Under The Net

Product Information

It follows the adventures around London of Jake, a translator and formerly aspiring writer, who gave up his ambitions. He meets various people and devises various plans which sometimes fail but more often are prone to the change of mind of their creator. Hugo and Jake used to have grand philosophical discussions, and Jake used this material in one of his books; out of embarrassment Jake cut his ties with Hugo, but now their paths cross again.

Jeeves's tone was reproachful. "Reduced to the bare essentials, sir, any work of art will look puerile. It is not what is written, but how it is written that matters in all forms of high literature. Interpolating a philosophical argument into a picaresque novel, and carrying it off without the pace flagging or the thread being lost, requires quite a deft hand. Miss Murdoch has accomplished it seamlessly, sir." 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. It so happens that Hugo was a former friend of Jake's. They had met long ago as fellow participants in a cold-cure experiment, and had had long philosophical discussions which Jake, without Hugo's knowledge, had turned into a book called The Silencer. Because Hugo believed that language was corrupt, Jake felt that creation of the book was a kind of betrayal, and had unilaterally broken off the friendship after its publication, not wishing to face Hugo's anger.

When Jake translated Jean-Pierre Breteuil’s work, he said it was clumsy, and claimed to streamline it and improve it. In a similar way, he took Hugo’s thoughts, rearranged them, and made them more accessible. Hugo himself has no impulse to put his thoughts on paper. Although Jake is very critical of Breteuil’s novels, he does not sit down to create an original work until the end of the novel, stimulated to do so by Breteuil’s vastly improved writing. However, Hugo has no such aspirations, and at the end of the book, Hugo desires only to learn how to make watches, which could be, in a way, another form of meditation. The novel can be seen as a process of revelation to Jake, that our subjective descriptions are apparent, and unreliable. They conform to our “Net”, and are not the world itself, which may slip away, Under the Net. However, Wittgenstein later referred to this work as meaningless nonsense, and in 1953 he totally rejected the concepts which he had originally published in “Tractatus”. Sadie leads Jake to another old acquaintance: Hugo Belfounder, a curious and very talented soul who dabbled (successfully) in a variety of undertakings.

Jake doesn't need much: his first night he wraps himself up comfortably in a "bearskin complete with snout and claws". Chekhov's Skill: Judo skills of which the protagonist is proud serve him once. But in a strange way: he does not fight a foe but rather throws a friend with a judo move in a room where he then proceeds to talk to him. He was unable to make the friend to talk to him otherwise. In this, too, Under the Netexcels.In Murdochland a sort of Ancient Greek pantheism rules, not in the form of merry bucolic spirits in tree-trunks but in the way that everything – animals, the horizon, nature, architecture, clothes – seems to think and feel, can terrify or give hope.The secret is curiosity: what Louis MacNeice called ‘the drunkenness of things being various’.To Hugo Belfounder, Jake’s obsession, everything is ‘astonishing, delightful, complicated and mysterious’.Hugo can find peace as a guinea-pig at a residential cold-remedy-testing clinic or as a watchmaker, because there is interest everywhere.As Murdoch wrote in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, ‘People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us’ and, although Under the Netis set in a hot dusty post-war central London, not beside mossy cliffs or monastic ruins, it too is made rich by noticing: sparrows, fire-escapes, cars, plywood representations of Roman market places. Existentialism, as espoused by Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, is developed in France by Jean-Paul Sartre through his essays and novels.Today: Elizabeth II continues as queen of England. Her reign has outlasted ten prime ministers, with Tony Blair serving in the post in the early twenty-first century. We all live in the interstices of each other’s lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything.” 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”. In this lightly comic novel about work, love, wealth and fame the main character is Jake Donaghue, a struggling writer and translator. He seeks to improve his circumstances and make up for past mistakes by reconnecting with his old acquaintance Hugo Belfounder, a mild mannered and soft-spoken philosopher. Russell, John, “Under Iris Murdoch’s Exact, Steady Gaze,” in the New York Times, February 22, 1990.