Seven decades on, Iris Murdoch's debut still dazzles

Times

22-07-2025

I first read Under the Net more than 20 years ago. Iris Murdoch's novels had enthralled me back then and I had greedily devoured her works. They have a particular appeal to young adults, speaking as they do of the glamorous mysteries of adults who seem to feel as deeply as teenagers, yet drink cocktails and have oodles of sex. And talk about philosophy, a lot. Picking up her first novel again, I was nervous. Rereading it, I thought, was bound to uncover problems, but I needn't have worried.
Murdoch was 34 when Under the Net was published in 1954, but it reads like a practised novelist's work, ranging in tone from the comic to the despairing to the mystic. Many of her most distinctive traits are present here in full-throated form. There are dazzling, phantasmagorical scenes (a city apartment full of birds, a lover's clinch in a mime theatre), philosophical dialogues and a powerful enchanter figure, the millionaire Hugo Belfounder, at the centre.
The novel thrums with a sense of possibility even though the setting is postwar London. Murdoch's gift for unusual yet precise descriptions of character is displayed in full. The socialist leader Lefty Todd has 'the eyes of a wombat or a Rouault Christ' (Georges Rouault was an expressionist), while Mrs Tinckham, a seer-like woman who presides over a cat-filled corner shop, is 'an earth goddess surrounded by incense'. Other characters span the social gamut from typists to starlets. There's also a lovely Lassie-like dog, Mr Mars, who has been very successful in films.
The protagonist, Jake Donaghue, shares affinities with Murdoch. He is a literary hack who subsists on translating bestselling French novels. He suffers from nerves, which (I surmise) may be something to do with the Second World War. When he's chucked out by his on-off girlfriend Madge, who is about to marry Sammy Starfield, a rich bookie, he becomes involved in a series of improbable events concerning one of his translations, Le Rossignol de Bois (The Wooden Nightingale). Sammy has obtained a translated manuscript without Jake's approval and wants to use it for a film adaptation, thereby beating Hugo, who has started a film company.
Jake's relationship with Hugo is key. The latter, who inherited an arms dealership and wants to divest himself of the money, is a saintly figure, an untrained philosopher who asks searching questions, whom Jake admires intensely. Jake's sole original published work is a philosophical dialogue based on conversations with Hugo, which, in typical Murdochian style, began when they were staying in a clinic, being guinea pigs for a cure for the common cold. Jake believes that by publishing these dialogues he has betrayed Hugo and out of shame severs relations with his friend.
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Yet Jake turns out to be wrong about this, as he is about everything else. His egotism causes him to misread the signs and he must uncover the truth about this relationship and his other mistaken perceptions to break out of his literary lethargy.
There are many hilarious, drunken scenes: a tense afternoon betting on the nags, a pub crawl that ends in a moonlit swim in the Thames and the mime theatre — as gorgeous and as strange as I remembered. The frenetic plot takes in a film set (where a production of the conspiracy of Catiline is broken up by a battle between socialists and nationalists), a late-night ferry ride and a race through Paris in search of a lover. I laughed at the scene when Jake and a friend kidnap Mr Mars and try to sneak its enormous cage out of Sammy's block of flats.
The philosophy dovetails with the comedy. The 'net' of the title is language. Hugo believes humans are unable to say anything true so the only truth is silence. It is a paradox that the novel explores this in so many wonderful words. The purity (or otherwise) of art runs alongside this concern. Jake's transformation is driven by how he comes to accommodate these ideas in relation to his own work as well as his growing understanding, partly through his tender relationship with Mr Mars, that he is not the only person in the universe.
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Although Murdoch makes clear her debt to Jean-Paul Sartre, whom she had met in Paris, it's extraordinary that such a joyful work as Under the Net should have affinities with existentialism. Jake is no Antoine Roquentin from Sartre's Nausea, finding boredom in everything.
Instead, the novel reads more freshly, energetically and involvingly than a great deal of 21st-century literary fiction. Murdoch achieves a rare thing: you want to be with her characters in all their glorious mayhem and to see the world as they do. When it appeared it must have shone in the gloom like a burst of crazy sunlight. Even today it has lost none of its manic, magical brilliance.
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (Vintage £10.99 pp320). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members