Iris Murdoch’s First and Last Novels: From Under the Net to Jackson’s Dilemma

Iris Murdoch has a funny habit of making novels look lighter than they are.

At first, you get the pleasures. The odd houses. The romantic confusion. The clever people making terrible emotional decisions with complete confidence. Someone is chasing the wrong person. Someone is philosophizing when they should really be apologizing. Someone is trying to sort out a spiritual crisis while the kettle boils and dinner quietly goes wrong in the next room.

Then, usually a little later than you expect, the floor gives way.

Because of course Murdoch is never just writing social comedy. She is writing about enchantment, vanity, delusion, and the almost unlimited human ability to turn other people into mirrors, prizes, theories, projects, distractions, or evidence. Her books can be funny, airy, crowded, and ridiculous, but underneath all that bustle is one very serious question: how do we learn to see what is really there when the ego keeps handing us prettier versions?

That’s one reason her first and last novels make such a fascinating pair.

Under the Net, from 1954, arrives with speed and comic confidence. It has London streets, pubs, dogs, philosophical arguments, romantic confusion, literary hustle, theatrical chaos, and Jake Donaghue wriggling away from anything that might force him to become a more answerable version of himself.

Jackson’s Dilemma, published in 1995, comes in much quieter. A wedding collapses and a bride disappears. Lovers drift and circle and misread one another. A strange servant-like figure moves through the story like a presence, or a warning, or maybe a half-kind magician. The whole thing feels softer, stranger, and harder to pin down.

One novel rushes in talking. The other seems to hover in a dimmer room.

But they are connected more deeply than that contrast suggests. Under the Net is about escaping systems like language, theory, ego, the stories we build to make life manageable. Jackson’s Dilemma is about enchantment, the false love, false dependence, private spells people don’t fully understand until something starts to break.

Murdoch begins her fiction with a man trying to slip out from under the net.

She ends it with people waiting for the spell to lift.

Under the Net: London, philosophy, dogs, and one very evasive man

Under the Net is one of those debuts that feels as if the writer opened the door and let too much life in at once, in a good way.

The novel follows Jake Donaghue. He’s a translator, writer, hanger-on, sometime fraud, full-time evader. Jake moves through postwar London trying to avoid work, avoid commitment, avoid clarity, and generally avoid the unpleasant experience of being pinned down long enough to become responsible for himself.

He is charming and clever. He is also exactly the kind of man who will call avoidance “freedom” and expect you to nod admiringly.

That’s what makes him such a good Murdoch creation.

The novel is full of movement: old friends, ex-lovers, film studios, pubs, stray schemes, philosophical talk, theatrical misadventures, and one of the more memorable dogs in twentieth-century fiction. Murdoch is clearly enjoying herself here, and that matters. You might expect Under the Net to feel like a young philosopher dutifully disguising a treatise as a novel, but it more feels like someone discovering how much fun fiction can be when ideas, embarrassment, desire, and farce all start colliding in public.

That energy is a huge part of the book’s appeal. It moves the way Jake moves, that is to say quickly, distractibly, opportunistically, always a little too ready to bolt when something starts feeling real.

And even in this lively early mode, Murdoch is already doing the thing that makes her Murdoch. She lets the comedy stay funny, but she also keeps asking what Jake’s cleverness is for. Is it insight? Sometimes. Is it self-protection? Constantly. He says he wants reality, not theory. He distrusts systems, explanations, philosophical nets.

Which sounds admirable until you notice how useful that posture is for a man who also wants to avoid being known.

That’s the early Murdoch trap closing right there. Jake may think he is dodging false systems. Often he is just dodging accountability.

Jake Donaghue, the first great Murdoch escape artist

Jake is such a good Murdoch narrator because he is bright without being especially wise.

He can talk beautifully. He can explain things and turn situations into amusing stories. He keeps himself in motion with enough charm and quick thinking that people, and sometimes readers, might briefly mistake this for freedom. But Jake is not free, he is evasive. There is a difference, and Murdoch is far too sharp not to notice it.

He wants to avoid being trapped by other people’s systems, by jobs, by relationships, by obligations, by any fixed version of himself. But the novel slowly makes you realize that his restless movement is its own trap. Jake thinks he is slipping past nets. In reality, he keeps weaving fresh ones around himself out of style, performance, self-mythology, and the old reliable technique of staying just hard enough to pin down that nobody can demand too much.

The ego pretending to be a philosophy is a problem Murdoch would return to throughout her career.

And one of the pleasures of Under the Net is that Murdoch never lets him become merely a type. Jake is not some cardboard warning about male evasiveness. He is funny, oddly touching, frustrating, energetic, and often accidentally revealing. He keeps moving, but the movement doesn’t save him from moral seriousness. It only delays it.

