An Unofficial Rose

by Iris Murdoch, T. Ritchie (Jacket Design)

After his wife's death, Hugh contemplates returning to his former mistress. His son, Randall, longs to abandon his shapeless marriage for a perfect partner. Randall's young daughter, Miranda, is adored by her Australian cousin Penn, but has attachments elsewhere. Her mother Ann has her own private dream, while taking upon herself the strains and pains of all the others. Impelled by affection, lust and illusion, these characters search for love within a tightly woven web.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, British Literature, Novels, Literary Fiction, Literature, 20th Century

348 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch

Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.

"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...

Reviews

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly typical Murdoch (which is a good thing, imo), charting the tangled lives and reconfigured and unrequited relationships of family and friends, featuring a Svengali-like 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 of 15) who comes to stay with his uncle Randall. Randall's wife is the rather wet and pious Ann. They have a mysterious daughter, Miranda, aged 13, and recently lost their son, Steve (who was roughly Penn's age). They have a large house and run a successful rose-growing 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 honey-coloured 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, witch-like".

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 off-stage. What's more interesting is the relationships that endure but are apparently chaste, all for different reasons. Divorce was less common in 1962, 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 daisy-chain of relationships seems never-ending; 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 in 1962 than in 2014, 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 long-ago 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' A 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."

[Vishakha · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my third Murdoch after her monumental Booker-winning novel The Sea, The Sea and her drab swan-song Jackson's Dilemma. Like the other two, this too involves a group of English upper-class people grappling with their moral quandaries. It has most of the elements I've encountered till now – a well-to-do Englishman past his prime, a circle of friends, family, and secret admirers which becomes a breeding ground for ethical dilemmas, difficult marriages, gay characters, and inspiration drawn from religion and Western philosophy with a sprinkling of Eastern spirituality. 

 The novel begins with the self-justifying musings of retired civil servant Hugh Peronett at the funeral of his wife, Fanny. In fact, Hugh's reflections on his life which passed him by, his passionless marriage which he thought of as a dull, resigned companionship, his failed attempts at adultery, and his unfiltered opinions on the people around him drew me to the book in the first place. Everyone here is yearning for someone else (usually unattainable) in this circle of friends and I was mildly annoyed to read through pages of discussions on heartbreaks caused by unrequited love and possible chances at match-making. 

 I enjoyed the well-drawn characters – most of them confused, unlikeable people suffering the misery of love. Hugh and his self-absorbed son Randall, both are attracted to charming, difficult, and morally dubious, almost devious women as they look for freedom from their own unexciting marriages with straightforward women. Randall's wife, Ann, is notably irksome. An epitome of "goodness", she is a passive and spineless bundle of confusion who never stands up for herself, thinking it to be the right thing to do as a virtuous wife.  

 With a variety of characters and insights into their impulses, drives, and actions, it was interesting to see how the events unfolded amidst opposing wills and complicated relationships. Nonetheless, the vague motivations behind Emma's shenanigans still elude me. 

This has compelled me to explore more of Murdoch's work where she dives deeper into moral ambiguity and philosophy. Hopefully I will be able to read The Black Prince this year. 

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know where I got this book - I must have purchased it in a used bookstore/book sale binge, under the idea that I had never read any Murdoch before and now was the time to start. I started reading it as part of my weird commuting book program, and I am certainly glad that I did, since it was a great read. The Unofficial Rose is subtitled "The Complicated, Funny, Sad Romance of Many People Lost in a Garden," and honestly, that is exactly what its about. It concerns a family and close friends of Hugh Peronett and the love complications that every single one of them - from newly widowed Hugh to twelve year-old Miranda - find themselves in over the course of a few months. It is an interesting book because on the surface, it seems slight and about nothing much at all - not much different from the sort of middle-brow romance novel written by a Maeve Binchy or a Rosamund Pilcher - which surprised me, given what I had heard about Murdoch. But the more I read and thought about the book, the more it stuck with me and the more impressed with it I became.

