“Extreme love, once it is recognised, has the stamp of the indubitable. I had just moved in, again, with my wife, whom I didn’t love, was obsessed by a woman who probably despised me, and had just learned that my former mistress was about to marry my brother, whose good fortune we were celebrating (if that’s the word) with my best champagne.” The opening line is, famously, Iris Murdoch. The rest: an abridger’s attempt to condense the plot of her fifth and most bourgeoisie-bonking novel, published in 1961.
Thankfully, Martin Lynch-Gibbon, the narrator in this dramatisation for Woman’s Hour (broadcast 24-28 August), was played by the always excellent Julian Rhind-Tutt, and in a modestly sardonic way, even if this was an adaptation that most underlined the novel’s farcical elements. When I first read A Severed Head, as a wholly green teenager and never having had anything even approaching a romantic relationship, its drama was gorgeously overwhelming – all that Knightsbridge bed-hopping (sculptors, academics, therapists and wine merchants). I was possessed by the glamour of its various adulteries.
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