The Bell Paperback – Import, 5 Feb. 2004

Great story . One of Iris Murdoch’s very best

I very much enjoyed the first half of the book with the establishing of the characters and the place. For me it then became overly melodramatic and lost some of its credibility as a novel. However a well worthwhile read so do give it a go.

One of my favourite Iris Murdoch books.

I read A Severed Head as a student, disliked it, and didn’t read anything more of Murdoch’s until recently (now as an ex-academic and a writer of fiction myself), feeling I should plug the lacuna with a cross-section of her work. Although some of the novels have been better than others, I confess to being generally underwhelmed. This was one of the least interesting.At the risk of stating the obvious, the miracle of fiction is the ability of the genre to encode in words a world of the writer’s imagination which is then (re)created by the reader in terms of his/her own imagination and experience, the recreation being different for every single reader but participating in the original nevertheless. I don’t need to bang on about ‘suspension of disbelief’, but if this is to work, the plot and location and characters created by the writer must be felt by the reader to be plausible and ‘real’, whatever other layers of significance they might have. This is true not only of ‘naturalistic’ or ‘realistic’ fiction, but much other fiction too. Kafka’s Prozess (Trial), for instance, works because Josef K is not a cardboard cutout, but intensely present and ‘real’ to the reader, as is the nightmare world he inhabits.On the whole I find the characters in The Bell difficult to take seriously as real human beings (I realize this will outrage some readers, but hope they will respect my opinion as I do theirs). I came to it fresh from reading Endo Shusaku’s Silence (straight through in one, then twice more in the course of a week, a literary experience I’m grateful to have had). I then re-read Greene’s Power and the Glory for comparison (with Endo) and was intensely moved as always. I’m aware that Murdoch’s novel is quite different in a host of ways and that it’s perhaps not fair to compare her with masters like Endo and Greene. But on the point of the reality and presence of the people in the books, it’s interesting that characters from early Edo Japan, like the subtle magistrate and inquisitor Inoue, Lord of Chikugo, and the wonderful thirteen-year-old Coral Fellows (so economically drawn) on her banana plantation in Mexico, were far more intensely present to me (and credible) than any of the characters in The Bell, even the more convincing ones like Dora and Michael.Space forbids me to cite as many examples as I'd like, but take the youth Toby, one of the three third-person ‘viewpoint characters’ (though there are frequent authorial interventions). Michael kisses Toby, sparking off all kinds of unsettling reflections, both on Toby’s part and the intrusive narrator’s. Having had no experience of sexual contact whatsoever (or, apparently, even thoughts about girls!), he wonders if he himself might be homosexual. ‘Was he attracted by women? The fact that he had not so far been had bothered Toby, till this moment, not one whit. Now it worried him and he began to want to be immediately reassured . . . He had scarcely met any girls of his own age. Images he had none to conjure up to test his inclinations. He pondered for a while rather generally on the subject of Woman.’ (p.178). This youth is actually eighteen years old, remember! I fell in love at the age of ten with a girl in my primary school and have never forgotten her, and throughout my adolescence very specific ponderings indeed ‘on the subject of Woman’ were rarely far from my mind. I dreamt longingly of contact with the gymslipped lovelies of the girls’ school opposite, and in the course of time I got it. In all this I was pretty typical of boys of my time, which was roughly Toby's time too. Are we really supposed to believe in this character as a kind of sexual tabula rasa? The fact is, of course, that his ‘role’ in the pattern of the novel is much more important than his reality. Toby is the ephebe, the pretty young gazelle-like creature, Donatello’s David. Toby is ‘Innocence’ and a temptation for Michael. And, mutatis mutandis, the others (even Dora, the most human of the lot apart from Michael at moments) are there for their roles in the pattern too. Not that there’s anything wrong in that, but it doesn’t make for a convincing read in this kind of novel, which purports to be of the ‘traditional’ kind.The plot, too, is sometimes as contrived as those in the other Murdoch novels I've read and depends too much on chance events (people entering rooms at vital moments or running into each other in the woods) or creaky devices like listening at windows (compare the totally unconvincing and unintentionally hilarious eavesdropping scene in the rosebed in The Sea, The Sea). But there's no room to go into this without hogging more than my fair share of space.I would also have liked to say something about the writing, which is sometimes superb, at other times flat and dull and prolix, and about the dialogue, which is often awkward, but again space forbids.It’s interesting to read Ms Murdoch’s Paris Review Interview (1990), where she talks about her way of working, which is a very unusual one among writers of my acquaintance and most writers I have read about, and may explain some of the weaknesses of her work as well as the strengths. If I haven’t mentioned the strengths much (like the excellently handled and shockingly vindictive double betrayal of Michael, and the fine closing chapter, where all have departed save Michael and Dora), it’s because other reviewers have eloquently done more than justice to them. Sorry for the length.I did include the link to the above-mentioned interview, but the dumb machine rejected it.

The book was selected for a reading group. There wide range of complex characters made for lively discussion.The book is simple in style, but uses some unusual words. It is well written, The reader wants to read on and on.

Like some other reviewers, I was new to Iris Murdoch's books. What a wonderful discovery!Murdoch manages to sustain a brooding, almost scaring tension throughout the book. I was reminded of Joseph Conrad's description of 'a little touch of other things'. There is always something unsaid going on. The author is symathetic towards her characters and shows the main ones to be multifaceted, often perverse and complicated. Despite their spiritual searching, they are all very human and all flawed.The style of the book is a bit dated and that takes a little getting used to. Certain anxieties that caused near despair in the time of this book would not cause such upset now.There are many layers to this novel. I don't usually re-read books very often but know that I will be returning to this one. This is intelligent writing at its best.

I first read this novel when I was 18. I am now 70, and do not, in general, re-read novels. I had forgotten most of the plot, but was as overwhelmed this time round as I was all those years ago. There is a lot of (capital P) Philosophy in the book, but that in no way detracts from the momentum of the action. Iris Murdoch's character-ruminations as to who felt what as a result of another character's (or his/her own) thought or action are, to me, utterly compelling, but some readers may find them hard work. A.S. Byatt, in her introduction, quotes Dame Iris as saying that "The Bell" was a "lucky" novel, in that everything "came together" in the writing of it. This has never seemed to me, neither did the author believe it, to be obviously always the case with her (Ms Murdoch's) books. Ms Byatt, herself a formidable novelist, also compares Ms Murdoch's writing to that of Henry James. Any profound similarity appears to me unlikely: suffice to say that I find Henry James extremely "difficult" and Iris Murdoch anything but (at least in her earlier work.) The BBC made a film of this novel decades ago, but as far as I can discover there is no dvd or vhs currently available. I got through "The Bell" more speedily than any other novel I read in 2018 - and that was wholly and solely on account of being rivetted! If you're an amateur psychologist or indeed philosopher, then I cannot believe that you'll come away from this brilliant work unfulfilled.

You need patience to get through, there are few landmarks or events. The whole endeavour is describing others’ inner minds, not always convincingly. Perhaps for its time it was novel but in 2022 it is not. I’m glad I got to the end but it did require determination. The characters are odd, the outre focus on homosexuality very passé but the religion worst of all. In one sense very dated