It Tolls, but for Whom?

THE BELL (342 pp.)--Iris Murdoch--Viking ($4.50).

This is conceivably the only novel ever written in which a boy tries to seduce a girl in a recumbent church bell. The would-be lovers fail, but that is because the clapper gives off a frightful clang that scares them both frigid. All of this will come as no surprise to fans of British Novelist Iris Murdoch (The Sandcastle), a philosophy-teaching Oxford don and an intellectual pixy whose wit ends in tears, whose sentences are transparent while her meanings are opaque.

The setting of The Bell is a lay community of semi-contemplatives, a kind of British Brook Farm attached to Imber Abbey, which houses an order of enclosed Anglican nuns. Imber is made up of a rather odd parcel of stuffed hairshirts. They include the son of an old military family, who seems to think of heaven as the last outpost of Empire, a mouse and lion husband-and-wife team, a saintly Good-Humored girl, frozen on the outside, soft on the inside. Finally there is the colony's leader, Michael Meade, a tense scoutmaster type who flounders in the hell of his homosexual impulses.

The colonists are joined by a group of visitors no less strange: a Byronic Oxford lad, a hopeless lush, a flighty wife named Dora, and her Prussianesque art-scholar husband. In a series of plot maneuvers as complicated as a gavotte, Author Murdoch sees to it that the insiders and the outsiders mix, mate and mangle each other. A lengthy subplot centers on the discovery and raising of the ancient abbey bell, legendarily consigned to the bottom of the lake as a result of a curse on an errant nun. The bell, of course, is a symbol for that clear-ringing innocence of which the colonists are self-deprived.

Author Murdoch mitigates the sordid in her story with a flow of wit that is civilized, unobtrusive and sometimes lethal. The novel achieves distinction in a series of brief sermons and reflections on the nature of God and the good that ought to make many an orthodox pulpit-pounding clergyman blush in envy. Yet the meaning of The Bell is muffled in final ambiguity, as the colony goes under in a tidal wave of newspaper scandal. With its strange but oddly exciting characters, its limpid prose, its sly wit and its ethical insight, The Bell unquestionably tolls, but it is never clear for whom and for what.

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