Iris Murdoch takes you into the religious world of Imber Abbey, a cloistered community of nuns. This devout group is about to receive a long awaited bell to replace one lost to magic and mystery. The Bell's plot focuses on a cast of damaged people living outside Imber Abbey: Paul Greenfield, there to translate fourteenth century manuscripts; his wife Dora, there because she feels obligated to stay in a loveless marriage; Michael, the leader of the lay community; Tobey, a curious man about to attend Oxford; Catherine, a beautiful woman about to entire Imber Abbey; her twin brother, Nick, there to be close to her one last time; and the old Abbess, the wise and all-seeing head of Imber Abbey.
Lurking in the background of The Bell is the legend of the original bell named Gabriel. The story goes, as Paul relayed to Dora, a fourteenth century nun was supposedly having an illicit affair but could not and would not confess to it. Because he could not punish the singular guilty woman, the Bishop cursed the entire abbey, causing the tower bell, the aforementioned Gabriel, to catapult itself (himself?) into a nearby lake. The guilty nun was so distraught by this phenomenon she was rumored to have drowned herself in the selfsame lake. When Gabriel unexpectedly resurfaces, with the help of Dora and Tobey, each character wonders what it could mean to Imber Abbey and to themselves.
Confessional: The character of Dora confused me almost as much as she confused herself. I wasn't even sure I liked her. Extremely immature, she would make up her mind to not do something but then go ahead and the thing anyway (not buy multicolored skirts, sandals and jazz records, not go back to Paul, the abusive husband; not give up her seat on the train. I could go on). There is a dazed and confused ignorance to her personality that I found either charming or annoying, depending on the minute. Dora is described as an "erring" wife, but how errant can she with an abusive ogre of a husband? He is condescending and cruel, telling her she is not his woman of choice. ( )

There is something about Iris Murdoch's novels that haunts me in a rather profound way. It has to do with being British. At the time of writing this, it has been 196 years since my ancestors left South West England to push out to Australia, and this sense of separation from the motherland is a strange, raspberry-coloured strain of my personality. I am not English, but I relate to that culture more than to any other (aside from my own Australian one). So when I read "The Bell", sixty years after its publication, I am struck by how familiar and yet eerily unfamiliar everyone feels. I understand what is being said, and what the characters are feeling, but at the same time I really, really don't. What I mean is - it's not just time. When I read Australian novels from the 1950s, I get the characters in a way that I don't entirely get these ones. Most people are thicketed by their culture (to use a Murdochian word) to the extent that it bursts out of them without realising it. Turns of phrase, implications of word choice, what we see and hear and what we feel.

All of which is to say that Murdoch's novels might be more descriptive than I would like in the twentieth century (very Zola), her characters prone to outbursts with origins I can't fully comprehend, and her sense of plot sometimes grinding mercilessly over her forever maudlin figures, trapped in an aspic-like web of memory (in How Fiction Works, James Wood paints Murdoch as a "poignant figure" because - as she herself admitted - she could never create fully psychologically independent characters, like Shakespeare could, but instead despite her best efforts, her characters were in some ways extensions of herself), but what distances me from the novel most is a sense that I'm not quite with the characters in this lay religious community.

In spite of all this, it might actually be impossible to get bored during a Murdoch novel. She weaves around you. She might be - as Wood argues - rehashing nineteenth-century styles and ideas with a twentieth-century melodrama facade, but I still think she's pretty damn good, and I'm haunted by that bell. As I wrote in my rather underwhelmed review of The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch was prolific, one of the last survivors of an age when "literary" writers could churn out stories without undue pressure that every work had to be a masterpiece. I don't actually expect every book to be a masterpiece, and I would much rather we return to a mentality when we can just enjoy works, great or minor, as stories.

Which is a needlessly lengthy way of saying that I enjoyed the book, I didn't love the book, I'm intrigued by Murdoch's characters, I'm disconnected from her characters, I'm haunted by that bell, and I also think that people whose lives are so fixated on a church bell need to consider other avenues of intellectual stimulation. That's clear, right? ( )

I picked up The Bell (Vintage) by Iris Murdoch totally randomly when I last visited the local library and I love it when serendipity works as well as this. It’s set in Imber Court, a country house in Gloucestershire where a strange collection of characters have formed a lay community attached to an abbey full of nuns next door. There are a few back stories that concern connections that have been made between some of them many years before and nearly always in ways that make their reunion awkward to varying degrees. The bell in question refers to the huge abbey bell that legend has it fell into the lake several centuries before and was lost. A splendid new bell has been commissioned and there are plans to celebrate its arrival and installation. The accidental discovery of the old bell gives rise to secret plans and alliances that complicate matters and don’t go as planned. Given the characters, motives and isolated location, it builds in a Agatha Christie type way and raises tensions that make it a page turner, particularly in the eventful final quarter or so. I have to say, I really enjoyed this book, probably more than Murdoch’s Booker winning The Sea, The Sea which is the only other of hers that I have read. This definitely won’t be the last. ( )

Excellent novel with treatment of homosexuality surprisingly insightful for 1971. A lay religious community and the flaws in the personnel. Leading to tragedy but it's not clear what the tragedy is to be until it happens.

Someday I suppose I'll chew through Iris Murdoch, but today is not that day.