Much preferable to rely on one’s friends to buoy one up without making a fuss, usually with a little G&T, or possibly even a bit of evening Compline before bed. Intimate communication is far too perilous a venture. And for heavens sake keep one’s mouth shut. Opening with a very civilised adultery, leading to an even more civilised reconciliation for which the outgoing lover provides transportation to the railway station, there is no conflict which can’t be solved if one just has the patience to wait it out. The narrator would only spoil the narrative if she gave the game away introspection is not to be encouraged, “A belief in Original Sin should not lead us to probe the filth of our minds.” Irony is after all English group therapy. How could it be otherwise? But their Englishness is the necessarily unstated subject of the book. They are, of course, completely unaware of this. Their individual worries, however, don’t inhibit their confidence, material or spiritual, in being English.
People ‘get on’ as if on a trajectory with the defined and relatively narrow limits of Oxbridge graduates in a post-war world they find alien and confusing. They live in an existential routine that seems fixed they are stuck. The characters, mostly middle class professionals, each might have ‘issues’ but all are nevertheless cradled in the social solidity of a 1950’s bourgeois English culture that hopes against hope that it will remain 1939 forever. And it certainly creates a distinctive atmosphere, one so dense, thick, and humid in the Summer heat that it feels like green cotton wool - simultaneously inhibiting and cushioning movement.
Byatt in her introduction calls The Bell Murdoch’s first ‘English’ novel. One way to interpret Murdoch’s novel is as just such an interruption in the lives of its characters.Ī.S. Paradoxically: a routine that interrupts routine. I have come to believe that this slight disruption, this interruption, is precisely the bell’s function, intended or not. The midday call to the Angelus therefore is somewhat disconcerting for passers by who nervously check their watches. The sound of the bell does indeed create a definite atmosphere in the place as also does its timing since it rings, like its larger fellow at Christ Church College, according to solar time - about six minutes behind GMT.
A few years ago Blackfriars acquired a bell to call the friars to prayer. I work as tutor and librarian at Blackfriars Hall Oxford, the smallest and most medieval of the University of Oxford colleges and also a Dominican priory.
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