- Dr. Wendy Jones Nakanishi (Faculty of Letters, Shikoku Gakuin University) for The Iris Murdoch Society of Japan
 

  To the casual reader first encountering The Red and the Green  (1964) after perusing Under the Net  (1954), it may scarcely seem credible that the two novels can have been penned by the same author, or that The Red and the Green  was written and published some ten years after Under the Net. While Under the Net  is an experimental work, analyzing both by its subject matter and its style, existential themes as espoused by Sartre, The Red and the Green, published ten years afterwards, can seem 'regressive' by contrast, harkening back to the old certainties of the nineteenth-century novel in its form and content, its omniscient narrator and conventional plot. And yet, as we shall see, although the novels appear widely dissimilar, they share many of the same preoccupations.
 It is no accident that Under the Net  was published only one year after Murdoch's acclaimed study of Sartre, which concluded with her complaint that Sartre's 'inability to write a great novel is a tragic symptom of situation which afflicts us all.î Sartre's deficiency was one which Murdoch herself sought to remedy.
 Under the Net  features a Sartrean protagonist and narrator, Jake Donaghue, who appropriately signals his creator's indebtedness to the French writer by intiating his first-person narrative with a description of his return to England from France, bearing cases heavy with French books. Jake is literally carrying the Sartrean baggage of existentialist philosophy which will inform his thought, his acts, and his choices - or his perceived lack of them - throughout the book.
 Although one must be wary of scrutinizing literary works for biographical fragments of their authors, it seems safe to assume that Jake, like the protagonist of The Red and the Green - Andrew Chase-White - represents aspects of Iris Murdoch's own character and experiences. Murdoch was enamoured with Sartrean philosophy despite her implicitly criticizing his concern with essences rather than materiality in Under the Net,  Jake Donoghue, like Murdoch and Sartre, is a writer but one suffering from prolonged writer's block, preferring to earn his money more easily by translating the works of a popular but second-rate French writer, Jean Pierre Breteuil.
 As for The Red and the Green, like Murdoch, Andrew is Anglo-Irish, and entertains ambivalent feelings about Ireland. Like Murdoch, he is the sole child of beloved and loving parents. Like Murdoch, he was removed from Ireland at an early age, to spend his childhood in England, visiting Ireland only on holidays. The mixed emotions these vacations in Ireland arouse in Andrew are vividly conveyed in The Red and the Green, making one suspect they were shared by Murdoch herself: it was a place 'intensely familiar and yet disturbingly alien. It was like a place revisited continually in dreams, both portentous and fleeting, vivid to the point of necessity, but not entirely real,î (p. 10). Ireland is a menacing place, inspiring fear and defensiveness about his Protestantism in Andrew and, possibly, in Murdoch, too.
 In an essay entitled 'Against Dryness,' Murdoch identified the Sartrean perception of the human being as a solitary individual who is 'totally free'. The Sartrean hero of Under the Net  is such a figure. Jake apparently lacks any  family ties. When he returns to England from France, there is no mention of parents or relatives to whom he might turn for help once he realizes his old girlfriend, Madge, is turning him out of the
flat he has inhabited rent-free for the past three years. Unmarried, childless,  he is unable
to achieve meaningful contact with any other human being. His former girlfriends are valuable to him primarily for opportunistic motives, as individuals who are potential providers of vital services - of free lodgings or of sexual favours. Jake  cherishes his rootlessness and lack of ties, admitting to having fled Anna, the only woman who might have inspired him to a marital proposal, on the grounds that he preferred his
 independence.
