![]() ![]() Murdoch’s third novel, The Sandcastle, was a not entirely successful attempt to write more realistically about “ordinary” people and problems-it had elements of women’s magazine romanticism, and touches of the fey. It is partly a philosophical quarrel with Sartre’s La Nausée it is brilliant and innovative. Under the Net is French and Irish, owing its form to Raymond Queneau to whom it is dedicated, and to the early Samuel Beckett of Murphy. ![]() Under the Net and Flight from the Enchanter, Murdoch’s first two novels, I came to understand, are European novels. It took me years to work out how and why. My idea of the possible novels in English shifted in my head. ![]() The Bell I devoured, entranced, involved, feeling puritanically that perhaps a novel had no right to be both so completely readable and so certainly serious. I had admired it, and puzzled over it, and had been uncomfortably aware that I had not understood either quite what it was about, or why it was the shape it was. Earlier in Cambridge a prescient friend had given me Under the Net, saying he thought it was my kind of book. I wanted to write a novel-I was writing a novel-and I feared I would never learn how, and should perhaps not be trying. I was an unhappy postgraduate in Oxford, working on religious allegory in the seventeenth century. I remember my first reading of The Bell with uncanny clarity. ![]()
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