That is what makes the novel more than a sparkling debut. Jake’s comic unreliability has real weight. He misreads people because his own story about himself is more vivid to him than their actual lives. He wants immediacy and truth, but he also wants to remain slippery enough that nobody gets to catch him being ordinary, or guilty, or fully answerable.

He is not wicked. He is just very practiced at not staying still long enough to be seen clearly.

Murdoch knows that type. Unfortunately, so do the rest of us.

The comic Murdoch is already the serious Murdoch

One of the nicest things about Under the Net is that it never feels like “early Murdoch” in the patronizing sense.

Yes, it is younger, brighter, more openly comic than many of the later books. But it already contains so much of what matters in her fiction. The emotional misreadings. The comic vanity. The way people turn one another into symbols. The way language itself can become a screen between us and what is really there.

What Murdoch does especially well here is make that all feel entertaining. She can take a philosophical problem and let it behave like farce. Jake doesn’t sit down and write a formal meditation on language, reality, and ego. He gets into absurd situations, runs after the wrong people, avoids the right responsibilities, and gradually reveals that he understands much less than he thinks.

That’s the Murdoch trick. Seriousness arriving in comic clothing.

The book’s liveliness is part of its intelligence. Murdoch doesn’t put on a solemn face to prove the themes are important. She lets the themes run around London borrowing money and causing problems.

Jackson’s Dilemma: the late Murdoch whisper

Then you get to Jackson’s Dilemma, and the temperature changes completely.

This is not the busy, energetic, London-running Murdoch of the debut. This is a quieter, thinner, stranger book. A wedding fails to happen. Marian disappears before she can marry Benet. Around that absence gathers a small knot of troubled people: lovers, ex-lovers, almost-lovers, the half-lost and half-attached. And moving through them is Jackson, a figure who seems part servant, part guide, part mystery, part moral weather system.

It’s a very odd novel and there’s no point pretending otherwise. Even readers who love Murdoch don’t usually march straight to Jackson’s Dilemma as the obvious recommendation. The context of Murdoch’s illness hangs over it, and it would be dishonest to act as if that isn’t part of how the book gets read. Compared with the great middle-period novels, it can feel sparse and oddly weightless. The old machinery is there, but running more faintly.

And yet I find it fascinating.

Not because it is secretly one of the strongest Murdochs, don’t get me wrong. But because even here, even in this strange and diminished late form, Murdoch is still Murdoch. The obsessions remain. The difficulty of really seeing another person. The longing to be released from the stories we have mistaken for reality.

The tone is what changes.

Under the Net is comic movement. Jackson’s Dilemma is haunted suspension.

That can be frustrating. It can also be moving.

Jackson himself: servant, enchanter, question mark

Jackson is one of Murdoch’s strangest figures, and that is saying something in a career full of enchantingly odd people.

He is not merely a realistic servant character, although he appears in that role. He feels more like a force moving through the story. A helper, maybe. A manipulator, maybe. A quiet rearranger of other people’s lives. Someone whose presence unsettles the emotional geometry of the novel even when he is not at the center of the scene.

That is very Murdoch, as her books often feature charismatic or mysterious figures who act as magnets for fantasy. People project onto them, depend on them, fear them, misread them, or build whole emotional weather systems around them. Jackson feels like a late, almost stripped-down version of that Murdoch figure. Less flamboyant than some of the earlier enchanters, but maybe even stranger because he is so difficult to define.

Who is he, exactly? What does he want? Does he rescue people, direct them, expose them, or simply stand there while they reveal themselves?

The novel never settles that neatly. Which, to be fair, is part of the point. In a book where everyone seems caught in false loyalties, false stories, or feelings they don’t fully understand, Jackson becomes less a solved character than a pressure point. He is the figure around whom hidden dependencies become more visible.

And in that sense, the “dilemma” is not really just his. It belongs to almost everybody in the book.

From nets to spells

This is where the first and last novels really start talking to each other.

In Under the Net, the trap is language, theory, interpretation, ego, all the little systems we use to make life manageable and flattering. Jake thinks he wants to get out from under them. He wants immediacy. He wants reality. He wants not to be pinned down.

But Murdoch’s quiet joke is that refusing one trap can become another trap very fast. Jake’s suspicion of fixed explanations becomes its own stylish evasiveness. His anti-system stance can be just another way of hiding.

By the time you get to Jackson’s Dilemma, the trap feels different. Less intellectual. Less comic. Less urban and kinetic. The characters are standing inside enchantments. Romantic fantasies. Emotional dependence. Habits of guilt. Private spells they barely recognize as spells.

And so the first novel is about escape while the last is about release.