 Jake has little more luck or interest in maintaining meaningful relationships with male friends. Some three years before the action described in Under the Net, Jake deliberately broke all contact with the man he claims he once revered most deeply, Hugo Belfounder, implausibly explaining that he felt that he had 'betrayed' Hugo by publishing a fictionalised account of their conversations and that this act must irrevocably have poisoned their friendship. At the beginning of the novel, Jake suddenly conceives a desperate desire to meet Hugo again, a decision no more rationally explicable than his former purposeful avoidance. There are no mutual friends who may assist him in arranging their reunion as it is also improbably  stated that Jake and Hugo had so successfully concealed their intimacy that no-one in their social circle had known of their friendship or even that they had ever been acquainted. But once Jake finally is able to track Hugo down, he finds that his old friend had felt no anger towards Jake at publishing their thoughts: for all Jake's obsessive analysis of his friend in which he has indulged during his laborious attempt to find Hugo again, Jake is finally revealed not to have understood Hugo at all. Ironically, it is subsequently revealed that Hugo had found it difficult to understand Jake's book entitled The Silencer,  supposedly the nearly literal record of their conversations, and that Hugo was not involved in Anna's idea for a mime theatre - a theatre Jake had credited Hugo with founding: these are two more proofs of Jake's tendency to create ideal images of friends or acquaintances which fail to correspond with 'reality'.
 Under the Net  depicts a world of well-intentioned strangers who only delude themselves with the illusion of real intimacy with others. Just as Jake never really 'knew' Hugo, similarly, he is irritated although intrigued by another supposed 'friend' named Dave. What the characters like to think of as friendship is often a relationship characterized by expediency or contingency. For Jake, Dave, like Madge, is potentially valuable as a source of free lodgings and, like Hugo Belfounder, useful as an intellectual companion with whom he might discuss philosophy, but their encounters are unsatisfying and oblique and neither Jake nor Dave invest any real effort in maintaining their relationship.  Even Finn, Jake's constant companion and the individual nearest approximating the definition of a 'friend' is figured as nearly mute, more or less permanently drunk, and ultimately unknowable - an inscrutable character who follows Jake about with dog-like devotion until, to Jake's amazement, one day he simply disappears. It later is revealed that the sudden acquisition of funds has allowed Finn to fulfill a longstanding dream of returning to Ireland: an ambition of which Jake professes himself to have been completely unaware although, when pressed, he remembers Finn having mentioned it. Jake had assumed Finn had no inner life - hence his willingness to attach himself to Jake. Finn's own hopes and desires could thus be dismissed by Jake as either negligible or untruthful.
 Despite this apparent chronic state of isolation, apparently self-imposed, ironically, much of Under the Net  is taken up with Jake's quest for companionship. Page after page of the novel re-creates the bombed-out landscape of 1950s postwar London as Jake jumps onto one bus or train after another and embarks on endless long walks, as if on a sacred crusade, searching not for the Holy Grail but for his old friends, desperately attempting to re-establish ties with people with whom he has lost touch. But it is a quixotic quest. As Jake makes his singularly uneventful picaresque journey he muses endlessly on past relationships and on their significance. As a 'writer,' he assumes a certain expertise in understanding people and their motives. On the other hand, once Jake actually is able to effect reunions with his old friends, they tend to disregard or ignore him, and he is shown completely to have misunderstood their characters and the reasons for their acts.
      Murdoch's characters resort to comically desperate lengths to achieve contact with each other. Jake adopts the procedures of a detective to find Hugo and Anna, but with ludicrous results. Despite the three years which have elapsed since their last meeting, despite the intimacy which Jake, at least, feels they once enjoyed, despite the great time and effort Jake has expended in the effort, he has trouble even attracting Hugo Belfounder's attention when, at last, he finds him at the studio he owns. Hugo is listening intently to an address delivered at a political rally being held there and refuses to be disturbed, with Jake finally driven to the expedient of bodily 'kidnapping' his old friend to be granted the privilege of several minutes' private conversation with him. Similarly, Jake imagines that his old affair with Anna, which Jake remembers as passionate and unique, held similar significance for them both, but when he is able to discover the whereabouts of her mime theatre, after a few hurried embraces and a short conversation, she rushes off, never to reappear in the novel. Jake supposes - a supposition never proven - that a woman he later sees across a crowded bridge in Paris is Anna, and he strenuously but vainly pursues her: the metaphor of vain pursuit is appropriate for all his relationships.
 Comic self-delusion also forms a theme of The Red and the Green, although its characters' incomprehension of their own and others' motives is detailed by an omniscient narrator rather than through the first-person chronicle we are offered in Under the Net.  The list of delusions is nearly endless. No one in this novel appears to know himself or anyone else.
