“Until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget I have ever been away I am inconsolable”. When the novel opens Jake has just returned from France. The book might also be said to include an analysis of love. Dave always tries to dissuade his pupils from philosophy.
The key would be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some 800 pages”. “To Dave’s pupils, the world is a mystery a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. They met as volunteer guinea-pigs at an unlikely-sounding institution called the Common Cold Research Unit (which really existed), and talked non-stop for weeks, and continued to meet and talk after they were both barred from the CCRU.Īs well as London picaresque, Under the Net is somewhat about ideas, most of which are treated as dubious.Jake’s friend Dave does extra-mural teaching in philosophy, and gives tutorials in his flat. Jake is almost obsessed with Hugo as a thinker. Hugo is a rich industrialist and currently the owner of a leading British film studio, whose star actress is Anna’s sister, Sadie. She is six years older than Jake, and has had many other lovers. She is a well-known singer of French chanson.
Jake believes Anna is the love of his life. The novel is largely a series of comic set-pieces loosely structured by Jake’s searches for two people, Anna Quentin and Hugo Belfounder. Perhaps London is the only British city where this is possible. Jake emphatically does not have a “manor”, or a “circle of friends”. He has friends that he may run into in pubs, particularly in Soho, but he is not invested in local friendships or a local. Jake and Murdoch both step lightly across London.Jake has lived in many parts of the city without becoming rooted anywhere. Jake prefers to live in his friends’ flats because of his ‘shattered nerves’, not because he can’t afford to rent a room. One essential feature aspect of Murdoch’s 1950’s London which strikes the modern reader is that there is no difficulty in finding affordable accommodation, at least for white people without children. Louis-Ferdinand Celine: Guignol's Band I & II John Sommerfield: Trouble in Porter Street Pamela Hansford Johnson: This Bed Thy Centre
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