Under the Net Gets Under the Skin

(Just a reminder, all my posts contain spoilers to some extent or another.)

There seems to me to be two basic courses that a novelist can follow when employing a first person narrator.  In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s nameless narrator is a charismatic character who takes us on his personal journey and allows us to experience his fears and outrages first hand along with him.  His ravings in the opening section grab us by the throat and let us know who will be our guide.  This use of first person is the use of character, voice, and perspective to control how we understand the world we travel in within the cover of that book.  Holden Caulfield is another captivating character, but unlike Ellison’s narrator, Caulfield doesn’t simply guide us.  We follow him, but we also think beyond his translation of his experiences.  Caulfield does his best to be fair and to rein in his attacks, but he has the perspective of a 15-year-old boy, and we can both revel in it and see beyond it.  In this respect, we have our second use of a first person narrative: the narrator as an unreliable teller.  In Under the Net, Iris Murdoch takes the unreliability of the first person narrator and makes it central to the theme of her novel, and she does so in a truly interesting and original way.  It’s not that we have to decipher Jake Donaghue’s lies that he tells to convince us of some untruth, but that the very adventure we are reading is the result of Jake’s continuing inability to know the truth.

In addition to being a very fun story about a struggling writer’s misadventures in London, Under the Net is a philosophical book.  Jake is writer who is an intellectual and something of a professional bum.  In order to make ends meet, he mainly translates the works of a French writer, who while skilled in the construction of plot, is no more than a hack in Jake’s eyes.  Most of Jake’s attempts at serious writing are left unfinished and abandoned. The one work that has been published met a lukewarm reception at best.  This failed book takes the form of a dialogue between two characters who are discussing the extent to which the truth can be told and communicated, and in some ways, that concern is Jake’s central concern throughout Murdoch’s novel too.  But the deliciousness of Murdoch’s story comes in the fact that Jake, while being honest with those of us reading the novel, is horrible at understanding those around him.

All the actions of the novel stem in some way from Jake’s misapprehension of the situations he finds himself in.  He fails to understand that Hugo (the man whose conversations with Jake provided the raw material for Jake’s published novel) does not hate the novel or Jake for publishing it.  He fails to understand that Hugo can love Sadie over Anna.  He fails even to understand that Hugo would go West instead of East when stepping out to a pub!  He thinks Anna is mimicking Hugo’s sentiments when she founds the mime theater, when in fact Hugo is following Anna’s lead.  He fails to understand that it is Anna chasing Hugo and not the other way around.  Every action that Jake takes that compels the novel forward is based on a misperception of the motives and desires of those who surround him.  And yet, even if we suspect that Jake is jumping to hasty conclusions, we are not allowed to be outside his thoughts.  He speaks to us the truth as he knows it, even though he doesn’t know it, and he couldn’t be more certain that he is right.  It is a brilliant approach to the first person narrative, and even if I loved nothing else about the book, I would love that.

But of course there is so much more to love.  I am a greedy reader, and I want my philosophical ideas and my gripping plot at the same time, and Murdoch is a storyteller after my own heart.  This novel sometimes feels like a French philosophical work: 

When does one ever know a human being?  Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

But instead of creating a philosophical tract, Murdoch presents this exploration of what we know about our fellow human beings as a comedic tale full of rich characters and compelling scenes.  The result is an entertaining read that satisfies both halves of the brain.

There is, I believe, a whole paper to be written on the forms of dialogues in this novel, but I’m not the guy to write it.  Between Hugo and Jake’s philosophical exchange, Lefty’s Socratic method, and Dave’s unyielding positions, there is something that Murdoch is saying about the way we interact with each other in our efforts to find (or force upon others) the capital-T Truth.  If you read the book and write that paper, please send me a copy because I’d love to read it!

Lucky Jim: So Wrong but So Well Done

I want to sing the praises of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim because there are many things to praise in this novel.  Before I can find the right key to sing in, however, I need to quiet the criticisms that are simultaneously harping in my brain.  The two most distracting elements for me were the lead character’s ugliness of character and the sexual politics of the novel.

Dixon, the protagonist of Amis’s tale, is a first year lecturer of history in an unnamed university.  Dixon is beleaguered by the absent-minded chair of the history department whom Dixon needs to impress if he wishes to keep his job.  Why Dixon wants to keep his job is a mystery, and why we would root for him to succeed in keeping his job is no less of one.  He hates teaching, he hates academic research, he hates academic writing, he hates the one student who seems interested in his class, and he can’t stand anyone who takes the university setting seriously.  Now, I have been an academic, and I can relate to the things that Amis wanted to poke fun at, but Dixon is so full of vitriol and misery that I found no pleasure in his frustrations.  As readers, we are clearly aligned with Dixon, cheering for and siding with him as he stumbles through his daily struggles.  Most of the time, I found him to be just petty and annoying in his hatefulness.

My edition has a forward by David Lodge, who explains the cultural moment of Lucky Jim and the post-war class issues of London and its environs that made me understand Dixon differently, but without that explanation, I would never find a way to make Dixon especially palatable.  Now I can have an intellectual appreciation for what Amis is doing, but I can’t wash the bad taste out of my mouth where Dixon is concerned. 

At the heart of the novel is a love triangle between Dixon and the two women he courts.  Margaret is a fellow instructor whom Dixon is entangled with even though he doesn’t like her all that much.  She looks alright, though she looks a little to “mannish” for his comfort.  One night, drunk, he makes an advance on Margaret, and she lets him at first.  Part way in, she appears to change her mind and kicks him out.  Later, he thinks on the encounter: 

 But he wouldn’t have tried, would he? or not so hard, anyway, if she hadn’t seemed so keen.  And why had she decided to seem so keen, after so many weeks of seeming so not keen?  Most likely because of some new novelist she’d been reading.  But of course she out to be keen anyway.  It’s what she really wants, he thought, scowling with the emphasis with which he put this to himself.  She doesn’t know it, but it’s what she really wants, what her nature really demands.  And, God, it was his due, wasn’t it?  After all he’d put up with.  

