A professor of mine once told me that I should read Iris Murdoch, because she “basically invented A.S. Byatt” (it may be difficult to tell from reading this blog, but Byatt is one of my favourite authors). And having now read The Bell, I can see the truth in this statement. Murdoch’s style has a lot in common with Byatt’s, although it’s difficult to pinpoint specific examples. One gets the same sense of a complex intellectual involvement with the inner lives of a number of characters, expressed through simple and thoroughly proper English prose. The Plain Style, I guess. Robertson Davies with a better ear. It’s lovely and hypnotic to read, even when nothing in particular is happening, although unlike Byatt, it’s very rare for more than a page or two to go by without something of significance happening to someone. Events in this novel are like stones thrown in a calm pool of water; each makes very little impact on its own, but the ripples linger and expand. Murdoch throws enough tiny stones that eventually the pool becomes like white water rapids from the mingling of all those ripples.
The novel both opens and closes with an omniscient narrator looking at a collection of characters as if from a great distance, the tone alternating between detachment and a kind of good-natured condescension. The characters are neurotic, dysfunctional, only sometimes likable, and yet profoundly, recognizably human. In some ways this seems a little too pat, an easy and uncomplicated way of setting up the board and then taking it down again, like a game of checkers, or maybe Scrabble. The bulk of the novel is of course more specific, dealing with the daily events and remarkably troubled spiritual lives of a group of people living in a lay religious community called Imber Court, attached almost like a parasite to an abbey of cloistered Anglican Benedictine nuns. The Bell for a time seems like it will follow the spiritual rebirth and emotional development of Mrs. Dora Greenfield, a skittish, not particularly intelligent woman who has married an appalling man named Paul, though she is in her own way quite appalling (James Tayper-Pierce, one of the Imber residents, says she is the sort of woman “who is sometimes called a bitch”), as she is selfish, thoughtless and almost without the power of introspection. At the opening of the novel she is returning to her husband Paul (violent, cruel, and even more selfish than she) after having walked out on their marriage for a time. Paul is a scholar, working on old documents that have been acquired by the abbey. Imber and many of the other characters are introduced by the narrator as though through her eyes. She does eventually begin to develop into a functional, independent, adult human being, but she is really only on the cusp of that achievement when the novel switches, at the end, back to the distant eye-in-the-sky style of narration.
By far the most interesting character in the book is Michael, the de facto leader of Imber court, owner of the grounds, one-time aspirant to the clergy and closeted (well, obviously closeted, the book was first published in 1958) homosexual. The most interesting parts of the book happen when Michael tries to reconcile his deep spirituality with his sexuality, two things which he sees as wholly incompatible, yet stemming from the same source. Interestingly, he thinks of his sexuality wholly in terms of love, never in terms of lust, although when the narrator recounts the events of his life, it’s clear that lust was also present. Dora, the less emotionally developed person, is perfectly capably of acknowledging and acting through lust, but Michael, the spiritual man who is endlessly examining his own actions and intentions, will only acknowledge love as a motivating factor where his sexuality is concerned. In some ways this is the most alien part of the book. We live, today, in a society that (well, for the most part; there’s still progress to be made) accepts homosexuals as people who are simply different from heterosexuals, neither better nor worse. The vast majority of society (or, at least it seems that way from my experience) has moved past the ideas that gay people are criminal, or in some way suffering from an illness, but to Michael and Toby (the young man with whom Michael falls, conditionally, in love with at Imber), these are real and vital concerns to deal with. One of Michael’s major struggles is to be at peace with his sexual identity, not only because he is different and the world unkind to those who are different, as the case would be today, but also because he must struggle with the idea, placed in him by both his society and his religion, that what he is must somehow also be wrong, dangerous, or evil, even. Michael’s turmoil is at turns fascinating and heartbreaking. Even when he reaches a place of equilibrium he must constantly be on guard of threats to it from the outside, as he is not free to be who his is.
There are other characters, such as Nick and Catherine, ghosts from Michael’s past, who are necessarily present but never seem wholly there, and are much less significant than the narrator suggests they could be (this is perhaps a major difference between Byatt and Murdoch; Murdoch has them play their role but otherwise ignores them, while Byatt would have given them greater attention). Likewise the bells themselves, the pieces of history that seem to bind everyone together at Imber, and direct much of the action of the book. They are excuses to set the pieces in motion, and though deeper tales are hinted at, they are not explored. Byatt would certainly have explored them. This is not a deficiency in Murdoch, merely a difference. The Bell is a tight novel, and indeed “wise, witty and compulsive” as the blurb on the cover suggests. (Oh yes, mine is an older copy than the one pictured here, so the cover is different.)
Next, Who Do You Think You Are?, a book of linked short stories by Alice Munroe.
