Guest review by Sarah LeFanu: UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch

 

"Her joy in thinking and observing, in the vagaries of the emotions, in the pleasures of friendship, and in the pursuit of love, are all vividly present in her very first, utterly delightful novel."

Photograph: Lindsey Fiddler

Sarah LeFanu is a biographer whose subjects include Rose Macaulay, Samora Machel, Mary Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. She has published two memoirs that focus on the process of biographical writing: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal and Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

A quintessential Iris Murdoch novel would feature a group of highly intelligent people caught in a chain of unrequited love, struggling to find meaningfulness in the random events of chance, and thinking deeply. They often think about how to be good. For some readers The Sea, The Sea is the classic, for others The Bell, or The Black Prince, or A Severed Head. Murdoch published twenty-six novels, so there are many to choose from. My own current favourite is her very first, Under the Net, published in 1954. It is a high-spirited and frequently hilarious exploration of how to live and how to be good, in the form of an extended caper through the streets and spaces of the narrator’s ‘beloved London’ (with an intermezzo in Paris).

Chronically short of money, reliant on what he gets from translating not-very-good French novels and on the goodwill of others, narrator Jake Donoghue finds, at the opening of the novel, that he and his sidekick Finn have been thrown out of their current nesting-place and must find somewhere else to live.

Besides Finn, Jake’s friends and acquaintances include Hugo Belfounder whom he first meets at a cold-cure research establishment (for penniless Jake ‘an incredibly charitable arrangement’), who is a rich inventor, a thinker, and owner of a film studio; Dave Gellman, a lecturer in philosophy whose flat in Goldhawk Road offers a floor if not a bed for Jake and Finn; Lefty Todd, eccentric leader of the New Independent Socialist Party; folk singer Anna Quentin for whom Jake yearns, and her sister, would-be film star Sadie; enigmatic cat-loving Mrs Tinckham who runs a grubby ‘accommodation address’ newsagent off Charlotte Street. And Mister Mars, a canine film star kidnapped (amateurishly) by Jake and Finn, who becomes Jake’s loving accomplice.

Some of these people are met by accident; others are pursued for one reason or another. All form part of an intricate, shifting pattern, pattern rather than plot, for this is a story about chance, luck, misunderstandings, reversals, money that comes unexpectedly and vanishes just as fast. There is unrequited love (Hugo: ‘Jake, you’re a fool. You know anyone can love anyone, or prefer anyone to anyone’), but this is also a novel about friendship.

Under the Net is rich in observed detail. Jake and his friends move through a London that is not yet recovered from the depredations of war, a London of ruined churches and rosebay willowherb. They wander from Shepherd’s Bush to the Holborn Viaduct, from which they look down on Farringdon Street which ‘swept below us like a dried up river’, to City pubs and to the Bounty Belfounder film studio in south London. In the early hours of one morning three of them swim in the Thames when the tide is on the turn and the moon is ‘scattered in pieces’ upon the water.

In between his pondering on inevitability, on fate, on the astonishing fact that the not-very-good French novelist’s latest novel has just won the Prix Goncourt, Jake amiably shares his views and opinions with the reader, and somehow makes us willingly complicit in the most egregious situations. ‘If you have ever tried to sleep on the Victoria Embankment,’ he declares, ‘you will know that the chief difficulty is that the seats are divided in the middle.’ He leads us through a series of wild and comic set pieces (the kidnapping of Mister Mars, the pursuit of Anna through the Tuileries, the clash between Lefty Todd and right-wing agitators at the studio) to an extraordinarily intense climax, which takes place at night on a hospital ward when devastating truth is revealed, but revealed in whispers so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Sister on duty.

Iris Murdoch’s reputation took a trashing, soon after her death in 1999, from an unsavoury memoir published by her husband John Bayley which charted her decline into dementia. I am glad to say that that has been succeeded more recently by biographical and critical accounts that celebrate her wide-ranging interests: her appetite for philosophy, for literature and for love affairs. Her joy in thinking and observing, in the vagaries of the emotions, in the pleasures of friendship, and in the pursuit of love, are all vividly present in her very first, utterly delightful novel Under the Net.

Under the Net is published by Vintage Classics (Murdoch Series)