A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

I was under the illusion that I hadn't read this novel before, because I had forgotten the title, but after the first two pages, I realised that I had read it a few years ago. Still, I'm never about to pass by an Iris Murdoch novel, and I very happily reread it. I didn't remember how very funny it is, it's almost a farce, where everyone switches sexual partners with such dizzying speed that sometimes they don't even get to the sex bit. Couples form, fall apart, and re-form in various almost arbitrary configurations in a small group of upper middle-class people in late 50s London, and it's impossible to take anything seriously. It's much less heavy on philosophy than most of Murdoch's novels, but is still full of the bizarre, the arresting and the creepy. There are many episodes of a sort of surrealist expansion of either time or space into infinity, and Murdoch's magical style works wonders with a sort of deadpan humour. I realised when reading this book that part of what makes her such an unusual writer is that all her first-person narrators are male. There's something amazingly androgynous about her style; it's not 'female writing', but it's definitely somehow a female voice, even when the narrators are male. Basically, no one else can combine a sort of serene matter-of-factness with a deeply magical atmosphere and an utterly unreliable sincerity in the narrative voice like she can.