In fact, I’m thrilled and relieved that it wasn’t, because imagine how dreary and pretentious it would have been! I am sorry, though, that I had so little understanding in advance of what Under the Net actually is like, or is about, because most of the time while I was reading it I felt quite adrift - not in an angrily puzzled way, but in an off-balance, faintly delirious way. I’m not sorry Under the Net was not like that all the way through. OK, “the final chop chop” is unexpectedly colloquial, but overall this is more or less what I thought a “ philosophical novelist” would sound like, or write about. 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 chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. 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. What is urgent is not urgent forever but only ephemerally. In the very last chapter of Under the Net, I finally arrived at a passage that was the kind of writing I’d expected from Iris Murdoch:Įvents stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. Ragged, inglorious, and apparently purposeless, but my own. Like a fish which swims calmly in deep water, I felt all about me the secure supporting pressure of my own life.
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