Luck and Finn

One thing I often wondered about while reading: What are we supposed to make of Jake's luck (and the role of luck in life)? He seemed to luck out several times: the two winning horse-race episodes, the potentially sweet house-sitting gig with Sadie, the generous job offer from Madge in Paris, getting the hospital gig so easily, the offer from Hugo to share some of his wealth. He never seemed truly down and out, because opportunities just seemed to fall in his lap. If he didn't avail himself of one, another soon came along. This seemed significant somehow, but I'm not really sure what Murdoch meant for us to make of it.

Also, what did you think of Finn and how he ended up back in Ireland?

Next pick

“The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan

I hope you’re in the mood for some nonfiction. Shall we say Aug. 30?

"Sadie would keep"

KC has pointed out some of the finer lines in "Under the Net," especially about the interstices. I thought there was some maturity to Jake's assessment, when he realized Sadie was the real object of his affection, that she would "keep." Not in a way that a woman would sit at home with her hands folded in her lap until her man caroused on home, but that she had a life and way congruent to his that meant their relationship could pick up again at some later point if it were meant to be.

When I have thought in terms of love, I admit I have not had the maturity to see that ability to let someone remain free and away from me, to percolate into whatever kind of person they were destined to become, if that makes sense. I am more inclined to feel anxious and put some stamp of ownership on that relationship. To claim dibs. Like Jake's comfort level with a life outside the settled-down and up-and-up, he also could part ways with people he loved and hope they meet again if it's meant to be. It was kind of part of that bohemian (am I using the right word? I'm tired) attitude that might have been Murdoch's or that culture at that time or whatnot, some kind of maturity we've rubbed out of our own attitudes about courtship.

The sisters

Again, I couldn't decide whether this was some target toward women, but I found it difficult to see Anna and Sadie as sisters -- they really seemed more like rivals, even without the rivalries over Jake and Hugo. (Jake being more so, I think, a rivalry they could pick up at any time but wasn't missed unless he forced himself into their lives again, as he did.) Anyway, I think there was some absence of affection, or because Jake viewed them as objects of desire, it might not have been something he could have provided as their narrator.

Did you find any more redeeming or deeper qualities in either sister, as Jake eventually did with Sadie?

Writing style

I confess that I sometimes found Murdoch's writing style too densely detailed (mainly too concerned with physical description), and, thus, somewhat slow-moving, but I also found some real gems of phrasing and sheer observation.

Sometimes comic:
To Dave's pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave's pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding university vacations, should suffice to find it.

Hehe

Sometimes poignant:
As for her ambiguous dismissal of me, I was used to this. Most of the women I know behave in this way, and I have become accustomed to asking no questions, and even to thinking no questions. We all live in the interstices of each other's lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything.

That is just brilliant to me. We all live in the interstices of each other's lives.

How strangely it excites people to see their dogs swimming!

Indeed, it does. Without fail! (I heartily enjoyed the way she portrayed Mars and Jake's fondness for him).

"Some situations can't be unravelled," said Hugo, "they just have to be dropped. The trouble with you, Jake, is that you want to understand everything sympathetically. It can't be done. One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on."

That's when I saw Hugo's real genius.

And sometimes poetic:
Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent forever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, life itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came."

Gorgeous.

Favorite parts

One of my favorite scenes in the book was when Jake and his cohorts got tipsy at the pub, then took a late-night dip in the Thames, followed by a snack of foie gras and crackers pilfered from Sadie's flat. The scene was well described. I could almost feel the foul, murky river water — and also the childlike sensation of not caring that it was foul, and the peculiar hunger you get after swimming. That's kind of a universal human experience, I think — the need to commune with the elements, water and night, and to feel like it's a kind of right, whether it's trespassing or dangerous or stupid or whatever. Jake's nighttime expedition after Anna in Paris also had that feel: the pursuit of a primal, if elusive, goal.

Although I thought some of the scenes rambled on a bit too long, I did enjoy the tours through London and Paris, all the place names and associations and the sense that the cities were themselves characters in the book. It didn't seem like a story that could be set just anywhere. It reminded me a little of George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London." They should release an edition of Murdoch's book with maps of all of Jake's rambles.

The good life

I want to be Mrs. Tinckham when I grow up! A cheap shop full of old books, where secrets are made and kept and cats guard the perimeter.

Actually, there was a broad appeal to me of the bohemian life Jake and the other characters seemed to lead, bumping about from one situation and odd job to the next, so unlike our culture and the requisite ladder. It's also a really useful setting for a romantic comedy that one can be on one adventure to the next when there's no job to report to. I can't imagine the comfort of living that way, though. Was that just a different time and a place? Did it affect Jake's philosophy at all? Did being an orderly change that for him?

Jake and the women

This is my second reading of "Under the Net" since many years ago, and the narrator, Jake, seems very different from what I remembered. I forgot he was such a connoisseur of women, their charms and their hangups. He was willing to love them for both but had to be on standby as their critic. Did you see that as well? Since it is the only book I've read by Iris Murdoch, I wondered, too, how she went about tackling a male narrative voice. Were the criticisms she piled on the women (save for the delightful Mrs. Tinckham) her personal POV or how she thought a man would perceive them?