Jake is a failed writer who earns money translating the works of a French writer. He is in love with Anna Quentin, a singer, and enormously influenced by Hugo Belfounder, a successful entrepreneur whom he meets at a clinic. There, they have serious dialogues about art and truth. When Jake is banished from his rooms, he tries to get in touch with Anna again. Through intricate and sometimes hilarious plot twists, he finds that Anna is in love with Hugo, and that Anna’s actress sister, Sadie, is in love with Jake. To complicate the plot further, Hugo is in love with Sadie. Sure enough, Iris Murdoch’s first novel Under the Net is dedicated to him. Perhaps the extraordinary confidence and success of this first novel, was due in part to her willingness to abandon or destroy her early works. The novel can be seen as a process of revelation to Jake, that our subjective descriptions are apparent, and unreliable. They conform to our “Net”, and are not the world itself, which may slip away, Under the Net. However, Wittgenstein later referred to this work as meaningless nonsense, and in 1953 he totally rejected the concepts which he had originally published in “Tractatus”. The 160 letters are to the popular French novelist, Raymond Queneau. They span 29 years, but most precede her marriage to the Oxford Professor of English Literature, John Bailey. She admired Raymond Queneau greatly as her mentor, looking to him both for intellectual stimulus and practical help. Queneau was a friend of Sartre: his works are said to have been a link between the Surrealists and the Existentialists. He was very interested in language, and some of his novels were written phonetically, rather than using conventional spelling. In some letters, Iris Murdoch wrote of the characters and plots she was working on. They show her filled with self-doubt, and even “hatred and contempt” for her writing, wondering whether she would “ever write something good”. Fletcher, John; Cheryl Browning Bove (1994). Iris Murdoch: a descriptive primary and annotated secondary bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing. p.127. ISBN 0824089103.

What if I try to be accurate?” Jake asked. Hugo’s response was: “One can’t be … The only hope is to avoid saying it … Language just won’t let you present it as it really is … [it] is a machine for making falsehoods … One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on.” Jake doesn't need much: his first night he wraps himself up comfortably in a "bearskin complete with snout and claws". I don't care what they think of her!" I bellowed. "If you ask me, the woman is batty. I have never read such utter bilge in my life!" He realises that it is Bastille Day, and he wanders the city for hours in a daze. In the evening, he is watching fireworks when he sees Anna. He tries to follow her, but the crowd impedes him. He nearly catches up with her in a park, after she leaves her shoes to walk barefoot on the grass. But he briefly loses sight of her, and the woman he accosts is not her. Modes of communication that rely on other languages run throughout Under The Net . Jake encounters Anna as part of a mime troupe performing in an empty theatre, a performance inspired by Jake’s interpretation of Hugo’s philosophy. When Jake finally meets Hugo again, it is on a television set of ancient Rome, which soon descends into a very real brawl. Whilst crawling London’s pubs, Jake bumps into the leader of the New Independent Socialist Party, and has a spirited discussion about socialism and activism. But in the end, theatre, television and politics prove equally limited tools for which to communicate the truth of the world.

Changes to the locations of the novel

For instance, the highlight comes from Jake and Finn trying to steal a StuntDog,Mister Mars from its home, via a cage that’s too big to fit through the door. This shows the characters charm and their human qualities, which are present throughout. Closing Thoughts on Under the Net Le meditazioni ad alta voce, i dialoghi, gli sproloqui sono arguti, divertenti, profondi. Quel tanto che m’ha fatto proseguire la conoscenza leggendo qualche altro romanzo della Murdoch (che ne pubblicò ventisei). During the 1930s, Iris Murdoch had read for a first degree in “Greats” (Ancient History, Classics, and Philosophy) at Somerville College, Oxford. After graduating, she worked as a civil servant. (It was during this time that she wrote the unpublished novels.) Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire, W. W. Norton, 1999. This is the second memoir written by Bayley about his wife. This one was written after her death, and many critics have highly recommended this book for its disclosure of a wonderfully warmhearted story of love.

Antonaccio, Maria, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch, Oxford University Press, 2000. So much attention has been spent on Murdoch as a novelist that her philosophical contributions are often overlooked. This is one of the first books that has tried to fill that gap. Antonaccio explores the contributions to moral and religious philosophy that Murdoch fervently studied and presented. They set off on a long round of visits to named pubs in named streets in the City to the east of Farringdon Street. The Viaduct Tavern and the Magpie and Stump are not described, but the George (demolished 1990) has “one of those cut-glass and mahogany superstructures through which the barman peers like an enclosed ecclesiastic”. (OK,that should be etched glass).They continue roughly eastward, and Jake’s drinking doesn’t stop him noticing the beauty of the evening: “The darkness hung in the air but spread out in a suspended powder which only made the vanishing colours more vivid … we came into Cheapside as into a bright arena, and saw framed in the gap of a ruin the pale neat rectangles of St Nicholas Cole Abbey… in between the willow herb waved over what remained of streets. In this desolation the coloured shells of houses still raised up filled and blank square of wall and window”. This lyrical passage ends with the words “we entered a Henekey’s house”. The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Rowe, Anne, ed. Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. A collection of essays that reinterprets Murdoch’s work in terms of twenty-first century debates about the aesthetic impulse, moral philosophy, gender and sexuality, literature, and authorship. Includes comparisons of Murdoch’s work with works by other authors. Hugo's philosophy has a bit of Wittgenstein to it (and the character, too, is in some -- though not all -- ways Wittgensteinian).