The Bell
by Iris Murdoch 
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A motley assortment of characters seek peace and salvation in this early masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, The SeaA lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an order of sequestered nuns. A new bell is being installed when suddenly the old bell, a legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. And then things begin to change. Meanwhile the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And show more everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved, whatever that may mean. Originally published in 1958, this funny, sad, and moving novel is about religion, sex, and the fight between good and evil.
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My sixth Murdoch and I've yet to read a duff one. This, her fourth novel, is set in a lay community of more or less spiritual seekers, attached to an abbeyful of cloistered nuns in 1950's Gloucestershire. Murdoch puts her characters through a kind of existential dressage, pushing them awkwardly, and often comically, round an obstacle course whose end is self-knowledge.
One thing I love about Iris Murdoch is how palpably amused she is at the antics of her characters. Her stories all wear this aspect of delightful archness, yet she never sneers at her creations or abuses them. I think if I could be a character in one author's stories, I'd choose her.
One thing I love about Iris Murdoch is how palpably amused she is at the antics of her characters. Her stories all wear this aspect of delightful archness, yet she never sneers at her creations or abuses them. I think if I could be a character in one author's stories, I'd choose her.
A sense of ennui prevails and clouds over The Bell despite its seemingly unshakeable spiritual sentiments. Murdoch's lucid prose baffles, tempts then almost seduces innocence to destroy itself at the surge of forbidden desire. She makes independence toil to discover its own worth against the deceitful freedom that both religion and marriage can promise; caging instead of emancipating. A friction between a "calling" and a "passion". The Bell resounds at a distance — hauntingly and tearfully. It drowns in its subtle dissonance almost to a dying shrill before pushing itself up for air; gasping. Then it resounds, faintly, rings, cautiously of hope, in time. And this takes time. However burdening guilt, regret, grief, and rejection may be, show more there is a place somewhere for everyone not only to nurse but also to heal. People also break each other's hearts in this compelling tale of brooding faith and disbelief. They break even their own. Though none of Murdoch's characters are completely likeable, they manoeuvre in a reality glaringly familiar with all of us: the struggle with knowing and accepting one's flawed self; and most powerful: the forgiveness of mistakes, the unalterable past, and our ever changing selves. Sometimes you have to put and think of yourself first.
"With strong magnetic force the human heart is drawn to consolation; and even grieving becomes a consolation in the end."
A delightful, effectual read amidst its little spells of tragedy. show less
"With strong magnetic force the human heart is drawn to consolation; and even grieving becomes a consolation in the end."
A delightful, effectual read amidst its little spells of tragedy. show less
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 show more 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? show less
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? show less
I enjoyed this very much—such a good balance of plot and detail, with some non-trite ruminations on character, religion, sexuality, and power imbalances (I was going to just say relationships, but let's call 'em as Murdoch saw 'em). The whole effect was very propulsive, and the setting kept me Googling photos of English country houses, which is never a bad thing. Good fun without being silly at all.
I quite liked this book. Murdoch is subversive, comic, and poignant at the same time. The mixture works very well. And just as I liked in the other book of hers that I read, The Sea, The Sea this one is rife with visual and verbal allusions and clues that things are not quite what they seem and deserve closer attention.
One of the main things that I picked up on in this book was the challenge about how one becomes virtuous. It is, in a way, the whole premise behind the story in which a lay community of spiritual people take up residence around an abbey, as a kind of "buffer state" between the cloistered world of the abbey and the larger world outside of Imber. Having the abbey closed off and access to the nuns being always obstructed by show more curtains, walls, and bars is a nice comment on our mortal access to the divine it seems. The town, Imber Gate is full of people working through all manner of issues.
The options we have for virtue are laid out in two sermons that are delivered, weekly, by different members of the lay community. In one, the route to virtue is to maintain one's innocence and focus our attention on a distant point that is outside of ourselves and free of our worldly experience as a beacon for virtuous navigation. Nothing in terms of ourselves, which is an untrustworthy perspective. The other sermon takes a different route, claiming that virtue comes out of the reality as we apprehend it because it is from that reality that comes "our power to live as spiritual beings: and by using and enjoying what we already know we can hope to know more." Navigating between those routes is quite difficult because of their incompatibilities.
Funny and well written. show less
One of the main things that I picked up on in this book was the challenge about how one becomes virtuous. It is, in a way, the whole premise behind the story in which a lay community of spiritual people take up residence around an abbey, as a kind of "buffer state" between the cloistered world of the abbey and the larger world outside of Imber. Having the abbey closed off and access to the nuns being always obstructed by show more curtains, walls, and bars is a nice comment on our mortal access to the divine it seems. The town, Imber Gate is full of people working through all manner of issues.
The options we have for virtue are laid out in two sermons that are delivered, weekly, by different members of the lay community. In one, the route to virtue is to maintain one's innocence and focus our attention on a distant point that is outside of ourselves and free of our worldly experience as a beacon for virtuous navigation. Nothing in terms of ourselves, which is an untrustworthy perspective. The other sermon takes a different route, claiming that virtue comes out of the reality as we apprehend it because it is from that reality that comes "our power to live as spiritual beings: and by using and enjoying what we already know we can hope to know more." Navigating between those routes is quite difficult because of their incompatibilities.
