Word: bells
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...BELL (342 pp.)-Iris Murdoch-Viking...
This is conceivably the only novel ever written in which a boy tries to seduce a girl in a recumbent church bell. The would-be lovers fail, but that is because the clapper gives off a frightful clang that scares them both frigid. All of this will come as no surprise to fans of British Novelist Iris Murdoch (The Sandcastle), a philosophy-teaching Oxford don and an intellectual pixy whose wit ends in tears, whose sentences are transparent while her meanings are opaque...
...setting of The Bell is a lay community of semi-contemplatives, a kind of British Brook Farm attached to Imber Abbey, which houses an order of enclosed Anglican nuns. Imber is made up of a rather odd parcel of stuffed hairshirts. They include the son of an old military family, who seems to think of heaven as the last outpost of Empire, a mouse and lion husband-and-wife team, a saintly Good-Humored girl, frozen on the outside, soft on the inside. Finally there is the colony's leader, Michael Meade, a tense scoutmaster type who flounders...
...named Dora, and her Prussianesque art-scholar husband. In a series of plot maneuvers as complicated as a gavotte, Author Murdoch sees to it that the insiders and the outsiders mix, mate and mangle each other. A lengthy subplot centers on the discovery and raising of the ancient abbey bell, legendarily consigned to the bottom of the lake as a result of a curse on an errant nun. The bell, of course, is a symbol for that clear-ringing innocence of which the colonists are self-deprived...
Ampex, Revere, Bell Sound Systems, Wollensak, Webcor are selling stereo tape players. Stereo record players (price: $125 to $2,500) are being pushed by Pilot, Columbia, Zenith, RCA Victor, Emerson and others. Into the market for stereo records have come Columbia, RCA, Angel, London, Audio-Fidelity...