THE BELL

by Iris Murdoch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 1958

An Anglican lay community on an estate attached to a convent of Anglican nuns provides the setting for some quite melodramatic happenings--suicide, a wrecked marriage, an antiquarian cause celebre-- among the small and eccentric band of idealists. Not since the early Huxley novels have such a varied, neurotic and strange group of characters enacted their amorous and philosophical adventures against the mellow background of a stately English home. The community's director, a devout and intelligent young man, keeps trying to convince himself that his lapses into homosexuality are not really sufficient moral cause to prevent his becoming a priest. The very beautiful girl whose bitions to enter the convent make her the pride of the community turns out to be a schizophrenic in love with the director (who had seduced her brother). The naive college boy eager to partake of the good and pure life seduces a visitor's willing wife, takes part in a hoax concerning the convent's new bell that ruins the community and becomes involved with the director in a fashion that forever demolishes his hope of being a priest. Naturally these and other less sensational but very amusing characters and the hothouse atmosphere of a whacky English Brooks Farm provide ample opportunity for satire. But it is Miss Murdoch's special gift that makes her people real and sympathetic as well as bulls-eye targets for a most Jively wit. By now Iris Murdoch's novels should have won her a select and appreciative following in this country, and The B can only add to her growing stature. However, after the brilliantly surrealistic invention of The Flight From The one feels in this book as in the previous novel, where fantasy was abandoned for more realistic plot and treatment, that something is missing, that the author could have done even more with her talents. Nevertheless she is certainly one of the few young novelists to watch.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0141186690

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1958

Categories: FICTION