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| The Bell (Vintage Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £1.39
You Save: £6.60 (83%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 59841
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 315
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0099470489
EAN: 9780099470489
ASIN: 0099470489
Publication Date: February 5, 2004
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: with slight tanning to pages.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Worthy but... not worth it March 17, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I studied this book, not out of choice, so perhaps mine is just the typical resentful schoolboy attitude. As the reviews show, many people seem to have hugely enjoyed this book. I kind of bet that none of them are under 25, though. The overriding feel I got from The Bell was one of coldness - I felt that Murdoch was too busy trying to impress with academic and literary concepts to worry too much about creating likeable characters or rewarding her readers. The plot seemed to revolve around the troubled soul of a closeted gay man, the vague dissatisfaction of a self-centred housewife, and an old church bell that was to be dredged out of a lake. Seeing as I couldn't have cared less about the characters involved (well, maybe young Toby was quite sympathetic) or their setting, the plot was one big yawn to me, punctuated only by groans of frustration. It seemed idea-driven, with the characters dutifully constructed mouthpieces or models in an allegory. The issues it raises about innocence versus experience could surely be explored in a more compelling way or at least in a shorter book. I honestly wish I hadn't spent so many hours of my youth ploughing through it.
 Strikes a chord (sorry...) October 19, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Here is a book, almost fifty years old, that feels as fresh and urgent as the best contemporary fiction.
It is full of shocks. The first is the care and precision with which it is written; and the second is that it treats seriously - indeed profoundly - issues of faith, something from which recent novels, like society, tend to shy away.
The novel begins as a comedy of manners, centring upon young, flighty Dora Greenslade and her unpropitious marriage to an academic some years her senior. She is a young woman at sea in a society in a state of flux. Another shock of the novel is the perspicacity with which Murdoch locates and pre-empts the social and political changes that the Sixties will bring about. She is at once liberal in her empathy for different people - one hesitates to call them characters, so vividly do they leap from the page - whilst subjecting them to harsh scrutiny. Like those people in life whom we really know, Murdoch's characters are more real, more human and therefore more possible to love for our understanding of their virtues in spite and because of their faults.
Once located to Imber Court, a newly founded lay community that borders upon an abbey of nuns, the plot really begins to take hold. In some senses, Imber is Edenic, an earthly paradise; unfortunately, as we know, Paradise is rent asunder by earthly knowledge, specifically in the form of female sexuality. And thus another shock is how the novel moves from its slightly satirical gothic tone (think Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey) to very 'real' (by which I think I mean contemporary) concerns with love in its erotic and platonic (and competing) forms.
Some of the reviews posted here have taken issue with the book's "old-fashioned" or "outdated" views, particularly with regard to homosexuality. For me, another shock is the generosity and sympathy with which Murdoch draws the character of Michael, a man prematurely middle aged by dint of his thwarted (indeed, illegal) love. Whether she intended it or not, Murdoch's delineation of Michael appears to suggest that suppression of his true self thwarts his becoming a whole person. His erotic impulse is adolescent, and its object boys rather than men (first a 14-year-old, later an 18-year-old). Even today these boundaries are blurred; to be sympathetic to their impulse in 1958 seems to me quite remarkable.
By the close of the novel, erotic attraction has wreaked some devastating ends. And yet it doesn't feel heavy-handed or morally didactic. THE BELL shimmers with vivid pictures and imagery and emotion. I feel almost lost without this parallel world, and certainly less for having relinquished the intelligence, care and humanity with which words on the page conjured it and its inhabitants to life.
Who has all the answers? Whose fault is it? March 17, 2006
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
I was reading The Bell whilst touring a play to churches around the country...It was a strange coincidence that it was grappling the themes that I was also exploring each night on stage, what is sacrifice? Who has all the answers? Whose fault is it?Iris Murdoch has a gentle stillness to her pro's that allows you to view the characters in their unguarded, pure moments of non-communication. Her description takes you on a journey within the stream of consciousness of each character, she enables you to inhabit the body, the discomfort, the senuality. The reader experiences the physical and mental struggle of finding an answer, a meaning. Throughout The Bell the drama erupts when characters confront each others painfully constructed and often dysfunctional identities. The Bell brings together a seemingly random group of people, who are all looking for a meaning in their day to day existence, they struggle with wants and desires, hopes and dreams, leading them all to either hide from or do combat with their demons...Loves enigma is a huge concept and both the innocent and experienced fall deeply into this age old mystery.
A slow start, but worth the read August 23, 2005
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
Not one of the easiest books to start- it's just a description of Dora Greenfield's main history untill her arrival at Imber. But as the novel progresses, Murdoch slowly but surely develops each of the characters and there is a special magic about the rediscovery of the bell in the lake. I thought that the book would be quite wet, (not a joke, no!). Yet, Murdoch is not wimpy about what happens: a bastard of a husband, fraught hommosexual relationships, suicide, mental instibility- 'The Bell' is not a light read- I took it on holiday with me, and did not read it till I got home as I thought i'd struggle with it, but that was completely wrong. Murdoch's language is so that it carries you along smoothly from one scene to the next. A must read!
nice philosophy, shame about the dialogue August 17, 2005
3 out of 15 found this review helpful
There is no doubt that Murdoch confronts interesting and thought-provoking themes in The Bell, but the book has two fundamental problems. For one thing her prose, while perfectly grammatical and filled with philosophical insight, is dull, workaday and, well, prosaic. This is ironic given her taste for the transcendent. Secondly, this book has without equal some of the most stilted, unconvincing and plain pathetic dialogue it has been my misfortune to read. It is as dated and clunky as a penny-farthing bicycle. Some may argue that this is simply a sign of the book's age, but I don't buy it. Writers contemporaneous with Murdoch write dialogue which, while sometimes dated, is nevertheless believable and true (indeed writers from previous centuries seem less dated: try Dickens for one). The dialogue here is frequently embarrassing. I really feel that with The Bell it's a case of the emperor's new clothes. It's a pity because, given some real talent as a novel writer, this could have been something special.
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