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Rating: 3 stars

This is my first Iris Murdoch book, and apparently I chose the wrong book to start with. I hope that's the case, since she has 5 more books on the list. It was a pleasant enough book, it just didn't really wow me in any way. To be fair, I have read a few "wow" books recently, and maybe it isn't fair to compare.

The good: I like Murdoch's use of language. I enjoy her wordplay and sense of humor. I also appreciated some of the philosophical conversations between characters. Murdoch did a terrific job of painting the character of Jake, the main character, even if I didn't particularly care for him. My favorite parts of the book involved the dog or the cats - definitely a plus for pet lovers.

The not-so-good: Not much of a plot. I don't always need a plot, but if I don't have a plot I should at least enjoy what is going on and feel engaged in the book. I found it mostly boring and really fought to stay interested. I also had difficulty identifying with the main character. He was a lazy sort with few redeeming qualities. The book moved slowly and yet was all over the place to me. I think it would have worked better as a set of short stories. Overall, these issues weren't big, there were just to many of them to suit me.

So, overall, just okay for me. Pleasant, but not interesting enough to keep my mind from wandering while reading. I do like really like certain aspects of her writing, and think that she probably does have books I might enjoy. I hope so, anyway.

I also gave this one 3 stars. A few Murdoch's in at this point, I've found I'm pretty much consistently aware of her skill but unmoved by her writing. There is something too self-consciously clever and unfeeling about it I think? I find there is something about her characters that the core of their emotional life or motivations is always missing to some extent- there is something a bit inhuman about them so I never fully relate to or get invested in what is goning on even when the language and plot is clever.

Ironically I feel it reflects this "inability to ever truly write or speak purely because of an inherent approval for the invisible audience" that Hugo describes and Jack can't overcome in this book.

Is there a plot? Kind of. It's mostly a series of misadventures in the life of hack-writer Jack in navigating love and trying to connect with his philosophical estranged friend Hugo- who he meets during being guinea pigs for a cold remedy. There is dog kidnapping, cat breeding, a head-trauma hospital, horse betting, woo woo spiritualism, the socialist party, and a 'love diamond'.

It was somewhat comedic and insightful, and was a fine reading experience, but does read a little bit like a less successful attempt to write an Evelyn Waugh novel.

This was only my second Murdoch, and I had forgotten that I had read The Sea, The Sea. I thought Under the Net was rather philosophically fun and the writing certainly is adept. I was put off by the Main Character Jake's irresistible intellectual attraction to Hugo and many of the female character's physical attraction to him without understanding exactly what the attraction was. Jake was evidently intelligent but conflicted, self-centered and lazy. Jake didn't even bother to get to know Finn, his best friend. There was a nice handful of other characters although my favorite turned out to be the dog Mr. Mars although Sammy and Lefty were both rather delightful in their own ways. The play with language from a Wittgenstein perspective whereby language is unable to communicate any reliable truth as its use modifies its definitions, was well done at times. All in all a pleasant reading experience and I am looking forward to more Murdoch, as evidently this is not her best nor representative.

Well I loved this book.

I am not a philosopher so I will have missed some of the philosophical depths of the writing but the characters are so well drawn and the humour is subtle but pointed. Her evocations of London and Paris felt so well drawn.

I enjoy books about wealthy ne'er-do-wells who reform. Especially when they do so by dognapping a canine film star, break in to a hospital, break out of a hospital, get caught up in left wing political meeting which involves the collapse of a filmset imitating Ancient Rome etc.

Oh and is love irresolvable because the only successful couple in this book is a cat who finally makes her owner happy by mating with a Siamese.

Loved everything about this book.

This is my fourth Murdoch and my favourite. Apparently she felt ashamed of it later in life, but for me the way she used humour and an anti-hero to describe serious philosophical ideas was brilliant, and brilliantly funny, too.

I had never read any Murdoch before and this is my second one in a month. I didn't like this as much as The Bell but I did like it. There are some hysterically funny lines and events (see below for some examples) and it adds up to a meaningful book about finding your own way in life, creating your own destiny. I didn't give it a higher rating because I, personally, could have done without the lengthy descriptions of walking through cities (I realize this is done deliberately, with reference to Sarte's Nausea). I am also a hard grader, as any of my former students would tell you.

⭐⭐�� 1/2

“Women think that beauty lies in approximation to a harmonious norm. The only reason why they fail to make themselves indistinguishably similar is that they lack the time and the money and the technique. Film stars, who have all these, are indistinguishably similar.��

“‘You’re enlisting for life as a mannequin,�� I said. ‘You’ll have to spend all your time being a symbol of conspicuous wealth.�� And it occurred to me as I said it that it mightn’t be such a bad life at that.��

“I hate solitude, but I am afraid of intimacy�� The company which I need is the company which a pub or café will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.��

“When I am fixed I am immobile. But when I am unfixed I am volatile…��

“We all live in the interstices of each other’s lives, and we would all get a surprise if we could see everything.��

“Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.��

“Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like 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.��

Reason read: Reading 1001 April botm
1954 debut (first published novel) novel of author Iris Murdoch. It is a simpler novel by the author but a very entertaining story. It is my 6th book by the author.

Plot: a bum, hack writer, drifting from one friend's home to the next.
Characters:
Jake - protagonist
Finn - a buddy that Jake takes for granted
Madge - throws Jake out and he has to find a new place to live
Anna - mime theater, loves Hugo
Sadie - actress, loves Jake but involved with Sammy
Mrs. Tinckham - a safe place for Jake, smoker, cat woman
Hugo - Jake and Hugo were friends but Jake feels he has betrayed their friendship
Lefty - socialist
Dave - friends with Finn's, tells Jake to find work
Mr Mars - old, dog star

Cats, Dogs, Starlings, London, Paris

***

I read that book some time ago and should have reviewed then, but I can still offer the following comments:

- Iris Murdoch is the female author who understands best the flawed nature of the male mind. She even understands it more than a lot of her male counterparts.
- Even though she nailed the main character perfectly, the suite of events and coincident meetings plotted in the novel is so far-fetched to be believable. Maybe she has been overly ambitious in trying to articulate a love quadrangle?