The influence was literary as well as moral. ‘He was a very literary man, he loved books and tales. I could read at an early age. He wanted to discuss books with me, so I was reading Treasure Island, Kim and the Alice stories. These were the first books I remember enjoying, and I discussed them with my father.’

Our first clue to its depth is the title, Under the Net, which is a metaphor used by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his famous work, “Tractatus”, of 1921. Wittgenstein believed that the deepest truths can never be fully verbalised. Although people might conceive of them, such truths are diminished by the limitations of language. He stated that any attempt to talk about, explain, or write a truth is similar to placing a net over the truth. Its effect is to blur the image, and make the truth less than perfect. Newtonian mechanics, Wittgenstein said, captures the world through the equivalent of a net, or many nets. The squares of the net determine how things are seen, which is different from that of a net with a triangular, or hexagonal weave: Then why were you sneering? Don't deny it!" I cut off his objections before he could mouth them. "You were smiling. I saw it."Iris Murdoch has a wonderful way with words, and can write ridiculously humorous episodes in a most entertaining way. Yet the more I think about his novel, the increasing plethora of cunning allusions I see, and the more brilliant Iris Murdoch’s achievement proves to be. However, appearances can be deceptive, and a closer look reveals that this novel is far more than that. Some critics now view it as her best work, and an excellent introduction to the philosophy of Existentialism. Partly because of Jake’s narcissism, partly because of Murdoch’s wit, Under the Netis also exceptionally good on shame, self-consciousness and awkwardness, those intensely human characteristics which so pointlessly occupy much of our lives.Jake is always trying to enter places he shouldn’t be: ‘I am myself a sort of professional Unauthorized Person; I am sure I have been turned out of more places than any other member of the English intelligentsia.’Even Mars the Alsatian is capable of sympathy, embarrassment, conveniently playing dead to make a speedy exit: ‘We [Jake and Mars] turned away, looking casual.’And, in desperate situations, Murdoch’s descriptions of sights and smells and sounds, always so precise, make us indentify with Jake; she is a master of the creative writing rule of Show not Tell.When Jake breaks into the night-time hospital, his fear is real and believable; it is ‘strangely alive,’ its stairs ‘glittering, deserted, immense’ unlike the ‘small sound of [his] footfalls’.‘There was a silence into which it seemed to me that I had just let loose a vast quantity of sound.’Yes, there is also safe-breaking, theft, trespass and a riot, but these dramas happen every day, in real life.They are only melodramas to the dismissive. Dennis Wrong (2005) The Persistence of the Particular, chapter 1: The irreducible particularities of human experience, Transaction Publishers ISBN 0-7658-0272-4

Indeed she kept a debate about human difference alive, through the bad years when the fools of both extreme right and left had sheepishly pretended that it did not matter, or even did not exist anyway. Human difference also meant moral difference. How is it that some human beings are morally better than others? What is it that might make a man good, even in a concentration camp? Consider Korczak, who gave his life in Treblinka, or Kolbe in Auschwitz, or, indeed, Frank Thompson. How did it come about that in the epoch of greatest political evil, the century of Stalin and Hitler, moral terms had simultaneously been evacuated of any absolute significance by philosophers? In the end Hugo has philosophically accepted: "One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on."The London story is interrupted by an interlude in Paris, during which Jake happens to seeAnna in the 14th of July crowd. He follows her for a long way and almost catches up with her in a wood in the Tuileries Gardens, but somehow loses her among the trees and people and never finds her again. He is left with overwhelming sadness.