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.

"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)