Iris Murdoch

Under the Net was Iris Murdoch's first novel published in 1954 and is one of Time Magazine's 100 best novels of all time. Much is made of Murdoch's philosophy background and how she married it with her fiction writing. And while I do find this present it doesn't make the story any more or less entertaining. The most common philosophical theme in this book is that of truth and lies in communication and how we are incapable of ever telling the complete truth.

James Donaghue (Jake) is a struggling British writer and book translator living in London. The story opens with Magdalen (Madge), a typist and model, kicking him out of her flat in a reverse psychology attempt at getting him to commit.

According to Jake, Hugo Belfounder "is the central theme of this book". Jake first met Hugo years earlier when they participated in a medical research project as test subjects. They shared a room, lively conversation and a mutual respect. Jake ended up publishing a book about Hugo's ideas on the sly. He felt guilty about it and ditched his friend with no notice. Years later, Hugo is suddenly under his radar and all Jake wants to do is find Hugo and apologize for what he feels is a great grievance against him.

Finding Hugo and a new place to live doesn't come as easy as expected because Jake is easily distracted especially when he discovers a planned double-cross involving his Madge, her new beau Samuel Starfield and The Wooden Nightingale (Jake's current translation). Throughout Jake gets himself into a number of extraordinary situations (like stealing an acting dog, skinny dipping in the Thames or bringing down an entire movie set on a crowd of protesters), always managing to get out from under the net at the last moment.

Many think the title of Murdoch's first book has to do with her philosophy background; specifically with Austria philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. After reading this novel I think it has more to do with Jake's escapades and how he gets so close to being caught but manages to slip out from "under the net" at the last moment.

"Under the net" appears in an excerpt that Jake shares from his published book, The Silencer, in a conversation between Tamarus and Annandine on the theory of why we do what we do. "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."

In reviews, I kept reading about how laugh-out-loud funny this book was but I didn't actually make a peep until Jake met Mars the acting dog and asked it to feign death so Jake could skirt the police. The whole scenario was a riot... literally. Overall, the book was a big disappointment for me but I haven't sworn off Murdoch yet. It is after all only her first book. There are twenty-five more to go.

This story opens with Dora Greenfield, a creative spirit who has trapped herself in a marriage where the husband spends more time degrading her than nurturing her. She's ran away and shacked up with another free spirit but this doesn't last for long and she ends up following her husband Paul, an art historian, to a small community of God-fearing people who have set up a settlement out side a nunnery called Imber Abbey. This group is lead by Micheal Meade, a man with his own secrets and internal turmoil. Micheal owns the land outside the Abbey which the members affectionately call Imber Court. These two seem like the most unlikely duo to establish a relationship with one another but without knowing it they do.

There are a host of other characters that affect their lives in both positive and negative ways. There's Noel the journalist, Toby the student, Nick the renegade, Catherine the future nun, Murphy the dog, and Gabriel... the bell. A reference to an old church bell buried in the sludge of the lake between the Abbey and the Court is made throughout the book giving it a position of an important character. Dora even suggests as much when the bell is finally unearthed. "She came near to the bell which seemed more and more like a living presence."

There are a number of strong issues throughout the Bell but the most dominant is religion. This is followed by a healthy dose of homosexuality, marriage and adultery. Some sources site a strong theme of good and evil (probably associated with religious beliefs) but I think evil is really too harsh a term. There are no real evil people or situations in this story. It's about a group of people trying to make it through this life as best they know how while dealing with the foreseen, unforeseen and exaggerated bumps they encounter along the way. Murdoch does use her philosophical background to insert interesting questions along the way like: "Could one recognize refinements of good if one did not recognize refinements of evil?"

Iris Murdoch's The Bell is her fourth of twenty-six published novels. It was released in 1958 but takes place in England in the late forties. This is my second Murdoch novel and I found it flows and is much more vivid in detail than her first book, Under the Net. While I felt this book was certainly better than my first taste of Murdoch, as a whole it bored the heck out of me. Seriously, after the first chapter until they brought up the bell I was bored silly. I realized that is quite a subjective statement but if I had not committed myself to reading all her books I probably would have stopped here. Language differences often slow story down: "After breakfast he repaired as usual to the estate office to cast an eye over the day's correspondence (page 88)." Or just unusual, "From within the dog's barking was redoubled (page 53)." And while cliche is perfectly understandable to most I think it's the easy way for someone who was considered such an established writer. Perhaps it is still too early in her works for me to recognize her greatness.

"Some kinds of obsession, of which being in love is one, paralyze the ordinary free-wheeling of the mind, its natural open interested curious mode of being, which is sometimes persuasively defined as rationality. I was sane enough to know that I was in a state of total obsession and that I could only think, over and over again, certain agonizing thoughts, could only run continually along the same rat paths of fantasy and intent. But I was not sane enough to interrupt this mechanical movement or even the desire to do so." ~Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea)