The Bell

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A new bell is due to arrive at the Abbey, but Dora is haunted by the story of the old bell and of the death that it foretold. Two of the central characters in The Bell are Dora and Paul Greenfield, an estranged married couple. Dora used to be an art student, and Paul is an art historian, staying in Imber Court to do research. When readers meet Dora, she is on a train to Imber Court to reunite with Paul, who has convinced her to return to their marriage. Paul is an overbearing and suffocating character who tries to control Dora. Why does James believe that “the study of personality, indeed the whole conception of personality, is . . . dangerous to goodness” (p. 119)? Through Dora, the reader is led towards the main focus of the book. Dora has agreed to return to her husband Paul Greenfield, who has temporarily joined the lay community at Imber Court, to work on some 14th-century manuscripts. During the train ride there, we are privy to Dora's inner turmoil. She comes across as immature, with little true self-knowledge, even rather limited in imagination, but her very frustrations and blunderings are appealing. Dora is perhaps the character least concerned with living a moral life, yet even she is wrestling with her conscience right at the beginning. We read a disjointed and absurdly lifelike set of internal arguments, conveyed with typical Murdochian wry humour, Ashamed of being gay, Michael tells no one in the community about his past, not even James, his second-in-command. He likes the idea of himself as a priest, as a person called to a celibate life, but in reality he longs for a partner.

This is the rousing penultimate paragraph of “Against Dryness”, and perhaps in retrospect its distinctions are almost too powerful, too seductive. Iris Murdoch’s critics have steadily berated her for not fulfilling her own prescriptions. She wrote of “the consolations of form” as though those were self-evidently inferior to some tough, unformed “realism” which would remain true to the “incomplete”. But in fact, a precise and delicate reader of her novels, or anyone else’s, does not experience any such brute opposition. There is a danger in Murdoch’s powerful formulations that her ideas can become associated with a pervasive modern myth that has also damaged both fiction and criticism—the myth of the primacy of the “random”. Too many novels eschew plot, storytelling, shapeliness, and wit in pursuit of this “authentic” sense of the random and the open-ended. Ian McEwan’s splendid Enduring Love was misunderstood by both reviewers and the Booker jury because it appeared to be “contrived”, plotted, formally too tight—although it was about a form of madness that sees fate and religious and erotic purpose where none is, and then creates it. He had found the appropriate form for the driven nature of his subject-matter. I think, without ceasing to respond to Murdoch’s call for both character and contingency, we can admire the formal variety of her fictions, including the artifice. If one looks with the microscope of a novelist learning her trade at any novel, from War and Peace to Malone Dies, from La Rabouilleuse to The Castle, concentration on precise things like the contents of a description, the number of metaphors, the number of characters in a scene, a chapter, the whole work, on the narrative transitions and what has been suggested but omitted give a more complex picture than any simple contrast between the realistic and the mythic, the fantastic, or the formally controlled. There is a general impression, not inaccurate, of a “world” of the Murdoch novel, with agitated hurried dialogue, discussion of moral ideas (sometimes in stressed italics), unexpected problems with machines or near-drownings, dogs and other creatures who are part of the texture of emotion, a plethora of accidents, mysteries . . . and bright sensuous colors, and described rooms and significant objects, milk bottles or works of art. But technically they differ more than this ease of recognition may suggest. This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ - Shakespeare, Hamlet Miles told us that Murdoch moved through a number of belief systems in the 1940s and 50s including communism and Christianity. A close friend at Oxford became a nun at Stanbrooke Abbey in Yorkshire, which may have provided the inspiration for the novel's Imber Abbey. Murdoch wrote to her: 'Take me with you as much as you can'. She was drawn to the world of contemplation and imagination portrayed in The Bell even as she became an ardent atheist later in life. Paul's callousness towards Dora is clear. He is comfortable to announce he does not respect her. Their relationship is unbalanced and unhealthy.The literary device of symbolism is present in Murdoch's The Bell. It is seen in the title of the novel and this can be linked to the central character of Dora. There are not one but two bells in the story, and they can be seen as individually symbolic. I started ‘The Bell’ many years ago but didn’t finish it. I became distracted and maybe felt that I had had my fill of the Murdoch craft for a while. From memory, I also found it difficult to read the small font. Had you still been alive today, you would be amused to know most, if not all, novels are now printed in 1.5 or double line-spacing and in larger font! We also have e-books! a b c d Byatt, A. S (1965). Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch. London: Chatto and Windus.

Iris Murdoch considers the challenges of living a genuinely religious life within corrupt, secular society; her setting is England some ten years after the end of World War II. Some of The Bell's characters are involved in or attracted to a more traditionally religious calling, represented by Imber Abbey. Most of the others, however, are searching for an emotional and a spiritual commitment, which may be located within a physical place, represented by the Imber Court community. Iris Murdoch uses the concept of the underwater bell, which may be retrieved and reinstalled in this community place, as a concrete representation of these challenges and the diverse ways that the characters experience them.A new bell is commissioned to be installed in the Abbey. The book follows the story of the two bells, old and new. The old bell is discovered by Toby when, curious, he dives to the bottom of the lake. He has a crush on Dora, and, confused, he eventually shares the knowledge with her. The two of them then decide to lift the bell from the lake and substitute it for the new one as a prank.

On the train, Dora meets two other members of Imber Court. One is James Tayper Pace, a senior member of the community, and the other is Toby Gashe, an eighteen-year-old who is spending time there before leaving for university. Upon Dora's arrival, she is immediately uncomfortable with the community, finding it repressive and sexist. Paul is also harsh towards her for leaving their marriage.For Charlotte Mendelson, who has written the introduction to Under the Net (1954), Murdoch’s novels “work for everyone because she understood our secret lives: falling in love with exactly the wrong person, maddened with inconvenient lust and sadness and fear. Her books are full of passion and disaster; I loved her as a teenager and will never stop.” A lay community refers to when people are part of a religious group but are not ordained or part of the clergy. Mrs. Mark is the agent of Michael Meade, the somewhat reluctant leader, whose family estate Imber Court is. In subsequent decades Michael would have been identified as the ‘cult leader’ of the residents, not as sinister as Jim Jones or as commercial as Werner Erhard perhaps but still of some unaccountably charismatic incompetence. Michael has been inspired by the Abbess of the Benedictine convent to ‘minister’ to folk who are neither clerical nor secular but what now might be called ‘seekers’. He is a homosexual. Once this gets going (I don't want to spoil anything because it's so good), once it turns Murdochian, I was thrilled. There is an incredible revelation from the headlights of a car - a device she reuses almost identically in THE SEA, THE SEA - and things proceed from there with a relentless sexual logic that I adored. And the writing!