Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Books to give you hope / The Bell by Iris Murdoch

Books to give you hope: The Bell by Iris Murdoch

The 1958 tale of lost souls in a lay community has an almost Wodehousian charm – and offers the reader some uplifting lessons in love

Charlotte Jones
Thu 11 August 2016

"Always forward, never back"
Iris Murdoch
Pothograph by Sara Lee

What relevance does a 1958 novel about a lay community sheltering in the grounds of a country estate hold for our precarious, post-Brexit Britain? Where is the optimism in a writer notorious for dark and weighty philosophic tomes?

The Bell, Iris Murdoch’s fourth novel, is less stylised than her debut Under the Net, which is an entertaining surrealist jaunt inspired by Samuel Beckett and Raymond Queneau. The plot is both comical and moving, and it’s a book that everyone who’s ever been tempted to throw in the towel and become a hermit should read. Throughout the 50s and 60s, Murdoch engaged in a covert quarrel with the angst, solipsism and despair of continental existentialism, and her response still has much to say to our divided nation.

Ex-teacher Michael Meade sets up a secular-religious enclave at his house, Imber Court in Gloucestershire, whose assorted inhabitants seek a “refuge from modernity”, which “with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure” offers “no home to these unhappy souls”. The book depicts the portentous arrival of two visitors: a schoolboy, Toby, “greatly attracted by the idea of living and working, for a while at least, with a group of holy people who had given up the world”; and Dora, the errant wife of a scholar who is returning penitently but reluctantly to her stultifying marriage. Imber is in turn set against a convent of Benedictine nuns across the lake, a “buffer state” between the abbey and the real world in which Murdoch stages a clash of ideals: religious yearning, sexual passion, and the role of spirituality in a materialist era.

I should first say that, despite the grand subjects at issue, the novel’s tone is not at all dry or didactic – it is, on the contrary, wonderfully lively and poignant at the same time, tender with a sprightly social comedy reminiscent of PG Wodehouse and Barbara Pym. Toby finds the lost medieval abbey bell while diving in the lake, where it was supposedly cast centuries earlier as a curse after a nun had an affair with a man; Dora suggests they secretly swap it for the abbey’s new bell, due to be delivered shortly, as a lark. Needless to say, things don’t go to plan, with consequences that are by turns slapstick and deadly serious.

For all its bucolic charm, The Bell is not simplistic escapism, the corrosive effect of which on human kindness Murdoch so viscerally dissects in other novels. Everyone at Imber is trying to figure out how to lead a meaningful life amid the disintegrating ethical certainties of a secular society – “learning to be good”, in the words of Charles Arrowby, the antihero of The Sea, the Sea, though they’re an infinitely nicer bunch than anyone in Murdoch’s rebarbative Booker prize-winning novel. The Bell’s secular cenobites are not embodiments of abstract absolutes, as Murdoch’s characters can sometimes seem in later novels – each carries their own individual burdens, trying to carve out a sense of goodness in the world that might console and redeem their guilty consciences.

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Murdoch wrote in an essay entitled The Sublime and the Good. “Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.” The Bell proffers a profound faith not just in the redemptive potential of people, but in art too. Dora’s triumph is that she twice – once examining the intricate carvings on the medieval bell and once opposite a Gainsborough painting in the National Gallery – opens herself up to works of art and discovers a moral focal point outside herself:

[…] since, somewhere, something good existed, it might be that her problems would be solved after all. There was a connexion; obscurely she felt, without yet understanding it, she must hang onto that idea: there was a connexion. She bought a sandwich and took a taxi back to Paddington.

It’s a moment of profound insight and typically Murdochian bathos. People aren’t capable of transcendence most of the time, after all: we bumble along, doing the best we can. Real utopia, Murdoch suggests, exists not in a primitive isolationist lifestyle inspired by William Morris, but in the ongoing struggle to be as virtuous as we can and “find the connexion”, the always incomplete and ultimately impossible attempt to generate an imaginative sympathy with others that has little to do with any specific form of faith but comes simply from love.

The lay community doesn’t survive the scandal of the bell’s resurrection but the abbey remains at the novel’s end – its legacy secured, in fact, by Michael’s leasing of the house and its grounds to the nuns indefinitely. The message of The Bell is by no means a sceptically dismissive “utopia can’t exist”. (As Dora’s lover, the reporter Noel Spens, quips, if nothing else “potty communities are good for a feature”, or indeed fiction.) But Murdoch nevertheless insists that “those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed”.

Hope, in other words, springs from a combination of engagement and generosity; in doing, as she wrote elsewhere, “good ‘for nothing’”. The abbess counsels Michael in his moment of crisis: “Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.” And after all, she says, “we can only learn to love by loving”. Practice makes perfect.

THE GUARDIAN