![]() ![]() ![]() These sisters are awaiting a new bell for their tower which, according to a local legend, has been empty since a 12 th-century bell flew out of the tower and into the small lake outside the walls after a nun broke her vows with a lover. The Bell tells the story of several weeks in the life of Imber Court, a small Anglican lay community living in an old country house in southwest England, next to Imber Abbey, a convent of cloistered Benedictine nuns. In the actions and interior monologues of her characters, Murdoch examines holiness and sin not as independent, mutually exclusive objects, like an on-off switch, but as the results of myriad, complex and obscure human decisions, often with unintended consequences. In today’s intellectual universe, belief, particularly religious belief, isn’t taken seriously.īut, in The Bell, Murdoch deals with these phenomena with respect, affection, puzzlement and compassion. I suspect that no modern novelist would be able to take up such material without an edge of irony or a framework of skepticism. It is difficult to imagine a novel like this being written today. ![]() The Bell by Iris Murdoch, published in 1958, is something of a time capsule. ![]()
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