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PARTISAN REVIEW
style is annoying in its Broadway familiarity, but at the beginning <me
does not feel this to be a serious blemish,
if
only because there is always
Holly, popping in and out of sight, to hold one's attention. The trouble
comes, as always with Capote, when he has to get his picture to move;
and then he rings in an Okie husband, a trip to Africa and other dime–
store exotica. The first part of the novel is both amusing and keen;
later, you might as well be in the movies.
American lady novelists can be threatening, especially
if
they put
you in their books, but Miss Iris Murdoch, born in Dublin and living
in Oxford, is something else : she is formidable. Her novel
The Bell,
with its complex structure and elaborate network of implication, is
meant to be formidable; so too are the ideas that visibly twist themselves
through the action, for Miss Murdoch has a philosophically trained mind.
The Bell
concerns a community of lay Anglicans, a motley of people
not quite fit for either world, the secular or monastic. There are obvious
possibilities for comedy in attacking a group of this sort, and Miss
Murdoch seizes upon some of them, notably in a series of deadpan ser–
mons that the characters deliver to each other.
Soon, however, it becomes clear that the order of reality to
be
encountered in this novel is several removes from any that might be
readily assimilated to common human experience, for it is the kind
of novel in which meaning is to emerge not so much from the fore–
ground action as from a design of suggestion traced behind the action.
What is finally to matter is not the living trait of this character or the
credibility of that scene, but a resultant of symbolic implication (in
behalf of which there is much to-do about sunken bells and ancient
legends). A pageant is unfolded in which every step is measured for
significance and behind which there flash a series of cognitive signals–
signals that tell us, impressively but predictably, that pride can nestle
in piety, that the world clings to those who would flee it, that the desire
for perfection is but a hair's breadth from sin.
As a piece of fiction
The Bell
is somber, languid and heavy from
overcontrivance. About midway through the book, however, Miss Mur–
doch displays a rare novelistic gift: she writes convincingly, without rant
or affectation, about love. One of her central figures is a not-too-bright
but very likable girl married to a domineering scholar; the fears and
yearnings of this driven creature mattered more to me than all of Miss
Murdoch's Wrought Complexities. Still more remarkable is the grave
and humane tenderness with which she presents the leader of the com–
munity, a man who suffers from a homosexual impulse he can neither
release nor suppress. Miss Murdoch persuades one to feel, not merely
