The Bell Read Free Page A

Severed Head , A Word Child , The Black Prince —and the more usual ones, where a narrative voice sees the world of the novel through many consciousnesses, as The Bell is lived through the minds of Michael, Dora and Toby, whilst we never “see into” Paul, or Nick, or Catherine, who remain, to use a Murdochian word, “opaque”. One of Murdoch’s abiding lessons was the difficulty and necessity of imagining other people, with centres of consciousness as real as our own, and different. This lesson is dramatised differently through the eyes of a first-person narrator failing to learn it, from when it is seen through a spread-out cast of human imaginations. There are differences too, both in the story that can be told, and in the craft of inventing characters, between a book with three actors, and one with fifteen or twenty. You have to say less if there are more—the skill is in suggestion and detail. The large cast, the repetitions and differences of behaviour, are essential both to Murdoch’s moral world and to her forms of realism. She said frequently that she liked to imagine retelling her stories from the point of view of the minor characters, and it is a tribute to her—especially when one thinks how few words, how few paragraphs she had to make up her minor characters in—that it is possible to imagine how this could be done. Even Mrs Mark, in The Bell , a deliciously recognisable type of the uncharitable charitable person, has a personal history, a marriage, a mystery.
    As Murdoch grew bolder, she moved in one sense further and further from the “probable” world of conventional realism into a world of games, of chance, of a human dance. Art, she used to say, was “adventure stories” and she let go of her puritanical mistrust of the fabulous, having understood how human truths are contained in the unreal patterns of Shakespearean comedy and romance, as well as in high tragedy. The novel, she used to say, is essentially a comic form—tragedy can be experienced communally in drama, but the private world of the novel is a mixed form, an incomplete form. She would say gleefully to me that she had come to see that you could put anything and everything into a novel, you were constrained only by length and paper pages. It could be argued that her late baggy monsters were defeated by this high ambition and by the problem of length.
    Postmodernism had rediscovered both the delight of storytelling and also the Murdochian sense that anything goes, if it works. It has made wonderful characters, but on the whole characters whose selves, identities or souls are not interesting, either to themselves or to their readers. The “now so unfashionable naturalistic idea of character” is still, though not in the same way or for the same reasons, unfashionable. (The interest is elsewhere. That is another essay.) So that, rereading The Bell , or later tough moral novels like A Fairly Honourable Defeat , I still have my original sense that my sympathy for the people and their predicaments, silly or terrible, is both natural and illegitimate. Iris used to say that The Bell was a “lucky” novel, in the sense that everything in it had come together, had worked. There is a harmony, a balance, the ideas are both powerful and incarnate. At the end Michael is left feeling that the Mass exists, and he exists beside it. It is “not consoling, not uplifting, but in some way factual”. It is a religious thing, in a world where “there is a God but I do not believe in him”. It is within, and outside, the pattern of the novel form. There are things novels cannot contain, but can point to. In that sense this elegant novel is essentially incomplete, as its author understood.
    A. S. BYATT
1999

TO JOHN SIMOPOULOS

CHAPTER 1
    DORA GREENFIELD LEFT HER HUSBAND because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason. The absent