The Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

This is another "library tagging project" discovery.  I had read Iris and vaguely remembered the movie but realized I had never read any of Murdoch's books.  She is considered one of the great contemporary British authors so when I found myself working in the "M" section, I selected a few to try.  The title suggested a murder mystery but I guess this would be classified as an intellectual romantic farce and oh so British.  Martin enjoys his life with his constrained marriage to the sophisticated Antonia and his deliciously illicit affair with the much younger independently minded Georgie.  He has no idea that Antonia is sleeping with his good friend Parker, an American psychologist,  who is in turn sleeping with his half sister Honor.  And this is only the beginning of the liaisons past and future.  The reader understand all that is happening through the often erroneous thinking of poor needy Martin.  I decided the title had nothing to do with a real severed head but much to do with making decisions as if the head was indeed disconnected from the body.  As muddled as the relationships may be, Murdoch's prose is dead on.  She has no need for the strings of modifiers that crowd some author's works.  She knows the exact word for how sad or delightful or angry something or someone is.  And if she needs a work of art or a literary reference to clarify the mood, she knows that too.  So now I am aware both of how little I know about these art and literary references and how mundane is my comfortable monogamous life :-)