But the style is not ornate just delicately aware of the job in hand and always ready for a joke.
‘Ornateness of mind’ is helpful, since some complicated thinking is going on in the novel. But Bradbury also tells us – he is writing in 1962 – that he finds this positioning ‘rather curious’, chiefly because of ‘the curious ornateness of mind which Miss Murdoch repeatedly manifests’. Malcolm Bradbury tells us that on its publication it ‘was hailed as part of the “angry” movement and closely associated with such books as Lucky Jim, Hurry on Down and even Room at the Top’ – novels by Kingsley Amis, John Wain and John Braine, which appeared in 1954, 19 respectively. Under the Net, Murdoch’s first novel, 65 years old in 2019 and still a very sprightly read, offers all kinds of ways of thinking about this work. What did I want? Shots of Murdoch at her desk? Walking around, waiting for inspiration? No, just a feeling, on film or in criticism, that the writing, the construction of sentences and the orchestration of time and the world, is where the work is going on. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person lost in her later life. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) is well paced, well acted, and offers a moving portrait of Murdoch’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. But we should not be, and for several reasons.Ĭritics recognise of course that Murdoch’s novels are not philosophical treatises or illustrations of ready-made arguments, but still they tend to concentrate on themes and characters rather than techniques or questions of language. We may be a little surprised to see Iris Murdoch playing with the Russian Formalists’ distinction of story and plot ( fabula and syuzhet, events in their chronological order and events in the order of their arrangement).
And of course destiny itself, whatever else it may be, is always a narrative effect, the insertion of a later perspective (real or imagined) into an earlier one. Jake’s ‘I had no notion’ respects this principle but the rest of the sentence ruins it, plants us firmly in narrating rather than narrated time. At one minute he calls what will happen to him his ‘destiny’ and flashes forward to a later moment of awareness: ‘I had no notion how fast it was galloping at that very moment to overtake me.’ ‘Galloping’ is a nice touch, since narrative custom mostly suggests that destiny sneaks up on us, that it can’t be seen in the offing. He refers to ‘earlier events related in this story’, restricts himself to what is ‘of any interest from the point of view of the present story’, and describes his feelings as they were ‘at the point which our story had now reached’. , the endlessly discomposed hero of Under the Net, is a careful composer when it comes to his narrative, as distinct from the life he has notionally been living.
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