IN HER fourth novel, The Bell, Iris Murdoch takes us to Imber Court, a lay religious community in Gloucestershire, which is going through some teething trouble. The eponymous bell belonged to the Anglican abbey, which stands adjacent to the house, but it went missing during the dissolution of the monasteries, and, as we join the action, plans are under way for a new bell to be unveiled. While the bell provides the novel’s name and the overarching geometry of its plot, it is the evocatively drawn characters that carry the story through a series of changes.
The predominant tone of the first quarter of the novel is comedic. Readers spends most of their time with Dora Greenfield, who is enchanting company, even if it isn’t hard to see why others intermittently find her infuriating. As unlovable as her bullying husband, Paul, is, it is hard not to feel a touch exasperated on his behalf when, on returning to him after six months of estrangement, she leaves his notebooks and special Italian sunhat on a train. It is perhaps an appropriate symbol of her flightiness that the only thing that she has in her hands when they meet on the platform is a Red Admiral butterfly.
Murdoch’s description of Dora’s thoughts as she rescues the butterfly from the floor of the carriage exemplifies the character’s self-consciousness, impulsiveness, and essential goodness. After silently convincing herself of the reasons that she shouldn’t make a spectacle of herself by leaning over to save the butterfly, Dora does exactly that: “She knelt down and gently scooped the creature into the palm of her hand, and covered it over with her other hand. She could feel it fluttering inside. Everyone stared. Dora blushed violently.”
The butterfly motif returns, silently, later in the novel, when Dora briefly flees back to London and seeks solace in the National Gallery. She examines a painting by Gainsborough in which his two daughters are depicted walking through a wood, “garments shimmering, their eyes serious and dark, their two pale heads, round full buds, like yet unlike”. What Murdoch leaves unremarked is the fact that the painting shows the younger daughter reaching out to grasp a pale butterfly. This delicate mirroring of Dora’s experience on the train adds a further gossamer thread to the novel’s web of symbolism.
Dora’s “mystical experience”, as she describes it, in the National Gallery gives rise to one of the novel’s infrequent passages of philosophical reflection, as Dora sees in the paintings “something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood”. What Dora discovers in paintings, many of the other characters in The Bell seek in God — and the novel reminds us that no two people’s journey, or destination, is the same.
Murdoch once wrote of her own lack of faith: “I myself do not believe literally in a personal God, the divinity of Christ or life after death, but I do believe in what Christianity stands for, its lessons in virtue and love, and the teachings of its great mystics.” This position finds a more oblique expression in a conclusion reached by one of the characters in The Bell: “There is a God, but I do not believe in Him.” The God in which Murdoch did not believe was, one might argue, distinctly Anglican (Features, 19 July 2019), and she was included in the 2019 volume of essays, Anglican Women Novelists (Features, 5 July 2019).
As with many of Murdoch’s novels, the first part passes without much happening, although the characters are so vividly drawn, and their relationships are so tantalisingly suggestive of dark secrets, that we barely notice the lack of action. Once we enter the perspective of Michael Meade, the founder of the lay community and an aspiring priest, the tone darkens.
Daniel Greenhouse/AlamyThe author Dame Iris Murdoch, in the portrait by Tom Phillips on display at the National Portrait Gallery. The artist described Murdoch as “a luminous presence . . . an electric light-bulb in that gloomy corner, glowing, casting out darkness”
Michael is troubled, and it is interesting to reflect on how we might read him differently now from the time when the novel was published, in 1958. Murdoch was writing at the same time as Sir John Wolfenden was working on his 1957 landmark report that paved the way for the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
Michael’s sexuality would have been far more likely to shock Murdoch’s first readers than those reading the novel in the 21st century, although, ironically, some of his behaviour is perhaps more taboo now than it was then. One example is when he drives a teenager home after drinking several glasses of cider; others have more impact on the plot, but would spoil it for those who haven’t read the novel. Suffice it to say that any modern visitor to Imber Court would find plenty to report to the diocesan safeguarding officer.
Michael’s drink-driving is not the only automobile-focused reminder of how times have changed: when the Bishop (presumably of Gloucester) arrives late in the book, the fact that he is in a Rolls-Royce is less noteworthy than the fact that he has driven it himself. The Bishop’s arrival heralds the unspooling of the carefully wound plot, ratcheted towards a climax that involves bodies, both human and tintinnabular, falling into the lake.
Many consider The Bell to be Murdoch’s finest novel. A. S. Byatt wrote that she “devoured” it, “feeling puritanically that perhaps a novel had no right to be both so completely readable and so certainly serious”. It is more compact than some of her later novels, and, as a result, easier to get into. And, once you’re in, you won’t want to leave, but stay transfixed as the characters that you have come to know each slide towards their own personal catastrophe, or redemption.
Francis Martin is a news reporter for the Church Times.
The Bell by Iris Murdoch is published by Vintage Classics at £10.99 (Church Times Bookshop £9.89); 978-0-09-947048-9.
Listen to Francis Martin discuss the book with the Revd Jeremy Davies, retired Canon Precentor of Salisbury Cathedral, in this week’s Church Times podcast. This is a monthly series produced in association with the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature. Listen here.
THE BELL — SOME QUESTIONS
- Murdoch takes the reader inside the minds of Dora, Toby, and Michael. If you were to be offered access to one more character’s thoughts, who would you choose?
- What moment in the novel did you find the most shocking? Do you think it would have been more or less shocking in 1958, when the novel was published?
- If you have read any other Murdoch novels, consider whether any of the characters remind you of figures in other books. Does Murdoch, to some extent, deal in “types”?
- Do you think that the Imber community would flourish in today’s C of E (safeguarding concerns notwithstanding)?
- Chapter 7 (roughly one third of the way through) ends: “It looked as if the strange tale would have, after all, a rather dull and undistinguished ending.” Having read the actual ending, could you say that there is any truth in this statement?
- The span of the novel is relatively brief. What do you think happens to the characters afterwards?
IN OUR next Book Club on 1 November, we will print extra information about our next book, Orbital by Samantha Harvey. It is published by Vintage Classics at £9.99 (£8.99); 978-1-5299-2293-6).
THE BOOK
Samantha Harvey’s short novel Orbital is a series of meditations by six fictional astronauts on the International Space Station. Travelling at an altitude of 250 miles above sea level, and orbiting the Earth 16 times a day, the book covers the life of the crew over a 24-hour period. Observations by the astronauts as they look down wistfully on the Earth are ones mixed with wonder and fear. Crossing war zones and impenetrable borders, and tracking a menacing typhoon, the book makes for uncomfortable viewing. Ultimately, Orbital is a book of hope, reaffirming in the reader a sense of insignificance in the presence of a larger, more magnificent realm.
THE AUTHOR
Samantha Harvey is a prizewinning novelist who lives in Bath, and is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her début novel, Wilderness, a story about the loss of memory, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009. Orbital, the author’s fifth novel and winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize for Literature, is also on the shortlist for this year’s Booker Prize, whose winner is to be announced later this month. The author has been described by the Telegraph as “this century’s Virginia Woolf”.