Under the Net
First edition
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| Author | Iris Murdoch |
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| Cover artist | Victor Ross |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Chatto & Windus |
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Publication date
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1954 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 286pp |
Under the Net was the first novel of Iris Murdoch, published in 1954. Set in London, it is the story of a struggling young writer, Jake Donaghue. Its mixture of the philosophical and the picaresque has made it one of Murdoch's most popular, although least favoured by herself.
It was dedicated to Raymond Queneau. When Jake leaves Madge's flat in Chapter 1, two of the books he mentions taking are Murphy by Samuel Beckett, and Pierrot mon ami by Queneau, both of which are echoed in this story. The epigraph, from John Dryden's Secular Masque, refers to the way in which the main character is driven from place to place by his misunderstandings.
In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present. The editors of Modern Library named the work as one of the greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century.
The "net" in question is the net of abstraction, generalization, and theory. In Chapter 6, a quotation from Jake's book The Silencer includes the passage: "All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net."
Jake Donaghue has just arrived back in London from a trip to France. Finn, a distant relative who is so obliging that he is sometimes mistaken for a servant, tells Jake that they are being thrown out of Madge's house, where they have been living rent-free for eighteen months. A conversation with Madge reveals that they are being moved to make way for her new lover, the rich bookmaker Sammy Starfield.
He goes with his suitcase to the cat-filled corner shop of Mrs Tinckham to check he has all his manuscripts and figure out where to live. Only one manuscript is missing: his translation of Le Rossignol de Bois, a novel by Jean-Pierre Breteuil. It is a mediocre work which he has done for money. He thinks of an old friend, a philosopher named Dave Gellman, and goes to his flat. A political meeting is being held there, and Dave is dismissive, but allows him to leave his suitcase. Finn suggests that he ask Anna Quentin, a singer he once fell in love with.
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Wikipedia