The Unofficial Rose is a both mediation/exploration on the nature of love and a satire on how foolish being in love makes everyone. It is reminiscent (and probably an intentional play on) of those Shakespearian comedies (like, say, As You Like It) where everyone is running around in the woods falling in love with each other, and being star crossed and scheming and falling in and out of love. The reference to being lost in a garden, and the themes of being in the garden and Randall Peronett's rose-growing business are certainly not-unintentional, and throw back both to Shakespeare and to the nature of being English itself. And it is also a darkly funny book - in the way that every character in it is a fool about love and suffers the consequences of that, and ends up no better than they started out, despite their romantic adventures

But what impressed me the most about the story is how Murdoch was able to write a true and accurate portrait of the feelings that you feel when you are falling in love. Not what its like to be in love, real sensible grown-up love, but the rather the ridiculous emotionality of falling in love and trying to figure out whether the person you are interested in is interested in you and how you become simultaneously muddled, and scheming, and hyperaware and filled with clarity. Murdoch captures precisely the how life becomes so much more emotional and fraught and complicated at those times. And not in a silly, Sex in the City/chick-lit sort of way, but with a clear, cold real novelist's eye. What I mean is, at first I was absolutely maddened by many of the characters, and their inabilities to make decision and move forward, and stop being lost in love's garden. But then it struck me that this is what falling in love is like - and I remembered being in college and mooning over my then ex-boyfriend (now darling husband), and how miserable I was, and how I suffered. And how I had this sixth sense of where he was and what he was doing (or thought I did) - and how hyper-aware I was of every emotion. And now that I am a happy old married lady (three years in September!) who is happy and in love, but no longer strung up by love, I think back on that time as being absolutely ridiculous, and want to go back and shake some sense into myself, and tell me not to be so dramatic, and that actually being in real love is nothing like that at all - and thank God for it. I commend Murdoch for being able to recreate that exact sensation for her characters. The book absolutely has made me think in the way that literature is supposed to, and I will read more Murdoch.


On an unrelated note when I opened my copy I found Mrs. Karen Larsen's business card, addressed 1-86 & 87, Dongbingoo-dong Yongsan-ku, Seoul, Korea. In English on one side and (presumably) in Korean on the other. This is one of the better items on my "mysterious things you have found in books" list, and brings me great joy.

[jrendocrine at least reading is good · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Iris Murdoch all right, delivering a highly intelligent observation of a dozen unhappy and stolid British (and one visiting Australian) in the 50s post war era. The crowd each are set in their ways, interlinked genetically and romantically throughout decades. Their entanglements are vicious and painful. Hugh, the patriarch of half the cast, loves a Tintoretto as much as his family. Murdoch analyzes each of these tortured souls, leaves nothing unturned, and also leaves no room to question her diagnoses. Ah well, they are her creatures! (I would have been kinder!)

The cast and their actions read as dated, they are unimaginable now. Very insular and Brit near upper class with London flats and servants in the country homes. Alas, no light anywhere, although Murdoch describes light in beautifully rendered settings. The first chapter has been touted as expert – all characters neatly introduced at a funeral– and indeed it hooked me. But all these potentially nice folks end up with emotions spiraling out of control and ruining their equanimity.

It's easy reading – it’s Murdoch after all – but too long (yet only 287 pages!). The author could never quite decide which conniving woman was spinning the dark entanglements; she finally settles on the youngest cast member – which is hardly fair (I object!). As I wrote above, Murdoch has no pity, and no room for alternate explanations for her creatures. Escaping to Delhi (!) is the only way out.

Not top notch Murdoch, her magnificent The Sea, The Sea comes 15 years later.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of the six books, I’ve read so far by Iris Murdoch, An Official Rose reminds me the most of The Sandcastle and The Bell. Affairs and troubled teens, the evocation of the British countryside and in The Bell and this one, the contrast between the country and the town.

What this one has far more of than either of those though is the amount of manipulation and calculation that is used by the characters to get what they want. In this it is more reminiscent of A Severed head and Flight of the Enchanter and in this one we seem very much to have an enchanter figure in the form of Emma, slighted mistress and successful writer who is described as both a witch and a queenly figure sitting on her throne. Emma successfully manipulates and plays with a multitude of characters just as a writer does and although one cannot say she gains happiness from this there is definitely a dark pleasure in it for her.

Yet Emma is not the only manipulator in this novel, Mildred the neighbor of the central Peronett family also directs events to benefit both herself and her brother Felix with love and marriage as the ultimate goal, checking first with her openly gay husband Humphrey if that’s okay. Sometimes, despite its contemporary ease with sexuality, this book seems like a Victorian novel in its pining over forbidden fruit, its considerations of finances before love and its tortured yearnings for another.

