Murdoch’s first novel recounts a few days in the life of Jake, a sometime translator and drifter, who lives on the margins of an early fifties London intellectual world. Kicked out of his digs in the first chapter, he spends most of the novel looking for his next place to stay, something that doesn’t appear to generate all that much anxiety. The novel has a lot on common with Wain’s Hurry on Down, published the year before. Like Wain, Murdoch centres her novel on a protagonist who resists any societal pressure to settle down and get a proper job. (The only fixed job Jake takes on is as a hospital orderly, following the in footsteps of Wain’s Lumley.) Instead, he embarks on a picaresque journey which involves rabid left wingers, actresses and his nemesis, Hugo, a man who can’t help making money but dreams of becoming a watchmaker. Jake has had a book published which is a disguised transcription of the philosophical conversations he used to have with Hugo. Likewise, one can perhaps sense the author’s own instincts to use the literary form as a way of grappling with philosophy, although it never feels all that clear which philosophical issues the book is seeking to address. It seems invidious to comment on the literary merits or not of the first novel of such a respected author, all the more so as I don’t know her later work. However, more than anything, Under the Net feels like a companion piece to the fifties aspiration to discover a path towards the unconventional, which had to be out there somewhere, if only you knew where to look. (As it turns out, Liverpool, the soon-to-be former colonies and the Deep South of the USA, to name a few.)
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