 The 'hero,' Andrew, wanders anxiously about in a blur of half-baked thoughts and suppositions, his own acts inspired not by conscious decision but often as emotional or irrational reactions to imagined slights or suppositions about other persons. He has joined the British cavalry during World War I, for example, not because he actually likes horses or riding but because of vague feelings of shame at his incompetence as a horseman during his childhood holidays in Ireland and a hope that he might somehow rectify this old deficiency and thereby earn the love of his mysterious and cold Irish cousin, Pat, who has always impressed him by an un-selfconscious posture of strength and stature of authority. It transpires that Pat actually does vaguely dislike his English cousin, but the grounds for his dislike are far removed from any that Andrew might imagine, let alone be able to address and, in any case, Pat is passionately engaged in Irish politics and has little attention he is willing to bestow on purely personal matters. This may account for some of Pat's attractiveness to the other characters in the novel: wrapped up as they are in their own solipsistic pursuits, Pat is the single character interested in something not specifically related to self.
 None of Andrew's relationships with others are what they seem. Andrew imagines himself the petted darling of the two women he most loves: his mother and Frances, a young Irish woman and distant relative to whom he has long been tacitly engaged. But Andrew's assumption that he is central to their lives comes crashing down when  mother suddenly amazes him by the purchase of a house in Ireland, a country he doesn't particularly like and where he certainly never has felt at home, and Frances abruptly turns down his proposal of marriage, once he gets around actually to asking her to wed him.
 It almost goes without saying that Andrew has no idea that Frances loves Ireland and would be unwilling to leave; he blithely had always assumed she shared his dislike of the country and would happily resettle in England after their marriage. Although dialogue occupies a great portion of any Iris Murdoch novel, characters seem not to listen to each other or, perhaps, distracted by the ongoing interior monologue of their own thoughts, they simply cannot hear another's voice. Appropriately, when Frances refuses Andrew's offer of marriage, he feels he is suddenly being confronted with a complete stranger who simply happens to inhabit a familiar body.
 Andrew's relationships with more peripheral figures in his world are no less unstable. Behind a pretence of affection and respect, he secretly fears Christopher Bellman, his future father-in-law, and he finds that the plump, lively Aunt Millie he habitually encountered on childhood holidays in Ireland has mysteriously transformed into a figure of sexual attraction, with the two eventually - improbably - going to bed together.
  Of course, Andrew is not alone in being completely deluded about himself and others. His mother, Hilda, imagines that Christopher Bellman shares her dislike of Millie, totally unaware that the two have been lovers for many years and that Christopher repeatedly has begged Millie to marry him. Hilda's blindness extends to her own family; her brother, Barney, also happens to be madly in love with Millie and forsook his vocation as a priest on her behalf but Hilda has no idea of any of this.  Millie, as it happens, is in love with Pat, who is oblivious to her affection, and then simply irritated by it, and whose only interest is in exploiting their relationship for gain - in using her luxurious house as a place in which to store weapons for the Irish rebels, on the point of launching the Easter Rising of 1916.  Murdoch reserves the last surprise for the 'twist' in the tale, when we discover, at the end of the novel, years after Andrew has been killed in the war, that his former fiancee, Frances, also had been in love with Pat.
 Both Under the Net  and The Red and the Green  revolve around one of Iris Murdoch's central preoccupations as both as novelist and a philosopher: with the relationship between man's inner world of thoughts, dreams and desires and the external world which impinges upon the purely personal. Murdoch once observed that 'Goodness is a form of realismî which prevents us from 'living in a private dream world,' (see Dorothy A. Winsor's 'Solipsistic Sexuality in Murdoch's Gothic Novels,î Iris Murdoch: Modern Critical Views, 1986, p. 121). Virtue is the recognition of the 'other': that other people exist, and inhabit their own realities; that other worlds exist, independent of our own hopes and wishes. Love facilitates the cultivation of this 'goodness' or 'virtue' while, ironically, it is also the most elusive of possessions and possible only when nourished by self-delusion. The phenomenon of 'falling in love' provides a temporary escape from man's self-imposed prison of self, of loneliness and isolation, and, perhaps that is why heady infatuation plays such a central role in Murdoch's novels. It is a condition resembling exhilarated madness that she is especially gifted at conveying in vivid, persuasive detail.
