6/1/2023 0 Comments The bell iris![]() ![]() Needless to say, things don’t go to plan, with consequences that are by turns slapstick and deadly serious. ![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. 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”. ![]()
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