Category: Classics Club

Book Review: The Bell by Iris Murdoch

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The BellAbout the Book

A 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 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.

Format: Paperback (352 pp.)             Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2nd August 1999 [1958]   Genre: Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting local UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Bell on Goodreads

My Review

“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.” In many ways, The Bell is a book about actions and unintended consequences.

Imber Court is described as ‘a buffer state between the Abbey and the world’ and it does seem that many of its occupants are in transition.   The most obvious is Catherine, who is spending her last few weeks before entering the Abbey as a nun.  However, as the Abbess sagely observes, “Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.”

Dora is dissatisfied with and feels trapped in her marriage to Paul, but can see no alternative.  ‘That was marriage, thought Dora, to be enclosed in the aims of another.’  Having broken free once, she now feels compelled to return to Paul and Imber Court is the scene of their reunion.  I have to confess I found Dora irritatingly passive about her situation for a lot of the book.  I tended to sympathise with her friend’s advice that ‘You must either knuckle under completely or else fight him.’ My view did change once she and one of the young visitors to Imber Court, Toby, embark on an enterprise together.  ‘It was as if, for her, this was to be magical act of shattering significance, a sort of rite of power and liberation.’

Dora’s husband, Paul, remains a rather peripheral figure.  He comes across as moralistic, cold and possessive and I rather struggled to understand what could have been attractive about him to Dora.   However, he’s clearly deeply hurt by Dora’s desertion but unable to forgive her, to articulate his feelings or to show any warmth towards her that might provide hope of a full reconciliation.

And there’s Michael, always struggling to do the right thing but not always succeeding.  I found him the most empathetic character.  Betrayed in the past, he still feels guilty about his part in the circumstances that led to it and struggles with what he sees as a conflict between his sexuality and his faith.  An instinctive and momentary expression of his feelings threatens to bring to light his past actions and sets in motion a chain of events that will culminate in tragedy.

During one of the regular community meetings, one character says: “A bell is made to speak out.  What would be the value of a bell which was never rung?  It rings out clearly, it bears witness. It cannot speak without seeming like a call, a summons.” In fact, as events unfold, it becomes clear that confession can sometimes be dangerous self-indulgence or disguised retribution against another.  ‘There are moments when one wants to tell the truth, when one wants to shout it around, however much damage it does.’

Murdoch’s skill is to really let you see inside the minds of the characters so that the reader witnesses their (sometimes illogical) thought processes, their moral conflicts and their attempts at self-justification.  It doesn’t make them necessarily likeable but it makes them feel credible.

The Bell forms part of my Classics Club list.  To see the other books on my list, click here.

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In three words: Elegant, insightful, intimate

Try something similar…Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Iris MurdochAbout the Author

Iris Murdoch was born in Ireland in 1919.  A university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. In 1956 Murdoch married John Bayley, a literary critic, novelist, and Professor of English at Oxford University.

Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease. Her novel The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978. In 1987 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died in 1999.  Murdoch was portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001), based on Bayley’s memories of his wife.

Throwback Thursday: Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

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ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk.  It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago.  If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

Today I’m reviewing Memento Mori by Muriel Spark, a book from my Classics Club list, first published in 1959. The lovely Ali at Heavenali is running a year long reading event to mark the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth.  You can find out more information here.

Memento MoriAbout the Book

“Remember you must die,” said the voice on the telephone.

Dame Lettie Colson is the first of her circle to receive these anonymous calls, and she does not wish to be reminded.  Nor do her friends and family – though they are constantly looking out for signs of decline in others, and change their wills on a weekly basis.

As the caller’s activities become more widespread, soon a witch-hunt is in full cry, exposing past and present duplicities, self-deception and blackmail.  Nobody is above suspicion.  Only a few, blessed with a sense of humour and the gift of faith, can guess at the caller’s identity.

Format: Paperback (226 pp.)                         Publisher: Virago
Published: 4th February 2010 [1959]           Genre: Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting local bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Memento Mori on Goodreads

My Review

My only previous experience of Muriel Spark’s writing is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  So I was expecting elegant writing, wit and acute observation but what I wasn’t expecting was the dark satire of Memento Mori and its unflinching portrait of old age, petty foibles and self-deception.  And the author isn’t afraid to deliver some quite breathtakingly sudden reverses for some of the characters. As I was reading the book, I wasn’t sure I liked it that much but, having now finished and reflected on it, I feel rather differently and have come to admire it.

Spark is good at identifying the way in which the elderly are regarded and the indignities that often come with old age.  There is a lot of truth in the depiction of the ‘Grannies’ and their loss of identity.  They are not in fact all grandmothers but referred to in that way by the nurses who care for them.  She’s equally good at pointing out traits which we’ve probably noticed in older relatives ourselves.  For example, frequently telling each other (and possibly reminding themselves) of their age and dwelling on their infirmities.  I’m not sure however that people spend quite as much time changing their wills as they do in Memento Mori.

While I didn’t find the humour in the book to be of the laugh out loud variety, I enjoyed some of the acerbic comments on domestic life.  ‘There was altogether too much candour in married life; it was an indelicate modern idea, and frequently led to upsets in a household, if not divorce…’. 

My favourite character was Charmian, a successful novelist in the past, whose books are now being rediscovered by a new generation (and who does that remind you of?).  At the beginning of the book, she appears increasingly absent-minded, if not in the early stages of dementia, but she turns out to be much sharper than people give her credit for. Some of the other characters are downright unlikeable, such as the dreadful and manipulative Mrs Pettigrew, adept at finding out secrets and using that knowledge to her advantage.  However, likeable or not, all the characters come alive on the page.  There’s Alec Warner with his compulsion for collecting facts about ageing and comparing the infirmities he observes in others with his own situation.  Or Charmian’s husband, Godfrey, with his odd peccadilloes and obsession with people’s loss (or otherwise) of their faculties.

Each of the characters who receive the cryptic message from the anonymous caller reacts differently – with outrage, with determination to find out the caller’s identity, with fear, with an academic interest about their own reaction to it, and in some cases, with acceptance.  The latter is the case with retired Chief Inspector Henry Mortimer, who made me think of the Inspector in J.B. Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls, as he tries to encourage the other recipients of the message to engage with its meaning, its inevitable truth, rather than focus on a search for the identity of the caller.   He greets the message with equanimity himself: “Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise.  It should be part of the full expectancy of life.  Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid.”  I guess that is the real message of the book.

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In three words: Dark, macabre, satirical

Muriel SparkAbout the Author

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.  Spark grew up in Edinburgh and worked as a department store secretary, writer for trade magazines, and literary editor before publishing her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961, and considered her masterpiece, was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film.

Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for “a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature”. In 2010, Spark was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970 for The Driver’s Seat.

Muriel Spark died in 2006.