The Bell Read Free

withdraws the world fragments, and various angels, good and evil, are all-powerful. It can be seen, in retrospect, that the final enclosure of Imber in the world of the Abbey prefigures some such separation.
    â€œReal people are destructive of myth, contingency is destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination. Think of the Russians, those great masters of the contingent. Too much contingency, of course, may turn art into journalism. But since reality is incomplete art must not be afraid of incompleteness. Literature must always represent a battle between real people and images; and what it requires now is a much stronger and more complex conception of the former.”
    This is the rousing penultimate paragraph of “Against Dryness”, and perhaps in retrospect its distinctions are almost too powerful, too seductive. Iris Murdoch’s critics have steadily berated her for not fulfilling her own prescriptions. She wrote of “the consolations of form” as though those were self-evidently inferior to some tough, unformed “realism” which would remain true to the “incomplete”. But in fact, a precise and delicate reader of her novels, or anyone else’s, does not experience any such brute opposition. There is a danger in Murdoch’s powerful formulations that her ideas can become associated with a pervasive modern myth that has also damaged both fiction and criticism—the myth of the primacy of the “random”. Too many novels eschew plot, storytelling, shapeliness, and wit in pursuit of this “authentic” sense of the random and the open-ended. Ian McEwan’s splendid Enduring Love was misunderstood by both reviewers and the Booker jury because it appeared to be “contrived”, plotted, formally too tight—although it was about a form of madness that sees fate and religious and erotic purpose where none is, and then creates it. He had found the appropriate form for the driven nature of his subject-matter. I think, without ceasing to respond to Murdoch’s call for both character and contingency, we can admire the formal variety of her fictions, including the artifice. If one looks with the microscope of a novelist learning her trade at any novel, from War and Peace to Malone Dies , from La Rabouilleuse to The Castle , concentration on precise things like the contents of a description, the number of metaphors, the number of characters in a scene, a chapter, the whole work, on the narrative transitions and what has been suggested but omitted give a more complex picture than any simple contrast between the realistic and the mythic, the fantastic, or the formally controlled. There is a general impression, not inaccurate, of a “world” of the Murdoch novel, with agitated hurried dialogue, discussion of moral ideas (sometimes in stressed italics), unexpected problems with machines or near-drownings, dogs and other creatures who are part of the texture of emotion, a plethora of accidents, mysteries ... and bright sensuous colours, and described rooms and significant objects, milk bottles or works of art. But technically they differ more than this ease of recognition may suggest.
    There are those, including the first two, the Irish-Gothic-Platonic religious fantasy of The Unicorn , and the Nietzchean fable of The Time of the Angels , where the symbolic nature of the world constructs a fabulous story in which, nevertheless, the people are mortal beings, not figments. There are many varieties of realism— A Severed Head combines a Wildean or Shavian drawing-room dance with a wicked anthropological undertow, whilst An Unofficial Rose and The Nice and the Good create space and leisure in their telling, are “English” like Jane Austen crossed with Margery Allingham. There are differences, which can be pursued with technical delight, sentence by sentence, between those novels which have a first-person narrator—all male— A