The Bell - Likewise Book Reviews

"An ill-assorted group of misfits form a lay community at an abbey of cloistered nuns. What could go wrong? You've got the closeted and highly conflicted leader Michael, and his hearty, cheerfully racist and misogynistic sparring partner James. There's featherbrained Dora, whose marriage to stick-up-his-ass bully Paul is on the rocks. There's sweet natured Toby, a nice young man looking for spiritual adventure before starting university. Annnddd...the mysterious twins: religious hysteric Catherine and her moody, misanthropic brother Nick, who seems to have it in for the community in general but Michael in particular. Add in a loopy prophecy about a lost bell whose ringing Portends A Death and you have the makings of either great drama or Pythonesque farce.<br/><br/>Somewhat to my surprise, Murdoch manages to hold it all together and generate genuine sympathy and emotion for her oddball characters. Her view of spirituality is ambivalent; she mocks excesses of piety, ("Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed". p 75) yet recognizes the value of seeking fulfillment outside of material pleasures and success. Although she caricatures the community seekers, the nuns are clear-eyed, sensible women, with far more insight into human weakness than their more worldly guests.<br/><br/>Murdoch's final verdict can be best be summed up by this lovely passage:<br/><br/> "To know clearly what you surrender, what you gain, and to have no regrets; to revisit without envy the scenes of a surrendered joy, and to taste it ephemerally once more, with a delight undimmed by the knowledge that it is momentary; that is happiness, that surely is freedom". p 138"