Michael thinks back to conversations with the Abbesshe had had before The Bell begins. Just as class undermines the community, so too do the differing conceptions of it that its members have. Even as the community tries to emphasise equality – everyone addresses each other by their first names, for example – it is founded thanks to privilege, and within it a certain hierarchy still sees the well-bred and intelligent at the top. Indeed, the utopia, where everyone lives in a rundown great country house and grows vegetables all day is only possible because someone owns that country house – Michael. James and Michael, the leaders of the lay community, get on well not just because of their characters, but because both of them have “a certain clannish affinity” stemming from a shared upper middle-class background. On the very first page of The Bell we are told that Dora comes from a “lower middle-class London family”, making us aware, unconsciously, that nobody is without background, even here. Murdoch is good at showing the subtle ways that utopia fails to escape the old world.

Between all these people plays out a tragic drama, as past and present collide in the vulnerable space of Imber, which at first glance appears to offer a kind of isolated utopia, and yet in reality finds the world left behind much closer than at first anyone had assumed. Paul is older, rich, and intellectual, while Dora is younger, cheerful, and trapped in a horrible marriage that she keeps running away from, unsuccessfully. The guests include Toby, a young man looking for a spiritual retreat before he starts at university, and a married couple, Dora and Paul. Other members include James, his second-in-command, Nick, a man who once was dangerously close to Michael, and Catherine, Nick’s twin sister and an aspiring nun. It is lead by Michael, a closeted homosexual.

Introduction to the CharactersĪt Imber Court, an old country house in Gloucestershire, there lives a lay religious community. Rather than spoil the plot as I usually do, in this piece I will discuss the ways that the community crumbles from within, and comment on the question of freedom, as it applies to Murdoch’s characters. As newcomers arrive this space’s stability is put to the test. Instead, they live in this fragile, liminal space, attempting to keep their lives in order. (A little like your own blogger, in fact). These individuals are people who are disappointed with the world in one way or another, and yet are unable to withdraw from it completely, as have the nuns. I bought it because I liked the idea, about a community of religious individuals living beside an order of nuns. Iris Murdoch is often considered one of the best English novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and The Bell is one of her best-known works.

The bell iris