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.

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.

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Money is just one form of violence. It's simply a matter of personal preference that some people dislike it less than screaming and shedding blood.

There are few individuals, even among those who seem the most rigid, who are not pleased by the flouting of a convention and secretly glad to think that their society contains deplorable elements.

I am old, or rather I lack an attribute of youth, a sense of the future, a sense of time. I am just a collection of perceptions, most of which are unpleasant. As for other people, they are either with me or they don't exist.

* * * * *

The general tone of readers' comments here, even when enthusiastic, is one of puzzlement. This is because, I believe, the setting is one with which few, at least those below middle age, will be even remotely familiar. So much has changed since 1962 when this novel was first published. This is the world of the English upper middle classes that once was, now perhaps even more distant than that inhabited by Jane Austen's demurely-calculating young misses or the waifs of Dickens. Even George Elliot of a hundred years before is more recognizable. It's always a mistake to read Murdoch entirely literally, though in her 'early period', where 'metaphysics' has as yet intruded only sparingly, the characterizations are more 'realistic'. In An Unofficial Rose, they are indeed highly realistic while serving a literary purpose unique to Iris Murdoch. Metaphysical or not, and leaving aside what for some is evidently an aversion based on some sort of inverted snobbishness, this is still a drama in the abstract. So the sense of recognizability is further confused by an apparent incompatibility between the seemingly moral force of the characters and their behavior. For all that, for those of a certain age, the portraits and the 'tone' are dazzlingly managed - wittily and even maliciously self-centered, dutifully and honorably restrained, left-over Edwardian bohemian and all presenting a very cool front behind which passions rage tempestuously. As Murdoch repeatedly advises us, who knows of what unknown and uncontrolled existences we involuntarily lead in the minds of others, as laid bare in this book. Hugh Peronett, a very proper, decently-constrained and rather ineffective elderly gentleman, realizes at his wife's funeral that in forty years he never really knew who she was. He reverts to a fumbling episode from the distant past with another lady he knows even less, now a Sapphic detective writer, "crumpled and dog-faced", looking "older than she could possibly be" but still far too sharp for him. His son Randall, bitterly at odds with his own wife Ann, yearns to be under the whip of his father's old flame's 'companion', also sharp and not very nice and fairly accomplished in wielding the whip. Poor dowdy Ann is for some reason the object of Felix Meecham's chaste but determined imaginings though he has someone else lined up as second best. Felix's worldly-wise half-sister, married to a man whose peccadilloes with foreign youths were such as could not quite be countenanced even by the tolerant British Foreign Office, has for years had her sights on Hugh who's too slow to notice them. A gauche adolescent Australian nephew receiving sly attentions from the disgraced diplomat discovers he himself is enamored of his pert English cousin, a monstrous child with a fixation on her mother's would-be suitor. And for some of them at least, it's also all about money: Mr Peronett has an extremely valuable Tintoretto which he’s persuaded, or blackmailed, to hand over to support his son’s philandering. No modern novelist could handle in such a matter-of-fact way what would now pass as extremely unacceptable goings-on. Nor does it end altogether happily; no one gets quite what they want, if anything at all, except for Randall and his minx, and even he's already contemplating fresh fields. The whole business is another Murdochian muddle and the only solution is to muddle on for better or for worse. Whether it's high farce or botched tragedy, who's to say, but it's certainly diverting and, above all, highly intelligent, engrossing in a fast-moving story which at the same time forces one to think seriously about one’s own muddle. Great fun.