Toby and Dora are each innocent, though in different ways. But his church’s theology calls them evil. Those urges feel good, give him a good feeling. Michael is a homosexual whose academic career was destroyed by Nick after a mutual flirtation, and he is constantly wrestling with the tenets of his Christian faith against gay feelings and actions and the bliss those feelings and actions bring him when he permits them.

Murdoch’s narrative is told from the perspectives of Michael, Toby and Dora. Imber Court also has several visitors, including Catherine’s brother Nick, a hard-drinking ne’er-do-well Toby Gashe, an 18-year-old soon-to-be student at Oxford art historian Paul Greenfield, an easily angered control freak and, reuniting after months of affairs on her own, Paul’s wife Dora, a vague, aimless, confused person, easily bullied by her husband. The lay community, headed by Michael Meade, has seven members, five men and two women, one of whom, the young Catherine Frawley, is getting ready to enter the convent and is described with fondness as “our little saint.” The community members are trying to live a spiritual life away from the distractions and temptations of the world. One sister even dives into the lake when she sees two women drowning.

The nuns appear rarely in the novel, and, when they do, they come across as plain-spoken, friendly visitors from another existence, as, of course, they are. These sisters are awaiting a new bell for their tower which, according to a local legend, has been empty since a 12 th-century bell flew out of the tower and into the small lake outside the walls after a nun broke her vows with a lover. The Bell tells the story of several weeks in the life of Imber Court, a small Anglican lay community living in an old country house in southwest England, next to Imber Abbey, a convent of cloistered Benedictine nuns. In the actions and interior monologues of her characters, Murdoch examines holiness and sin not as independent, mutually exclusive objects, like an on-off switch, but as the results of myriad, complex and obscure human decisions, often with unintended consequences. In today’s intellectual universe, belief, particularly religious belief, isn’t taken seriously.īut, in The Bell, Murdoch deals with these phenomena with respect, affection, puzzlement and compassion. I suspect that no modern novelist would be able to take up such material without an edge of irony or a framework of skepticism. It is difficult to imagine a novel like this being written today. The Bell by Iris Murdoch, published in 1958, is something of a time capsule.

The bell iris murdoch analysis