Perhaps the ultimate torturer is Miranda, the teenage daughter of Ann and Randall although she seems eleven going on thirty, I won’t elaborate except to say the scene with the photos and dolls is particularly sinister and there are other aspects of this book that verge on the dark side. Humphrey’s intentions towards Penny are hinted at in a way that in today’s world might be worrying and uncomfortable and are reminiscent of The Bell in this respect yet I don’t think there is any actual menace involved. Emma and Lindsey are also like two witches in their cave using Randall like a puppet for their own amusement yet their bond itself has elements of enchanter and victim, mistress and servant or perhaps mistress and something more.

This book doesn’t have the humor of Under the Net or A Severed Head and there are very few characters who really engaged my sympathy. Penny seems to be the only truly innocent one of the lot and indeed the whole Australian side of the family are a contrast to the English in their apparent decency. Ann and Felix might be the most open in their behavior but Hugh and Mildred, despite their connivances, still manage to be as sympathetic in their old age desire for one last love.

In the end it seems very few characters will be happy and I’m beginning to think this is something that is part and parcel of Murdoch’s writing. She is very good at showing how people can be together but alone and there are numerous references in this book to the ‘solitude’ of the characters and not necessarily as a negative thing. Disappointment is a recurrent theme throughout this book and her others and romantic or resolved endings are, so far in my reading, not part of her oeuvre however, because of her writing, the journey towards this end is always compelling and this sixth book was no different.

Favorite lines;

..although the context for thinking him an ass was almost completely there, the judgment could not quite be made: the elusive but indubitable light of intelligence flickering in that mild visage forbade any too casual dismissal of its owner.’

‘There are few persons, even among those most apparently straitlaced, who are not pleased by the flouting of a convention, and glad deep inside themselves to think that their society contains deplorable elements.’

‘He was hers as a mild chronic illness might be hers, when one knows all its strange ways and it has become a part of the personality.’

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Iris Murdoch's sixth novel. I have read all six in the order in which she published them, as part of My Big Fat Reading Project. There is less humor in this one than in the earlier books but like all the others it is about moral quandaries and affairs of the heart.

The difficulty of marriage is the theme, with each major character either caught in an unsatisfactory marriage or wishing for a partner who can be truly loved. These yearnings take the form of actual infidelity or unrequited passion.

Though this may sound like any old romance novel, Ms Murdoch confounds those expectations by the depths of her characters and no happy endings for anyone. Two of the women are the scheming type with little compunction about controlling others to achieve their aims. Hugh, the widower and main character, is the victim of both women.

An unofficial rose is one that has been left wild rather than hybridized into the special cultivated sort loved by gardeners everywhere. Hugh's son Randall runs a commercial rose nursery on the grounds of his property. It is also his family's home inhabited by his long-suffering wife Ann and his devoted but precocious daughter Miranda.

Randall has lost the drive to keep the rose business going so Ann does most of the work. She knows her husband sees other women but adheres to her Christian belief that marriage is a lifelong commitment as well as a sacrament. She is, however, in love with another man herself. Is Ann the unofficial rose?

These and other characters from teens to parents to the older generation all do silly things in pursuit of love and passion. It is a fairly sexy book. Describing them all would take too long. You'd be better off reading the novel, as I am no Iris Murdoch. In a live interview from 1962, she makes it clear that she had no intention to write "comfort fiction." I like that about her because she delves into the discomforts of love and passion, yet you feel less a fool for some of the things you have done for both.

[Julie Bozza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hhhmmm... I'm having a bit of a problematic relationship with Iris Murdoch lately. The first books of hers that I read were The Bell and The Sea, the Sea, in which I found various things to like, love or at least admire. Since then it's grown difficult!

This novel is detailed and clever, with superb analysis of characters, and terrific use of place. However, the 'bad' characters are bad in nasty, maniuplative, selfish, destructive ways that make them completely unsympathetic - and the 'good' characters are weak, and often defeated by their own traits as much as those of the bad characters pitted against them. There are very few characters to like, and any happy endings for those who deserve them come late and rather meagrely. Escapism it's not.

However, I can't deny it's well-written and true to life. It's just that there's a whole lot of other things going on in life that I would prefer to read about, or that would at least provide a bit of yeast in an otherwise rather dreary story.

Oh dear.

