Under The Net

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It’s worth noting that Jake’s cousin Finn provides the majority of the comic relief due to his goofy nature and inability to grasp many social interactions. B : decent romp, with some fun scenes and clever thoughts, but doesn't quite come together as a novel Iris Murdoch started her career with one brilliantly funny novel, Under the Net. From then on, it was downhill all the way" - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent (8/5/2003) Si va al pub, si beve, si parla (lui, Jake, l’io narrante protagonista), l’amico del cuore Finn ascolta senza aprire bocca, e così sembra molto intelligente. Chiacchiere, pensieri, filosofeggiare, letteratura.

Jake is a failed writer who earns money translating the works of a French writer. He is in love with Anna Quentin, a singer, and enormously influenced by Hugo Belfounder, a successful entrepreneur whom he meets at a clinic. There, they have serious dialogues about art and truth. When Jake is banished from his rooms, he tries to get in touch with Anna again. Through intricate and sometimes hilarious plot twists, he finds that Anna is in love with Hugo, and that Anna’s actress sister, Sadie, is in love with Jake. To complicate the plot further, Hugo is in love with Sadie. Nolan, Bran. Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction. 2d ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Takes a psychological approach to Murdoch’s work, focusing on how she represents past events and their effects on her characters. Includes analysis of novels that were not discussed in the first edition, published in 1999; also includes a new preface, an updated bibliography, and three additional chapters covering Murdoch’s most important and popular novels. Iris Murdoch is one of my favorite authors. This is the 6th book of hers that I have read and I never thought I would rate one of them a ‘3’ but here it is. I'll explain below. It's still a good story. Kellman, Steven, “Shakespearean Plot in the Novels of Iris Murdoch,” in Iris Murdoch, edited by Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views series, Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, p. 89. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch’s first novel, might seem, at least in summary, fair game.It contains suspiciously European-sounding academics, Socratic argument, farcical semi-crimes, French translators, large affordable flats in Central London.Could anything be less attuned to this miserably populist, anti-intellectual, austerity-ridden xenophobic age?And, although its characters don’t have the establishment jobs, the beautiful gardens and romantic good fortune for which her later work is criticised, they are nonetheless fans of gauzy fabrics, Pernod and existentialism; they include a firework manufacturer, a celebrity German Shepherd, a fairly honest bookie and a taciturn taxi-driver.Everyone writes letters; the City of London is a Blitzed wasteland of rubble and fragile churches, full of willowherb and potential.What possible relevance could such a book have now?

Had the war not supervened, Iris might have continued her studies as a Renaissance art historian. With her first degree she got a post in Cambridge for a year and then in Oxford, where she taught philosophy from 1948 to 1963. She is remembered as a generous and brilliant teacher - very beautiful, with great big eyes and striking dresses. There was a brief period teaching philosophy at the Royal College of Art in the 1963-67. She found the wildness of the students picturesque, and this gets into the novels of that decade. Such a process of learning is necessarily a calling-into-question of what is normally meant by ‘identity’. Indeed, she would often speak of herself as having no strong identity. And yet the capacity so to forget herself depended equally on an unusually strong sense of who she was. In the bar of a train in 1981, an enthusiastic lady greeted Iris Murdoch as Margaret Drabble. ‘How can you tell,’ Iris quizzically and patiently enquired ‘that I’m not Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, or Muriel Spark?’ ‘I’d know you anywhere Margaret,’ cried the enthusiast. Big Guy, Little Guy: That's what Jake and Finn are together, the protagonist Jake being the little guy.

Accomplished work my foot!" I exploded. "This tale of a dotty bounder who wanders around London, going on one continuous toot - I mean, there is hardly a scene where he is not having a drink - and getting the raspberry from one popsy after the other, until he winds up on the road with an aged Alsatian dog is considered an 'accomplished' work?" What was she like? There are myths here, as well as truths. She created, in Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), one character who feared that after his death he would be wrongly praised as a saint, and seems to have meant this as a whimsical warning about being turned into the Abbess of north Oxford herself. Yet she would answer all fan-mail by hand, with no help from a secretary, who - this was her fear - would eat up further time. As a result she was plagued by bores who returned for more. ‘Pals for life’ she once despairingly complained. There were often 12 letters per day, and then 200 at Christmas. She helped her mother’s window-cleaner publish a detective novel. When A S Byatt’s son was killed, Iris listened to her and wept, and let her say the things that no-one else would. All the while Jake rushes to and fro and all about (including, briefly, to Paris), getting involved in a number of capers and some madcap misadventures. In the end Hugo has philosophically accepted: "One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on."

In Paris, Jake is amazed to discover that Jean-Pierre Breteuil's latest novel, Nous les Vainqueurs, has won the Prix Goncourt, and having dismissed Breteuil's work for so long he is amazed and envious. Madge's offer turns out to be a kind of film industry sinecure, and he finds himself refusing it with distaste for reasons that he cannot explain. Modern Library ranked Under the Net at #95 on its list of ‘ the greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century.’ Under The Net Analysis The ideas are already here, and the talent too, but Murdoch wasn't fully able to make a story out of it yet.

The novel is largely a series of comic set-pieces loosely structured by Jake’s searches for two people, Anna Quentin and Hugo Belfounder. Jake believes Anna is the love of his life. She is a well-known singer of French chanson. She is six years older than Jake, and has had many other lovers. Hugo is a rich industrialist and currently the owner of a leading British film studio, whose star actress is Anna’s sister, Sadie. Jake is almost obsessed with Hugo as a thinker. They met as volunteer guinea-pigs at an unlikely-sounding institution called the Common Cold Research Unit (which really existed), and talked non-stop for weeks, and continued to meet and talk after they were both barred from the CCRU. Jake’s quest next leads him to his friend Dave’s house. Dave Gellman is a philosopher, “a real one,” with whom Jake loves to discuss ideas. Yet no matter how much they talk, he finds that they never get anywhere. Jake tries to discuss various philosophical concepts from Hegel or Spinoza, which he did not fully understand. Dave often tells him that he does not understand Jake. “It took me some time,” Jake said “to realize that when Dave said he didn’t understand, what he meant was that what I said was nonsense.” This reflects Wittgenstein’s belief that all philosophers, including himself, could at best only write nonsense, because of the limitation of language. Jake finally gives up trying to talk philosophy with him, because “Dave could never get past the word.” Indeed she kept a debate about human difference alive, through the bad years when the fools of both extreme right and left had sheepishly pretended that it did not matter, or even did not exist anyway. Human difference also meant moral difference. How is it that some human beings are morally better than others? What is it that might make a man good, even in a concentration camp? Consider Korczak, who gave his life in Treblinka, or Kolbe in Auschwitz, or, indeed, Frank Thompson. How did it come about that in the epoch of greatest political evil, the century of Stalin and Hitler, moral terms had simultaneously been evacuated of any absolute significance by philosophers?Under the Net, from 1954, was the first published novel by Iris Murdoch, the distinguished academic, and professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University. As well as books on moral philosophy she wrote twenty-six critically acclaimed novels, one of which won the prestigious Booker prize. Yet Under the Net is sometimes dismissed as a light comic piece, in comparison with her later, lengthier novels. Certainly it can be read that way, as a humorous tale about a Bohemian young Irish man in London, Jake Donoghue, who occasionally earns a crust by translating trashy French novels, but by and large has avoided getting a job, and as the blurb says “sponges off his friends”.