It’s #IMReadalong update time – today I’m going to be sharing the reviews of “A Severed Head” that have come in so far (and will add more as they appear) and then have a chat about April’s read, “An Unofficial Rose”

“A Severed Head”

Excitement started building on this one as early as my introductory post at the end of February, so I knew a few people would be taking part.

I managed to get it reviewed earlier in the month than the last couple, and had some great comments on my review.

The cover images have been coming in again, with Peter Rivenberg submitting this really lovely image of the American Viking hardback:

Alice Libbey Griffith sent me this Penguin cover, which again I really like (I have some paperbacks in this edition, but not this one):

And both Peter and blogger Bookish Beck (more on her review in a moment) sent me cover images of this AWFUL film tie-in cover …

Isn’t it just HORRIBLE! Peter let me know some more details – I haven’t seen the film:

[This] is from a 1974 version with an image from the film based on the novel and play. It shows … Martin and Antonia (Ian Holm and Lee Remick) in the foreground with Palmer (Richard Attenborough) in the background. Not my idea of Palmer at all. And I’ve read that Murdoch was not happy with the film.I went back and reviewed scenes from my DVD of A Severed Head (I bought it from Turner Classic Movies out of curiosity about a year ago) and realized the book cover is not exactly a dream sequence but more an image that comes to Martin as he is contemplating his situation. The film is likely to be a disappointment to anyone who has read and loved the book. At times the characters speak lines from the book and at other times new lines have been invented that fall flat to my ear. Georgie, bizarrely, works at some kind of loom, perhaps an allusion to the Lady of Shalott. Necessarily the film needs to do away with a lot of the book’s complexity but the sequence of events is more or less intact.

Moving swiftly on to the reviews, there have been some great comments on my own review here. Bridget from A New Look Through Old Eyes (with whom I’m planning a sort of project on paper book / audio book reads) has posted this excellent review of her experience with the audio book (with the absolute perfect narrator). Bookish Beck has posted a great and funny review here. Liz talks on Goodreads about how the themes and the way they’re portrayed contrast, and Jo has a good meaty Goodreads review  which does contain mild spoilers but goes into a lovely lot of detail.

If you have comments to make or links to blog posts to post, you can put them here or (better still) on the review.

“An Unofficial Rose”

Moving on to our April read, I have three copies of “An Unofficial Rose”. I thought I first read it when I discovered Murdoch and read my way through everything she’d written until then (this was in around 1986, so I would have had access to the paperbacks up to about “The Philosopher’s Pupil” but the note inside the front cover of my Penguin copy says I bought it on my 23rd birthday in 1995. I really don’t recall whether I’d already read it; I know I snapped up Murdochs with Christmas and birthday book tokens as I went. I know I read it when I went through them all in my 20s and again in the 2000s; I also know that I have never considered it a favourite, but I can’t explain why.

Here are my three copies: a Chatto & Windus first edition (not a first printing as it has a note that it’s a Book Society Choice), a Penguin edition bought in 1995 and very faded, and my new Vintage copy:

Here are the blurbs to entice you, from the earliest, talking about one of those Murdochian webs of love:

and do we have a potential Saint already in Ann, absorbing everyone’s strains and pains? Shorter and to the point with the Penguin:

and interestingly concentrating a lot more on Hugh and Emma. And the most recent one:

Well, here they’ve gone back to that first blurb in a lot of ways, haven’t they?

Are you going to be reading or re-reading “An Unofficial Rose” along with me? What’s your favourite so far?

You will find a page listing all of these blog posts here, updated as I go along.