[Julia Rubtsova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Мердок - гений

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘An Unofficial Rose’ is a family story- a very dysfunctional family. The matriarch has just died, and the day of her funeral starts the book. With Fanny dead, Hugh Peronett is now free to rekindle an old relationship with Emma. His son, Randall, wants to be free of his wife, Ann, so that he can pursue Emma’s companion, Lindsey. Hugh’s grandson by his absent daughter, Penn, is visiting for the summer, and he pursues Randall and Ann’s daughter, Miranda-and he is in turn pursued by another character. Meanwhile, members of another family also pursue various members of the Peronett family. Everyone wants someone else and there is not one simple relationship in the whole thing. This is a very flawed cast of characters; only Ann and Penn seem to be unafflicted with the urge to manipulate people that the others seem to have so strongly.
The book, written in 1962, is of course a product of its time. Ann is encouraged by the priest to stay married to Randall, even though he has deserted her for another woman, because marriage is forever and she can help Randall-even if he never comes back- by forgiving him and praying for him. A straight woman and a gay man stay together in an open marriage of convenience. It’s all right to have Randall, when asked by Lindsey what he would do if she changed her mind about having sex with him that night, say “I shall probably beat you and certainly rape you” and she accepts that rather than run screaming into the night.

In the end, the identity of the prime manipulator is a surprise. While there are some clues throughout the book, it’s still not what you expect; it must have been a bit shocking in 1962.

[Ginny · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very complex and intellectually challenging novel. I chose to read this because it is discussed in Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison. Of course, Byatt and Sodre see many allusions and references that I missed (for example, that this is a reworking of Mansfield Park), but I did feel, as they do, that the characters don't really work. That Murdoch was trying to do something deeply philosophical that she didn't quite pull off, at least as an enjoyable novel. She is exploring the nature of love and art. From Murdoch's essay "The Idea of Perfection", as quoted in the Byatt/Sodre book: "Art and morals are, with certain provisos....one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself if real." There is much to think about in this book, but the three stars indicate that for me personally, it fell a bit flat.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

the writing is vivid and beautiful; Murdoch describes human relationships in such a way to expose their painful, unpredictable nature.

There is the wild passion of an affair reflected in both father and son; the steady insipidity of marriage; and the intense longing of first love.
The setting is filled with juxtapositions which reflect the various relationships- Greyhallow is a place of both passion and isolation, and the rose nursery represents both sexual desire and decay.

[Blake · Rating 3 out of 5]

She did not know herself. It was not possible, it was not necessary, it was perhaps not even proper. Real compassion is agnosticism; and we must be compassionate to ourselves too. Tasks lay ahead, one after one after one, and the gradual return to an old simplicity. She would never know, and that would be her way of surviving.

The character of An Unofficial Rose has transition as its key trait, but it's difficult to know if it's a virtue or a vice. Among Iris Murdoch's published works, it sits between her earlier The Bell and later The Italian Girl. In reviewing those, I characterised them as "stirred and uncaged" and "stolidly and rigidified" works, respectively. But there are three books in between those two, and An Unofficial Rose is only the second and central of these. That gives me to wonder if it ought to be thought of as an increase and whether the change for Murdoch has been sudden or gradual. There is a new sympathy: what previously called for comic treatment is more softly delineated and the happy picked out from the sad. Themes are that familiar couple, Love and Goodness. For Murdoch, these have to be married by a third, Vision (or Attention). So, this is a number of linked ceremonies - all interrupted. The ideas and play do achieve their vibrancy and volume, but the voice of these within the festivities is mute in all but the concluding toast. Still, the toast is memorable.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I LOVED this book! The premise - various people of various ages fall in and out of love with each other under various circumstances - doesn't sound that exciting. But this isn't Mills and Boon, it's Murdoch, and she's on great form here with some marvellously real, three dimensional characters, and acute insights into their motives, hopes and fears. It makes for addictive and satisfying reading - perfect for anyone endlessly fascinated with and mystified by the human condition.

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t exactly sucked in by the synopsis on the back of my Warner Library paperback issue of this 1962 novel. But I’ve never been let down by an Iris Murdoch book yet, and this proved to be no exception. It’s 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 middle-aged widower whom many of the female characters often warmly refer to as a “simple ass.” I’ve been called an ass by women I’ve admired. I could probably die happy if at some point in my life a powerful and attractive British woman called me an ass. But that’s 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 I’ve read. Emma writes detective novels, has never married, and lives in London with her beautiful assistant Lindsay Rimmer. Lindsay has caught the eye of Hugh’s 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 Murdoch’s writing keeping the reader happily in her world of both the sacred and the profane. Recommended for British Lit lovers.