Funny and well written. show less
Murdoch's power as a writer was evident in the first novel I read in my "Year of Murdoch" ([The Sea, The Sea]) but I was not taken up and absorbed by it, nor did I ever feel more than tepidly empathetic with any of the characters (more like I found them pathetic or annoying mostly), but here I was fully engaged, fully swept up in the setting and the story itself, both for the plot (which comes to a fiendishly chaotic climax) and for the complexities and agonies of the various characters as they get caught up in the drama. Others have outlined the story quite well here, so I won't. Instead I will simply offer up some choice quotes that are either wise or quintessentially Murdochian or both:
- That was marriage, thought Dora; to be show more enclosed in the aims of another.
-Youth is a marvelous garment. How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents.
- ...to know clearly what you surrender what you gain, and to have no regrets; to revisit without envy the scenes of a surrendered oy, and to taste it ephemerally once more, with a delight undimmed by the knowledge that it is momentary, that is happiness, that surely is freedom.
-As Michael contemplated that tiny distance between the thought and the act it was like a narrow crack which even as he watched it was opening into an abyss.
-Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Such things, as the unintended conequences of insufficiently thought-out impulsive actions are at the core of the novel's heart - with it the big question of why we are so judgemental when we are all so frail. Bravo Iris! ***** show less
- That was marriage, thought Dora; to be show more enclosed in the aims of another.
-Youth is a marvelous garment. How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents.
- ...to know clearly what you surrender what you gain, and to have no regrets; to revisit without envy the scenes of a surrendered oy, and to taste it ephemerally once more, with a delight undimmed by the knowledge that it is momentary, that is happiness, that surely is freedom.
-As Michael contemplated that tiny distance between the thought and the act it was like a narrow crack which even as he watched it was opening into an abyss.
-Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Such things, as the unintended conequences of insufficiently thought-out impulsive actions are at the core of the novel's heart - with it the big question of why we are so judgemental when we are all so frail. Bravo Iris! ***** show less
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 show more 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. show less
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Dora, a young, irresponsible art student, marries Paul, who is thirteen years older, and finds him decisive, possessive, authoritative and violent: 'Something gentle and gay had gone out of her life'. She leaves him and 'passed the summer drinking and dancing and making love and spending Paul's allowance on multi-coloured skirts'. She then decides to return to him, and goes by train, very show more nervous. On the carriage floor she sees a butterfly crawling; picks it up and holds it safely until the train stops and she gets out and meets her husband who finds she has left his property on the train, and 'His face was harshly closed'. He asks her why she is holding her hands so oddly, and she opens them 'like a flower'; the butterfly 'flew away into the distance'.
Clearly this is a butterfly highly charged with symbolic value. show less
Clearly this is a butterfly highly charged with symbolic value. show less
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Author Information
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Iris Murdoch was one of the twentieth century's most prominent novelists, winner of the Booker Prize for The Sea. She died in 1999. (Publisher Provided) Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland on July 15, 1919. She was educated at Badminton School in Bristol and Oxford University, where she read classics, ancient history, and philosophy. After show more several government jobs, she returned to academic life, studying philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1948, she became a fellow and tutor at St. Anne's College, Oxford. She also taught at the Royal College of Art in London. A professional philosopher, she began writing novels as a hobby, but quickly established herself as a genuine literary talent. She wrote over 25 novels during her lifetime including Under the Net, A Severed Head, The Unicorn, and Of the Nice and the Good. She won several awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince in 1973 and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea in 1978. She died on February 8, 1999 at the age of 79. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Iris Murdoch has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
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- Canonical title
- The Bell
- Original title
- The Bell
- Alternate titles*
- Die Glocke
- Original publication date
- 1958
- People/Characters
- Dora Greenfield; Michael Meade; Toby Gashe; Nick Fawley; Catherine Fawley; Noel Spens (show all 14); Paul Greenfield; James Tayper Pace; Margaret Strafford (Mrs Mark); Mark Strafford ; Peter Topglass; Mother Clare; Sister Ursula; Murphy (Nick Fawley's dog)
- Important places
- London, England, UK; Imber Court (fictional), Gloucestershire, England, UK (fictional); Pendelcote (fictional), Gloucestershire, England, UK (fictional); Swindon, England, UK
- Dedication
- TO JOHN SIMOPOULOS
- First words
- Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him.
- Quotations
- It might be thought that since Nature by addition had defeated him of Nick, at least by subtraction it was now offering him Catherine: but this did not occur to Michael except abstractly and as something someone else might ha... (show all)ve felt. (p.98)
Dora's ignorance of religion, as of most things, was formidable. She had never in fact been able to distinguish religion from superstition, and had given up her own practice of it when she discovered that she could say the Lo... (show all)rd's Prayer quickly but not slowly.
At last, obeying that conception of fatality which served her instead of a moral sense, she left him. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Tonight she would be telling the whole story to Sally.
- Original language
- English
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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