The Bell

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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. Morals and spirituality are linked for many of the characters in The Bell. People go to Imber Court, a secluded, religious community, to escape modern society. This is one of the key aspects that attracts Toby to the community, for example. Members feel they can be more in touch with their morals and values in this spiritual place. 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. In the actions and interior monologues of her characters, Murdoch examines holiness and sin not as independent, mutually exclusive objects, like an on-off switch, but as the results of myriad, complex and obscure human decisions, often with unintended consequences. Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination. Think of the Russians, those great masters of the contingent. Too much contingency, of course, may turn art into journalism. But since reality is incomplete art must not be afraid of incompleteness. Literature must always represent a battle between real people and images; and what it requires now is a much stronger and more complex conception of the former.”

Do you agree with Michael that spiritual aspiration and passions often spring from the same source? Is it possible to fully satisfy both?When Dora learns that Catherine plans to enter the Abbey as a nun, why does she feel “as if something within herself were menaced with destruction” (p. 63)? The Bell, Iris Murdoch's fourth novel, was published in 1958 by Chatto & Windus in Great Britain and Viking Press in the United States. [11] :9,12 It was an immediate popular and commercial success, with 30,000 copies of the British edition printed within ten weeks of its publication. [9] :423

Again Dame Iris, you would be amused to learn that your abundant use of the word ‘gay’, with its derivatives ‘gaily’ and ‘gaiety’, holds a different colloquial meaning in today’s society. We have ‘gay marriage’ now, and homosexuality has been decimalised in many countries. My feeling is that you would have supported this, or at that very least, provided a detailed philosophical argument for and against it. The Abbey makes plans to replace its missing bell with a new one. The Bishop will christen the bell and give it its name at Imber Court before transferring it to the bell tower.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, In that lowness, Murdoch found the subject of her novels, each to a greater or lesser degree peopled by delusionals and lunatics. Often, those who are compelled by the attempt to be good are the most dangerous, particularly when they have covered themselves in the cloak of mysticism, a recurring trope that allows Murdoch to study – in common with Muriel Spark – the devastating power of charisma. The setting is Imber Court, a country house in Gloucestershire that is the home of a small Anglican lay religious community. It is situated next to Imber Abbey, a convent belonging to an enclosed community of Benedictine nuns. The owner of Imber Court and the community's de facto leader is Michael Meade, a former schoolmaster in his late 30s. The community supports itself by a market garden. Dora is married to a cold, cruel man who is an art historian. They have an on-again, off-again relationship. As the story opens she’s returning to her husband from a casual affair with an old flame. “…she could be happy neither with her husband nor without him.” “It seemed to her that her husband …was urging her to grow up, and yet had left her no space to grow up into.” Her husband, the snot, tells her: “Of course I don’t respect you…Have I any reason to? I’m in love with you, unfortunately, that’s all.” How’s that for a sad state of affairs? For all its bucolic charm, The Bell is not simplistic escapism, the corrosive effect of which on human kindness Murdoch so viscerally dissects in other novels. Everyone at Imber is trying to figure out how to lead a meaningful life amid the disintegrating ethical certainties of a secular society – “learning to be good”, in the words of Charles Arrowby, the antihero of The Sea, the Sea, though they’re an infinitely nicer bunch than anyone in Murdoch’s rebarbative Booker prize-winning novel. The Bell’s secular cenobites are not embodiments of abstract absolutes, as Murdoch’s characters can sometimes seem in later novels – each carries their own individual burdens, trying to carve out a sense of goodness in the world that might console and redeem their guilty consciences.