Word: murdochized
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...SEVERED HEAD, by Iris Murdoch (248 pp.; Viking; $3.95), leaves little doubt that adultery would be even more popular than it is but for the fact that it involves a more exacting set of rules than marriage itself. Oxford Philosophy Don Iris Murdoch has written a novel about adultery so complex and involuted as to suggest an anthropologist's chart of the mating patterns of a tribe at once polygamous and polyandrous. Among the wholly amoral cast of characters: Martin Lynch-Gibbon, an elegant but asthmatic London wine merchant, who is also the novel's narrator; his blonde...
...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...