The Flight from the Enchanter

11 hrs. 5 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Iris Murdoch

Narrator Vadim Pugachev

Description

The novel “Beneath the Net,” Murdoch’s debut in fiction, is one of her most famous works and remains relevant thanks to the image of the main character, Jake Donaghue. Jake, a translator and prose writer, is smart, ironic, and talented—but lazy as well, and he has an amazing habit of simply drifting with the flow of life, not so much unable as simply unwilling to fight fate. He doesn’t care how to earn a living—whether through cheap literary day labor or the hard work of a hospital orderly. At most, he’s willing to worry about finding an inexpensive apartment. Yet an unexpected meeting with a young woman named Anna Quentin proves fateful for Jake: his life begins to get entangled in a network of astonishing events, taking an even more unexpected, almost surreal turn… “Escape from the Magician.” Misha Fox is an unusual person—either someone who imagined himself to be a magician who likes playing with people’s destinies, or someone who truly possesses a certain mystical power over human souls. People around him can’t get rid of his influence and obediently comply with all his manipulations, because once Fox touches one of the threads, the entire puppet theater of living marionettes comes into motion. But is it really all that way? Perhaps Misha Fox is only a convenient excuse not to control his own life, to let go and drift with the current. Perhaps the people he enchants have invented their own “magician.”