[Ashley Marilynne Wong · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book didn’t quite work for me although it did have a merit or two, hence my rating. I was impressed by the way Murdoch portrayed her teenage characters and I could relate to them on a deeply personal level. However, out of the 13 Murdoch novels I had read so far, I liked this one least of all. I struggled to connect with nearly all the adult characters in the novel and I didn’t care much for the plot. With its many inconsistencies in the philosophical and psychological themes explored, this book fell short of being thought-provoking. Nevertheless, my lack of enjoyment of An Unofficial Rose should not deter me from resuming my Murdoch marathon, considering how much I loved the other 12 books that I’d read, all of which were philosophically profound and full of psychological depths. I need a break from the marathon though. I shall hopefully start the second half of my Murdoch marathon after reading the novels on this year’s Booker longlist.

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was great and the story kept developing all the way to the end.

[Heather]

The middle dragged a bit. Some excellent writing towards the end. Overly small print marred my experience of this book though.

[John Of Oxshott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iris Murdoch is one of my favourite novelists. So far I have enjoyed every book of hers that I’ve read. I’ve found in them so many interesting details that I have often gone back and re-read them in whole or in part and thought about them for weeks afterwards.

Every chapter of An Unofficial Rose is technically brilliant but I especially admire Chapter One. It takes place during the funeral of Hugh’s wife, Fanny. In contemplating the mourners gathered about her grave, Hugh comments to himself on almost every character who will feature in the plot. Every detail is significant and sows a little seed that will later blossom into a significant story arc. Of special interest is a Tintoretto painting inherited by Fanny from her father and which will become, now she is dead, a pivot on which a major portion of the plot will turn.

The provenance of the painting is carefully established. Fanny’s father was a wealthy art dealer but the Tintoretto was the only painting that Fanny was able to wrest from her “boorish” brother after their father died. Hugh’s scrutiny of his motives for marrying Fanny is handled with exquisite skill. “Perhaps he had married her for the Tintoretto,” we are told, and already we suspect that Hugh’s life is now about to undergo some abrupt change of direction.

In works by other novelists the ground is not so carefully prepared. Murdoch’s stories are expertly plotted, which allows her to add great depth of insight from the very beginning. This is what makes her novels so fascinating. The characters are flawed but utterly convincing human beings and Murdoch exposes the dark workings of their minds with extraordinary precision.

I don’t find the same clarity of motive in the works of novelists who, if we believe what they say in interviews, make the story up as they go along — novelists such as Zadie Smith and Rupert Thomson, for example, whose novels I have been revisiting lately. Those novelists trust to their intuition to bring the strands of the story to a satisfying conclusion. Murdoch knows all the time where the story is leading. She uses her intuition instead to probe her characters’ perceptions of themselves and others. She does this with empathy, vivid descriptive detail and frequent touches of dark humour.

The ending in a novel by Iris Murdoch novel is not necessarily satisfying, though, in spite of the intricate plotting. The "Unofficial Rose" of this novel is Hugh’s daughter-in-law, Ann. She is married to an alcoholic husband who, having started a rose nursery, has abandoned it in favour of dubious meetings in London, leaving Ann to keep the business going.

Ann is portrayed as good but somewhat dull. She is a Christian who believes in the sanctity of marriage and perhaps lacks the spark needed to have an affair or break out of what is now a stultifying relationship. The moral choices with which she is faced, which are foreshadowed in the early chapters, simmer slowly in the background until they build to a crisis which is fully explored in Chapter Twenty-eight.

Whether or not you find the ending uplifting may depend on your personal spiritual beliefs. The various strands of the story are resolved but the characters don’t necessarily find happiness. Some do, some don’t. What is satisfying, in an aesthetic sense at least, is that the novel ends as it began with Hugh looking back on his marriage to Fanny but also looking forward now to a new life which is very different from the one he had glimpsed at the end of Chapter One.

The good thing about an Iris Murdoch novel is that this is not really the end but the beginning of an enriched understanding as you go back and re-read some chapters and uncover some of the finer points and deeper pleasures.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fanny Perronet was dead. Hugh's wife, Fanny, dies after 40 years of marriage; his former lover, Emma, appears at the funeral. Hugh becomes wild to win her love again, while neighbor Mildred (with her gay husband Humphrey's blessing) has designs on Hugh. Hugh's son Randall, meanwhile, is madly in love with Emma's companion/secretary Lindsey who may or may not be having an affair with her employer while Randall's wife Ann yearns for Mildred's brother Felix, who, in turn, has always secretly adored her. But it is the scheming of Miranda, Randall and Ann's teenaged daughter, that ultimately determines the outcomes of their lives, for better and for worse.