Murdoch begins with a man who keeps trying to slip away from whatever might define him. She ends with people who are far less mobile and far more ensnared, waiting for something to lift. One novel runs on motion and evasion. The other hangs in uncertainty and half-seen transformation.

But the moral core is the same. In both books, people are trapped not just by circumstances, but by the stories they tell themselves. And in both books, the real work is the same too, to get past the ego and see what is actually there.

Murdoch never got bored of that problem. 

The difficult question of Jackson’s Dilemma

You can’t really talk about Jackson’s Dilemma without acknowledging the difficulty around it.

It is not one of the great Murdoch novels. Many readers do find it thin compared with the best of her work. The language is less commanding. The characters can feel less densely alive. The whole thing has a loosened, spectral quality. Murdoch’s Alzheimer’s shadows the book, and that context matters.

But I also think it’s too easy to treat the novel as only evidence of decline. Once that happens, it stops being read as a novel at all and becomes a symptom. That feels too neat, and Murdoch is one of the last writers who should be read neatly.

A farewell novel does not have to be fully successful to be revealing.

In fact, one of the interesting things about reading Jackson’s Dilemma alongside Under the Net is that the late novel still carries the old signatures, just more faintly. The comedy has dimmed and the bustle has drained away, but the old concerns remain visible through the blur. Illusion, dependency, moral confusion, the difficulty of seeing clearly, the hope that false enchantment might finally dissolve.

I would never tell someone to start with Jackson’s Dilemma but I also wouldn’t tell them to ignore it.

Read late, and with the rest of Murdoch behind you, it becomes less a failed final statement than a strange last chamber in the house. And Murdoch, of all writers, deserves to be approached through rooms rather than verdicts.

What these bookends reveal about Murdoch

Taken together, Under the Net and Jackson’s Dilemma show just how continuous Murdoch’s real subject was.

Not romance, though she wrote a lot of love and a lot of bad love.
Not philosophy, though philosophy is everywhere.
Not eccentricity, though God knows she had plenty of that too.

Her deepest subject is attention.

Can one person really see another person without reducing them to fantasy, need, fear, vanity, or use? Can love become unselfish? Can we get past the flattering stories the ego keeps offering us? Can reality break through the net, or the spell, before it’s too late?

That’s the same question in both books.

Under the Net asks it through talk, motion, wit, and youthful evasion. Jackson’s Dilemma asks it through disappearance, uncertainty, enchantment, and release.

That makes for a pretty beautiful arc, even if the final book is imperfect. Murdoch begins with a comic man trying not to be trapped. She ends with people who are already trapped and barely know the shape of what holds them.

In both cases, the work is to stop rearranging reality into something easier and try, however awkwardly, to see.

Murdoch spent an entire career writing that difficulty.

Where to start with Iris Murdoch

If you’re new to Murdoch, Under the Net is a perfectly good place to begin, especially if you want the bright, comic, fast-moving version of her. It’s funny, smart, messy, and much more welcoming than the phrase “philosophical novelist” might lead you to expect.

But it isn’t the only doorway.

Start with The Bell if you want Murdoch at her most approachable and morally rich.
Start with The Sea, The Sea if you want the big ego-and-obsession novel.
Start with A Severed Head if you want comic cruelty and romantic chaos.
Start with The Black Prince if you want obsession, storytelling games, and a really excellent intellectual mess.

Under the Net is the charming front entrance. Jackson’s Dilemma is not an entrance at all. It’s more like the far room at the back of the house, the one you reach after you already know the layout and want to see what remains when the lights are lower and the noise has thinned out.

That doesn’t make it unimportant.

It just means you should probably meet Murdoch in the middle of the party before you follow her into the hush.

From escape to release

Under the Net and Jackson’s Dilemma are not equal novels.

That matters less than it might seem.

The real pleasure of reading a first and last novel together is not always symmetry. Sometimes it’s the gap that tells the story: the energy of the beginning, the fragility of the ending, the obsessions that survive the whole long trip between them.

Murdoch starts with comic motion: London, talk, dogs, philosophy, running, wriggling, evading, trying not to get caught by theory or by life.

She ends with stillness, disappearance, enchantment, forgiveness, and people waiting for release from stories they barely understand.

One runs, the other hovers.

But both belong to the same lifelong project. From beginning to end, Murdoch kept writing about people trapped inside flattering fictions and trying, usually clumsily, to reach reality.

That’s why these bookends matter. They show a novelist changing in style, weakening in force, thinning in texture, and still circling the same deep problem.

How do we get out from under the net?
How do we know when the spell has lifted?

Murdoch spent a career asking versions of those questions.

That’s a pretty wonderful reason to keep reading her.