality and other elements of philosophy, but is on the whole...

My review: https://theblankgarden.com/2018/12/10...

The opening of the Unicorn is like the opening of a classic gothic novel, a young woman travelling through a bleak and wild landscape to a dark house or castle that is run down and full of odd characters, hints of Jane Eyre, Northanger Abbey, Rebecca perhaps. To add to this gothic atmosphere the novel is filled with allusions to fairytales such as Sleeping Beauty, to spirituality, both pagan and Christian, but far more to spells and magic, the notion of an Enchanter again rears its head in Iris

This book started out like a Victorian novel, with a young woman traveling to the country to be a governess....but things are much different than she expected. I had the same problem I always have with Iris Murdoch novels..her writing, scene setting and characterization is excellent but her plots always seem so unbelievable and somewhat farce filled that I lose interest. Maybe I am just not “getting” something?

I ended up in the Iris Murdoch section of the library quite by accident, and her name was so familiar to me but I couldn't think of much of anything about her, so I decided to give one of her books a try. I picked The Unicorn because it was small enough to carry with me back and forth on the train and because the one-sentence synopsis pasted inside the otherwise completely blank cover sounded interesting enough: "A London girl, hired as a companion and tutor, attempts to rescue her mistress who

This review isn’t going to be long, as I finished this book a few weeks ago and never got around to writing the review. Perhaps because I thought I couldn’t do it justice, because I wasn’t sure I would be able to properly explain why I am rating it 5 stars. I guess, simplest answer, is that it had almost everything I like in a novel; desolate setting, weird characters, tragedy/tragic romance, and it makes you think about it when you’re done. This novel, just from the title evokes symbolism and t...

I hadn´t borrowed a book for yonks! A friend was reading Iris Murdoch in the school playground while we were waiting for the kids, and when I mentioned I had never read any of her books, she lent me this one. It is an old dog-eared copy: I cannot find the edition in goodreads. It appears she has read it several times: she noted the years on the flyleaf.I remember reading books like this one when I was a teenager. Lots of names come to mind. Marguerite Duras. Milan Kundera. Herman Hesse. Miguel d...

I realised soon after I started The Unicorn that I had in fact attempted it many years ago and loathed it, having given up before I ever finished it. I also soon realised that I wasn’t sophisticated enough a reader all those years ago to appreciate what was afoot. This time around, I was utterly captivated by Dame Iris’ tenacious commitment to keeping within the genre conventions of the Gothic novel while at the same time writing a modern psychological novel set in the real world (well, the earl...