Under The Net

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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. One day on the way to church he had met a pretty, 18-year old girl. Irene Richardson wanted to train as a singer, and had a wonderful voice. They married, and the singing career languished. Iris inherited a somewhat more uncertain version of her mother’s ‘shebeen soprano’, loved a sing-song, and on a small number of public occasions in later life was capable of breaking into song. Then why were you sneering? Don't deny it!" I cut off his objections before he could mouth them. "You were smiling. I saw it." 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. Toda teorizaci��n es una huida. Debe dirigirnos la situación en sí, y eso es inexpresablemente concreto. Desde luego, es algo a lo que nunca podemos acercarnos lo bastante, por mucho que intentemos, por así decirlo, meternos bajo la red".La más humorística de las obras que hasta ahora he leído de la autora, alguien a quien admiro profundamente y a la que saboreo me hable de lo que me hable. Y aquí, en su primera novela, me ha hablado de algunas de las cosas que le importan y de las que ya me ha hablado en sus obras posteriores.

Interestingly, Under the Net was published just a year later in 1954, and later in her own life Iris Murdoch too, professed to be embarrassed by her novel, saying that the writing was immature and juvenile. Nevertheless Wittgenstein’s influence remained clear in all her novels; she repeatedly demonstrated that life could only be shown, and not explained. They set off on a long round of visits to named pubs in named streets in the City to the east of Farringdon Street. The Viaduct Tavern and the Magpie and Stump are not described, but the George (demolished 1990) has “one of those cut-glass and mahogany superstructures through which the barman peers like an enclosed ecclesiastic”. (OK,that should be etched glass).They continue roughly eastward, and Jake’s drinking doesn’t stop him noticing the beauty of the evening: “The darkness hung in the air but spread out in a suspended powder which only made the vanishing colours more vivid … we came into Cheapside as into a bright arena, and saw framed in the gap of a ruin the pale neat rectangles of St Nicholas Cole Abbey… in between the willow herb waved over what remained of streets. In this desolation the coloured shells of houses still raised up filled and blank square of wall and window”. This lyrical passage ends with the words “we entered a Henekey’s house”.

Time.com

Likewise, Murdoch’s use of imagery had me swept away, with her delicate details of busy streets, giving every environment its own unique touches. She offers up some extraordinaryhuman insights that have you taking to the characters in no time. 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. With an immensity of pains, Jake succeeds in reaching Hugo's room shortly after one in the morning. The conversation is not at all what he expected: Hugo is not at all angry with Jake, and it turns out that while Anna is indeed besotted with Hugo, Hugo himself is in love with Sadie, and Sadie with Jake—not a love triangle, but a one-way love diamond. Hugo demands that Jake help him escape. Jake does so, but they are seen by the hostile porter, Stitch, and Jake knows that he has lost his job.

Under the Net is an extraordinary novel which can be read on so many levels. The setting switches between London and Paris on a whim. Most of the characters seem to play at life: to dabble in one thing or another. Time and again we see facades and illusions, such a movie theatre set of an impressive Roman temple, which is shown to be a paper and plaster sham, crumpling to nothing. A simple reflection in a lake dissolves in an instant when it is disturbed. The truth is not how it appears. And that, precisely, is what’s saved him.He’s left behind hopeless love and the illusion of importance; he’s ready to work, and notice things, and that will be his salvation.In Murdoch’s novels, characters grow; they think about what matters, experience sorrow, guilt, heartbreak and passion, and try to be strong.Does it matter that this tends to happen in shabby London side-streets, in bosky woods or sunlit beaches, not in the White House or at war?Of course not.Fiction is about the variousness of being human, and Iris Murdoch, a complicated human and a great writer, is the perfect guide. 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. 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?"

Ho iniziato a leggerla sicuramente perché la trovavo nominata spesso leggendo Arbasino. E ho cominciato proprio da qui e non da un altro dei suoi venticinque romanzi immagino per via della dedica: “a Raymond Queneau”. In Medias Res: It all starts when a protagonist and his friend Finn are evicted from the house where the lived. Better still they lived their for free as the landlady demanded no rent from them. I know that nothing consoles and nothing justifies except a story", Jake quotes from his own Hugo-influenced work, The Silencer. Still it's a good story and I enjoyed the humor in the writing. So why rate it a ‘3’? It turns out, and I did not know this while I was reading the book, that this was the first novel that Murdoch published, 1954. Obviously her skills improved over time.