 Which brings us back to Sartre. While Murdoch agreed with Sartre's perception of the inescapability of man's fate of alienation and delusion, and depicted such individuals in most of her novels, in characters such as Jake and Andrew, who blindly struggle to find their way in a world deceptively coloured by their own dreams and desires, she also believed in the hard reality of the world itself, the stubbornly actual contingency against which her characters bump or stumble. She felt Sartre glossed over the hard reality of actual circumstance or that he was unwilling to accept its existence. This disagreement with Sartre informs Under the Net   to the extent of providing it with its title:
 
 the movement away from theory and generality is the movement towards
 truth.  All theorizing is flight.  We must be ruled by the situation itself and
 this is unutterably particular.  Indeed it is something to which we can never
 get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl Under the Net.
            (p. 91)

 This 'other world' which confronts her characters includes, of course, both the physical, material world and the world of other people. Time and time again, Murdoch's characters are uncomfortable when confronted by the intractable 'otherness' of place and person, a phenomenon perpetually amazing to such typical protagonists as Jake and Andrew, immersed as they are in near total self-absorption, entertaining themselves with an incessant interior monologue which scarcely recognizes external events or individuals. Such characters resemble animals, creatures of habit, fond of their familiar lairs: as Jake confides, on returning from France, his longing to bury himself in his old haunts in London so thoroughly he can forget he ever has been away, or as Andrew observes, when drawn unwillingly from the security of England to the strangeness of Ireland.
 That other people can think or behave contrary to their suppositions, let alone to their own wishes and desires, is nearly inconceivable, and so the world is a mysterious place full of surprises for them - often unpleasant or unpalatable ones. Jake is stunned by the sight of his former girlfriend, Madge, when he returns from France, finding she has transformed herself from an ordinary if pretty girl into a glamorous, sophisticated young lady, and then he is surprised to hear that she is to marry Starfield, a rich gambler with whom he hadn't known she was even acquainted. The list of revelations continues: Hugo hadn't been perturbed by Jake's publication of their private conversations; Hugo is in love with Sadie, the sister of Anna, the woman Jake once had contemplated marrying; the second-rate French novelist whom Jake translates has written a classic, jealousy-inspiring novel; Anna has suddenly abandoned her career as a singer to run a mime theatre; it transpires that Sadie is a good friend of Starfield's and Jake suspects them of plotting to steal one of his manuscripts; the doggedly loyal Finn one day simply disappears and Jake finally learns of his 'servant's' longing to return to Ireland. The surprises and self-deceptions are endless, with the latter figuring nearly as often as the former. For much of Under the Net, for example, Jake labours under the delusion that Hugo is in love with Anna when it is actually Sadie, whom Jake dismisses as negligible in looks and talents, compared to her sister, who is the object of Hugo's obsessive passion. Jake believes that Madge has finally jilted him and found true love in her relationship with Starfield and then is shocked when she declares her love for him and her plotting to advance his career and to win him as her husband.
  Nobody is whom they seem; nothing is what it appears. Murdoch's characters resemble figures from a Shakespearean play, wandering through an enchanted wood, donning and doffing masks and disguises, perpetually encountering the strange, the marvellous, and the unexpected.
 Similarly, in The Red and the Green,  Andrew is, of course, unable to dismiss the reality of World War I, although he initially regards it in the light of an inconvenience which annoyingly disrupts his own plans. His mother's incomprehensible plan to move to Ireland represents another inconvenience. Life then deals this complacent if rather shallow young man a series of blows. Andrew is shocked when Frances rejects his proposal of marriage, incredulous when Millie accedes to his sexual advances, and stunned when, happening to visit Pat as his cousin is preparing to participate in the Easter Rising, he is bound up by him to prevent his disrupting the conspirators' plans. Life's final 'blow', ironically, is death, when all Andrew's carefully-laid plans are shattered when he is killed at the battle of Passchendaele in the final year of the war.
