Review: The Bell

The story itself – typical of Murdoch – is a mixture of melodrama and zany comedy with a highly improbable plot. This jungle of a story is held together by the utterly beautiful definition of character and the depths Murdoch finds in perfectly ordinary people (and the weird ones too). These are all people damaged by life trying to find a way to make sense of existence.

The novel was written in the 1950s, a decade before the Parliamentary Act from Roy Jenkins’s Labour Government decriminalised gay sex. Michael Meade, a schoolteacher, has been disgraced after falling in love with Nick, a teenage student who enticed this timid man into further intimacy and then, after Michael kissed him, betrayed him to the school authorities.

When the novel opens, now unemployed Michael has inherited Imber Court, a derelict country estate separated by a lake from an enclosed order of contemplative nuns. Michael aims to convert Imber into a community of people who want to escape the rat race and find meaning in their lives, while making a modest living by running a market garden. He gathers a small group of friends and their friends, and each has his or her own agenda about how to achieve this utopia.

It’s a random and heterogeneous group led by Michael and James Tayper-Pace. James is a supremely fit and personable social worker, who had excelled in working with socially disaffected boys from London’s East End. His philosophy is simple: Christianity sets the rules, and our task is to obey. So, to James, homosexuality is not ‘wrong’ or ‘disgusting’ or whatever labels society chose to place on it: it is simply forbidden – end of story. Though James’s presence is asexual, it seems clear to me that James is gay and has successfully sworn himself to celibacy. James has ‘disciples’ but is probably not capable of being close to anyone.

But the community also includes Michael, the polar opposite of James. Though some years have passed, Michael still cannot free himself from his entanglement with Nick, and his feelings about Nick are strong and contradictory (he blames himself rather than Nick for his disgrace). Michael hopes to achieve salvation by rising out of himself into some plane of contemplative selflessness. He greatly admires the Abbey across the lake – in particular the Abbess, whom he looks to for guidance. But he doesn’t pick up on the Abbess’s suggestion that what he needs is not more contrition but more courage. Michael tries to do what James has done – to escape the human condition. But Michael’s ‘human condition’ dogs his every move. He can’t stop feeling guilty/ashamed about Nick; he is bogged down by the practical problems of running a market garden which will pay enough to avoid bankruptcy, and he struggles with the personality conflicts among the group. Michael is a thinking man and a feeling man. He is a muddle and could never hold to the simple spiritual regime which governs James Tayper-Pace. Michael’s problem is a deeply loving heart which is paralysed by his acceptance of the view of a cruel society that the deepest expression of this love is wrong - and would send him to prison.

Michael gets into even deeper water when a new arrival at Imber, Catherine Fawley, brings along her twin brother, the very same Nick of Michael’s shame. Nick is now a nihilistic drunk, his beauty lost, his earlier mischievous destructiveness (and self-destructiveness) now honed to a capacity to be very nasty.

Further new arrivals include Toby, an idealistic and innocent public school boy who wants to experience Imber before entering the priesthood, and also floppy but delightful Dora, the estranged wife of the possessive and domineering Paul, one of the Imber inhabitants, then studying early manuscripts at the Abbey.

It’s a wonderful story, and so full of detail about how people behave that this review could go on forever. But, as we’re an LGBT group, its focus is only on those aspects that are relevant to our interests.

Enough to say that Michael, seeing Toby in the headlights of his car after drinking rather a lot of cider, is so overwhelmed by the beauty of this otherworldly boy that he kisses him. Once again he is betrayed – not intentionally by Toby, but through the machinations of Nick, who leads Toby to confess the ‘crime’ to James Tayper-Pace. It ends with the dissolution of the community and Nick’s final act of revenge on Michael for not levelling with him – he uses the gun he’s been endlessly polishing by turning it on himself.

The reaction of our group was very mixed. Some were put off by the rag-bag switches from horror to comedy, some by the detailed physical descriptions, where the precise layout of Imber is given in the elaborate detail of a who-dun-it. Some found Michael’s endless self-analysis tedious, some thought the book overloaded with philosophy. Mixed reaction; two members of the group loved it (one particularly enjoyed the comedy and the aquatic nun); two found it puzzling but interesting and worthy of further exploration, and the others found it either infuriating or wordy. This reviewer is one of the two who loved it, and my recommendation is any other reading group is: do read it; but read it at least twice. And it’ll be even better on the third reading.