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 rose has a symbolic meaning: it can be a symbol of love, of truth, of beauty, of transience, of Englishness. By an "unofficial" rose 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 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.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is much to discover in this intriguing novel. Once again, Murdoch demonstrates her keen ability to portray the ordinariness of life in an extraordinary way. Towards the beginning, for example, we learn how Hugh, on leaving his wife's funeral, suddenly sees himself as a frail old man - a clever insight about the way in which we rarely view ourselves as others do from the outside. A key theme for me is how all the characters think they know what is going on between themselves, whereas the reality could not be further from the truth. Nothing in life is black and white, as we all know. At times, the intricacies of who loves whom threaten to descend into the kind of facial treatments seen in Murdoch's earlier novels. Yet, in this book, there seems always to be a sense of quiet and calm, despite all the various carryings on. In keeping with Murdoch's earlier work, the main characters in this book are extremely hard to like, yet I found myself at one point starting to feel very slightly sorry for one of them - a testament to Murdoch's skill in drawing one in to the narrative, only to provide a slap around the face on the next page! Overall, a most enjoyable read.

[Sarah Beaudoin · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Iris Murdoch

[David Baker · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard work. Felt dated. Didn't like any of the characters nor were they interesting or compelling. Sorry!

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

SUMMARY - Hateful people, with hearts rattling in their ribcages like ice in a chilled g+t.

Murdoch typically writes unlikeable/unsympathetic characters, but usually manages to interest me in the outcome. However, I have found An Unofficial Rose a struggle, and would gladly have sent them all packing from their dreary manor house lives by the midpoint. By the end I wanted the secateurs to snip them off at the necks.

Everyone seems to have either unrequited or complicatedly requited love interests in everyone else. Affairs blossom like weeds, and Murdoch seems to see a world in which people as well as plants are always hungry for fertilisation. Meanwhile, their hearts rattle around in rib-cages like the ice in one of their g+ts. There is often this disconnnect in Murdoch between rampant love making and the rose-prickly cuttingness of her characters.

I have a feeling that there is a subset of Murdoch novels that may not work for me - those focused on love triangles (and the ethics of love, e.gs, The Sandcastle, Bruno's Dream) rather than self-actualisation (e.gs, The Sea..., Flight from the Enchanter). I'm not sure where The Bell (my fave so far) or The Black Prince fit in, but I suspect it may be that they had more sympathetic figures who were trying to do the right thing. In contrast, '...Rose...' gave me the philosophy of love as told by people I couldn't believe in any case capable of love.

The sentences on their own were nicely written, but the whole, although it doesn't stink, I found it sour by any other name.

[Mi Jung · Rating 5 out of 5]

Iris Murdoch is one of my favourite authors and I try to read at least one of her novels each year. "Unofficial Rose" is all about love. Every character is in love and to obtain that love, one doesn't mind becoming cruel, cunning, manipulative or even giving up another precious love (Tintoretto!). But nobody is truly happy in that love. Murdoch beautifully unfolds such diverse aspects of one of the most complex human emotions maintaining a perfect structural balance. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

[Helen McClory · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's inevitable that in reading an Iris Murdoch, if you've read a few of her others, you take to comparing them. This one had the usual incisive look into human heads, peeling back the tissues to explain, this is what this person is feeling and why. And it has verisimilitude. And in the book there are moments of beautiful prose and deep feeling. But the greater feeling is of attending an autopsy of the various actors in the book - it was perhaps just me, but nothing flowed as well as I wanted from one of her books. I also wanted more roses, but that perhaps is just the wish to be indulged in more sumptuousness, which Murdoch was capable of and here restrained

[Елвира · Rating 4 out of 5]

Айрис Мърдок има свой собствен стил.
Романът е страхотна и притежава всичко, които ми харесва в нейното виждане за нещата и въображение. Не е многословно философски, но е изящен и пълен с много изненади, повечето от които неприятни, което в случая е огромен комплимент, но това би го разбрал само някой, който вече е чел нейни неща.

[Andréa Lechner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sensational novel by a very accomplished Iris Murdoch, delving into the intricacies of difficult family relationships. Surprises galore all along the way and, as always, wonderful descriptions of both people and places. A must read for anybody interested in complex plots and characters.

[Gary Branson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another satisfying read. Manipulating characters, philosophical explorations, good dialog. One certainly doesn’t read Murdoch for plot, and this makes for interesting reading.

[Lise Færch · Rating 3 out of 5]

As long as it took me to finish this book, because I kept putting it off, and as much as I didn’t care for any of the characters and their fates, I thoroughly enjoyed Murdoch’s excellent writing.