  Yeah.  That’s what it really says.  Still later in the novel, when he breaks it off with her, Margaret goes into full blown hysterics, causing Dixon’s neighbor to slap “Margaret several times on the face, very hard” and then shake her “vigorously.”  This cure is just what she needed, and when she comes too, Margaret apologizes.  The neighbor refers to her as “girlie,” and she responds to him by sincerely saying, “Thank you so much, Mr. Atkinson; you’ve been wonderful.  I just can’t thank you enough.”  Ha!  That killed me! 

I actually liked Margaret, but I was clearly in the wrong.  Before Dixon can get together with the proper girl, he has to have good grounds for ditching Margaret.  Just walking away, an act that Margaret seems to condone, is for some reason unacceptable to Amis.  Apparently that is another cultural moment that does not translate to a 21^st century American reader.  So how does Amis create the necessary schism?  We learn in the penultimate chapter that Margaret is dangerous and damn near insane!  She’s a liar and a manipulator and a harmer of innocent menfolk.  No one could blame Dixon for walking away from that!  Ugh.

Meanwhile, the greatest thing that Dixon can say about Christine, his bona fide love interest, is that she is really pretty.  The sexual politics of the novel suck.

After all that, it is going to seem strange that I still say that this is an excellent novel.  I can’t help but admire Amis’s deft handling of the plot, which while relatively simple is also extraordinarily tight.  The scenes begin and end excellently and progress naturally.  The writing is sharp and witty. The comedy (when I am not wincing at the characters’ characters) is solid.  Take this description of waking up hung over: 

Dixon was alive again.  Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but the summary, forcible ejection.  He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning.  The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.  A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse.  His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.  During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police.  He felt bad.

The novel employs a very tongue-in-cheek tone that is fun to play in when the nasty attitudes don’t get in the way.  In the end, it’s a romantic comedy that could have starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, and when I think of Dixon being portrayed by Grant, I could see myself enjoying the story a lot.  It’s well worth the read, even if you get hung up on the politics like I did.  If your political views are less intrusive than mine when you read, then I would think that you would find the novel a very rewarding read.

Lords and Ladies of the Ring

I begin with a confession:  this is the first time I have ever read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

I know.  It’s crazy that a 40-year-old self-professed nerd has never read the granddaddy of all fantasy fiction.  I’m not proud.

While we’re being honest here, I have to admit that I was a little afraid to read it now.  I grew up hearing all the stories from the novel thanks to my older brother and my various geek friends.  I played D&D when the game was first published in the 70s, and my first wizard was named Gandalf.  I have read and loved The Hobbit.  I have seen the movies many times and loved them.  What if, given all this indirect exposure, I read the thing itself, the center of so much nerdy fun, and found that I didn’t like it?  What if I stumbled over literary faults or found the plot dragging and leaving me wishing for the films?  What if Tolkien’s voice, so easy and charming in The Hobbit, became overworked and pretentious with the epic nature of The Lord of the Rings?  It would be devastating.

My worries were of course entirely unnecessary.  I loved the novel.  It read with all the easy and joy of The Hobbit, and I never felt the story sag, in spite of its tremendous length.  Tolkien is a master of his craft, and his place in the literary canon (of both fantasy and literary fiction) is well founded.  It is, of course, a wonderful story, wonderfully told.  And those appendices! Oh my goodness!  I never understood why some people insisted on rereading then novel every year, but now I get it.  I embarked on the appendices solely because I promised myself I would read the whole book, but I was shocked to learn how engrossing the appendices were.  The scope of Tolkien’s universe is staggering.  The energy he put into creating the world lying under his tale—incredible!  With every page, I wanted to reread the novel and see how much more I understood.  One could spend 20 years studying, reading, making connections, and making sense, all to understand a mythical world.  What an accomplishment!

Early in the novel I found myself disappointed with the dialogue because so much of it is all surface.  The characters say exactly what they mean with no subtext.  And all the characters recognized each other’s greatness, so friendships could form in ridiculously short times.  But in the end, these disappointments were minor and had no lasting impression; the story and scope of the world are so grand that the lack of subtleties in character can be painlessly overlooked.

I don’t have much to say about the novel analytically, but I will leave off with some thoughts about the lack of women in the novel.  Frodo and Bilbo have no woman in the house, Sam’s mother has apparently passed on, both the kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor are without a queen, as is Rivendell, and of course the Ents have lost the Entwives entirely.  There is a serious dearth of mothers and wives at the end of the Third Age of middle earth.  Obviously, this is no accident on Tolkien’s part.  Moreover, Eowyn’s roll and speeches make it clear that Tolkien didn’t remove all the women because he felt that war was no place for such gentle creatures.  Nonetheless, women do act as a kind of symbol in the novel, a symbol of growth and stability and healthy times.  The three main female presences in the novel are Lady Galadriel, Arwen, and Eowyn.  The last two becomes wives and a promise of generational growth and prosperity in the Fourth Age, the Age of Men.  Eowyn is tamed by Faramir, giving up her desire to fight in order to be with him. Arwen sacrifices eternal life to rule with Aragorn.  Meanwhile, the other creatures will dwindle, like the wifeless Ents, the dwarves with their low population of women, the orcs, who seem to be entirely without females.  Lady Galadriel has been doing all the work of womankind for the last half of the Third Age, and she is ready to retire her position and sail from Grey Haven with a boat full of broken and used-up men.

When this reading adventure is complete, I expect I'll be coming back to Lord of the Rings and travel through Middle-Earth once more.