Under the net

Iris Murdoch's first published novel, Under the Net, came out in 1954. It is set in London, and it is dedicated to the French writer Raymond Queneau.

The central figure is Jake Donaghue, a young writer with no money and no fixed address, who is moved from place to place less by any plan of his own than by his own misunderstandings, as the epigraph from Dryden's Secular Masque suggests. When he leaves Madge's flat in the first chapter he takes with him two books, Beckett's Murphy and Queneau's Pierrot mon ami, and echoes of both run through what follows.

The title refers to the net of abstraction, generalisation and theory, the thing a person has to get out from under in order to see what is actually in front of them, and the novel argues the point through farce rather than through discussion. It was named by Time magazine in 2005 as one of the hundred best English-language novels published since 1923, and the Modern Library editors also placed it among the greatest novels of the twentieth century.