Paul's Reviews > Under the Net

2.75 stars
My first Murdoch in some years and it probably wasn’t a good idea to go for her first novel! It’s from 1954 and is set in 1950s London with an eclectic bunch of Bohemian characters. The narrator is Jake, a hack writer, who has a set of fairly picaresque adventures. This being Murdoch, there is a fair amount of philosophy flung about the place (one of the characters is a philosopher) with Beckett and Queneau both being referenced. The net referenced in the title is a net of abstraction, generalisation and theory. Indeed the title is explained by a quote from the title character’s own book!
"All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular here. 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.”
Well that’s obviously clear then.
The plot is best not described in detail: Jake is always looking for someone and rarely finding them, He has a fairly tangential relationship to the law and as this is Murdoch contingency raises its head:
“There are some parts in London which are necessary and others which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earls Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason.”
Murdoch, throughout her writing stresses the importance of the accidental, unpredictable and life’s messiness. That is also contingent and Jake experiences all this by the bucketload.
There are some good minor characters. For example, the chain-smoking cat lover Mrs Tinckham, who owns a newsagents shop:
“In the midst sits Mrs Tinckham herself, smoking a cigarette. She is the only person I know who is literally a chain-smoker. She lights each one from the butt of the last; how she lights the first one of the day remains to me a mystery, for she never seems to have any matches in the house when I ask her for one. I once arrived to find her in great distress because her current cigarette had fallen into a cup of coffee and she had no fire to light another. Perhaps she smokes all night, or perhaps there is an undying cigarette which burns eternally in her bedroom. An enamel basin at her feet is filled, usually to overflowing, with cigarette ends; and beside her on the counter is a little wireless which is always on, very softly and inaudibly, so that a sort of murmurous music accompanies Mrs Tinckham as she sits, wreathed in cigarette smoke, among the cats.”
Mars, the aged Alsatian is also a star turn. Jake however is pretty self-centred and unlikeable (like a number of Murdoch’s leading men) and spending most of the book in his company is a bit wearing:
‘I am myself a sort of professional Unauthorized Person; I am sure I have been turned out of more places than any other member of the English intelligentsia.’
In a sort of way Jake is trying to find himself and although the novel is only about 250 pages, he seems to take a long time to do so!
It isn’t all bad, there are some well-drawn minor characters and the picaresque areas are entertaining (and probably contingent).