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In its concern with the role of art in redeeming contingency it clearly echoes La Nausée; but it is also a novel which differently undercuts its existentialist hero-narrator. It is in fact a novel which draws on the Romantic tradition, the first novel of a Platonist in the making, schematically enquiring into the nature of the Good man and his relations with art, with true vision, and with copying. Art as much as Jake is its hero, copying its prophetic subject-matter. It takes on anxieties about realism many decades before these became fashionable in England.

      Under the Net’s success has been obscured by the later work. It would be a very odd and unintelligent writer whose work did not develop at all over more than thirty years, so that her first novel remained her best; and whatever else Iris Murdoch is as a writer, she is an exceptionally intelligent one. In comparison with The Black Prince, a better novel about art and the education of an artist, where the idea-play is fed by a much more interesting story and better-drawn characters, Under the Net is extraordinary but still clearly apprentice work. Apprenticeship is another of its subjects. Both Hugo and Jake end up apprenticed to their crafts, of watchmaking and fictionmaking respectively.

      And yet if Murdoch had written nothing else she would have been remembered for Under the Net. It is only the stature of her later work which dwarfs it, an astonishingly assured, inventive and funny first book. She had destroyed three or more earlier unpublished novels^*; on the grounds of their immaturity, and this rigour had paid dividends. Under the Net partly resembles The Pickwick Papers: a picaresque, charming, light and innocent first novel, an episodic account of the boozy journeyings of a quixotic, illusionridden knight and his cannier squire. There have indeed been few critics who are not Chestertonian in their enthusiasm for the zest and buoyancy of her early novels, and because this has meant an undervaluation of the later work it seems useful to try to see the early work in a perspective which the later work makes available, and to read the early work through the later. I’m not – or not simply – pleading, like Edmund Wilson with the ‘dark’ Dickens, for a demonic and alienated later Murdoch to set off against her early optimism. One aspect of the brilliance of the later work is the critique it offers of that facile pessimism which is nowadays the insignia of the intellectual: to have a passion for imagining the worst, as John Bayley puts it in The Characters of Love, is the main premise for being thought serious.² The general movement, however, is, as Murdoch put it, from the ‘quaint, funny, absurd and touching’ early work towards the ‘sad and awful’ later dark comedies (Bellamy, 1977). A crucial word here is ‘comedy’. The later books are not only darker, much more confident and less anxious to charm us than the early ones – they are thereby also wiser and funnier. She latterly showed us terrible things and made us laugh, and without diminishing the awfulness one whit. The face of the mature work resembles Martin Lynch-Gibbon’s in A Severed Head, ‘the face of someone laughing at something tragic’ (15). There are connexions between comedy and ‘contingency’ in her work which cut across all other distinctions, and where the books are less than fully successful it is often not because they are more ‘symbolic’, but because they are less comic.³

      By these high standards the interest of Under the Net is partly in its exposition of themes which were to recur. It is the first and least disquieting of her brilliant first-person male narrations. She called her identification with the male voice ‘instinctive’ (Caen, 1978); I know nothing quite like them. There are male novelists who can persuade you into the minds of young women – Tolstoy, Henry James, Angus Wilson; the reverse feat seems rarer. Virginia Woolf’s pleasure in animating Orlando as a man can seem winsome and create a mild disassociation. In Murdoch what you detect is not so much the author’s pleasure as her relaxed and businesslike efficiency, into which she has wholly disappeared. The question of her relation with these heroes is a legitimate one. The subversive power of these narrations comes from our intimate relation with them and hence from our identification. This is solicited through a strenuous suspension of moral judgement on the author’s part, which comes to mean that judging these ‘loveable monsters’ resembles passing judgement on ourselves. This is one reason why reading these books can be, as well as a hilarious and spellbinding experience, also a very uncomfortable one. The prototype for this subversive relation between author-character and reader is Dostoevsky’s blackly comic Notes from Underground, a work to which The Black Prince, A Word Child and The Sea, The Sea show a debt. Dostoevsky’s relations with his hero, like Murdoch’s, are profoundly equivocal, and depend on devious intimate play with his own potential worst self or selves. Murdoch’s mastery of this equivocation is extraordinary.⁴

      What might be added is that if there is a naïveté involved in identifying the author with her, very different, first-person narrators, as if this were a mere feat of literary transvestism, another sort of simplicity wholly detaches her from this crew as if they were moral exhibition-pieces, waxworks in some cautionary tale. Her success depends on the warmth of her identification as much as on the rigour of her simultaneous detachment. Where she gets too close (Jake in Under the Net), or too distant (Edmund in The Italian Girl), the book can be less successful. Moreover, despite conspicuous differences between these narrators, there are also evident similarities. Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea and Jake Donaghue in Under the Net are both short men who blush and like swimming. All these narrators, from Jake to Charles, are within a year of their author’s age at the time of writing. All are in her specially extended sense ‘artists’. All are differently fastidious, are in some (not simply sexual) sense puritans, and experience that terror of multiplicity or contingency which Murdoch acknowledged in her interview with Ruth Heyd (1965). ‘I hate contingency; I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason’ (24), says Jake. Such fear marks us all; what Murdoch shows in each portrait is also that relaxation of censorship at the threshold of consciousness which Schiller emphasised, in a well-known letter admired by Freud, as the peculiar, dangerous gift of the artist.⁵ Her suspicion of this relaxation of censorship, and her mastery of it alike, make for a sense of drama.

      Under the Net is told by Jake Donaghue, a bohemian, an Irishman brought up like Murdoch in London, and a ‘professional unauthorised person’, a raffish outsider. Talkative yet secretive, an irresolute sentimentalist with ‘shattered nerves’, he announces himself as a swift, intuitive type of thinker. This comes to mean, as the story unfolds, that he is impulsive, restless, profoundly impressionable, romantic and somewhat lost. Jake is a charming, feckless bohemian hack given to bouts of melancholia who earns money by translating the French novelist Breteuil, whose work he despises. At the beginning he arrives back from France to find himself homeless. His squire Finn tells him that Madge, with whom they have been living rent-free in Earl’s Court, is marrying and has kicked them out. The book concerns Jake’s subsequent journeyings; as Frank Baldanza has pointed out, they represent a mixture of flight and quest.⁶ Flight and quest are indeed often indistinguishable here. The mystery he is seeking seems to him partly embodied in the two Quentin sisters, Anna and Sadie, partly in his erstwhile friend Hugo Belfounder. Like Jane Austen’s Emma, Jake makes mistakes about who loves whom. He thinks he loves Anna who he imagines is pursued by Hugo who he thinks must be loved by Sadie. In fact Anna pursues Hugo who loves Sadie who is keen on him, Jake. He has been told all this but has licensed his own fantasies. He similarly thinks that Breteuil will never write a good book and that Finn will never return to Ireland, though Finn often says he wishes to. Finn does return to Ireland and Breteuil wins the coveted Prix Goncourt. Jake is progressively disenchanted, and ends the book with a newly-won joy at such withering into the truth, ready to write a book of his own, and trying to eschew theory.

      What distinguishes Jake’s tale from that of a nineteenth-century hero or heroine – Emma, or Isabel Archer, also a ‘person of many theories’ – is the special use of picaresque convention, which is more self-conscious than Dickens’s, the extraordinary relations between the two central figures and what passes between them, and finally the tale’s openendedness.

      A.S.

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