Word: murdoch
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...BELL (342 pp.)-Iris Murdoch-Viking...
...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...
...colonists are joined by a group of visitors no less strange: a Byronic Oxford lad, a hopeless lush, a flighty wife 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...
...Author Murdoch mitigates the sordid in her story with a flow of wit that is civilized, unobtrusive and sometimes lethal. The novel achieves distinction in a series of brief sermons and reflections on the nature of God and the good that ought to make many an orthodox pulpit-pounding clergyman blush in envy. Yet the meaning of The Bell is muffled in final ambiguity, as the colony goes under in a tidal wave of newspaper scandal. With its strange but oddly exciting characters, its limpid prose, its sly wit and its ethical insight, The Bell unquestionably tolls...
...incomprehensible love affair that grows between the two is made plausible by Iris Murdoch's great tact with words. It is only when this serious novelist (she is a tutor in philosophy at Oxford's St. Anne's College) intrudes witchcraft into the plot that she seems to forget the difference between the reality of magic and the magic of reality. Mor's daughter Felicity, hoping to release her father from his enchantment, casts a spell and burns a figure (made of a nylon stocking stuffed with paper). Mother catches her at it: "Whatever were...