 In the world of Murdoch's novels, everything is viewed through the prism of an individual's self-interest, which is a glass which necessarily distorts and colours whatever is seen through it. Judging from Under the Net  and The Red and the Green, Murdoch's characters inhabit an indifferent if not actually cruel universe ruled by accident, chance, contingency and coincidence. It is a place robbed of any certainties and containing precious little even of the comfort of probabilities. The only 'good' towards which her creations may tentatively grope is the 'virtue' of recognizing and acceding to the inviolable mystery of 'otherness,' in permitting the reality of the external world and the unknowable actuality of other people.
 This pursuit of Murdoch's notion of 'goodness' and 'virtue' can be seen as a kind of self-growth or process of maturation, but few of her characters are equal to the struggle. In The Red and the Green  the failed priest, Barney, comprehends this notion of 'goodness' and twice attempts paths of renunciation, first trying to devote himself to God and then secretly joining the Irish Volunteers, but in each case he eventually acknowledges defeat and returns to his own furtive habits and occupation: secretly spending his days labouring on the composition of a memoir concerning his life and social world. This memoir, in its comprehensiveness, in its attempt to understand motive and character, echoes the novelist's own task in writing a book. Arguably he achieves a measure of self-awareness in writing down his own and others' secrets, but he imagines, once the memoir is completed, that he will 'write at the bottom in large letters ALL THIS IS NOT QUITE TRUEî (p. 213). Perhaps this is Murdoch's concession to the probability that the reality the novelist also tries to convey in some sense fails to capture its true  essence. In the event, Barney destroys the memoir himself.
 In Under the Net  Jake's friend Dave counsels him to take on a 'proper job,' perhaps as a factory inspector, a probation officer, or a teacher in an elementary school. Jake scorns the suggestion: 'To save my soul,î Jake retorts, with Dave answering, 'Always you are thinking of your soul. Precisely it is not to think of your soul, but to think of other peopleî (p. 29). Ultimately Jake takes Dave's advice and, to his surprise, finds happiness and fulfillment in his work as an orderly at a neighbouring hospital; he has achieved a kind of self-redemption in caring for and learning to think of other people.
 Did Murdoch succeed as a novelist where, in her view, Sartre failed? Harold Bloom believes she also failed, but that her failure was more impressive than the 'victories' achieved by most other writers.  In his introduction to a book of modern critical views on her work, Bloom observes that 'Her formidable combination of intellectual drive and storytelling exuberance may never fuse into a great novel, but she has earned now the tribute she made to Jean Paul Sartre more than thirty years ago.  She too has the style of the age,î (Harold Bloom, 'Introduction,' Iris Murdoch:  Modern Critical Views, 1986, p. 7.)
 Certainly her books convey something of what she has described as the 'stuff' of life - its sheer messiness, the day-to-day trivia as experienced by humankind, divorced form Sartre's more clear-cut 'theorizing' (see Steven J. Kellman's 'Under the Net: The Self-Begetting Novel,î Iris Murdoch: Modern Critical Views, 1986, p. 95).  On the other hand, some might argue that her plots are implausible, relying too heavily on coincidence, on sudden transformations of character, on episodes of fantasy and magic, and on certain stock characters who appear in most of her novels, including, for example, wise or charismatic men and beautiful, impossibly capable young women intent on pursuing their own obscure aims, often with the ultimate purpose of attracting the attentions of much older men.
 For this reader, the world presented by Murdoch's novels resembles that drawn in the conclusion of Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' - godless, bleak, in which we must rely on the fragile consolation of love to find any meaning at all:

 'Ah, love, let us be true
 To one another! for the world, which seems
 To lie before us like a land of dreams,
 So various, so beautiful, so new,
 Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
 Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
 And we are here as on a darkling plain
 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.
 Where ignorant armies clash by night.'
 

(References to Murdoch's books are to the following two editions: Under the Net, Chatto & Windus, London, 1956; The Red and the Green, Chatto & Windus, London, 1965).