lilyshanxu

This is what Iris Murdoch's earlier fiction was working towards -- a synthesis of the traditional and the revolutionary. Under the Net, her first, looked like an anti-novel, and The Flight from the Enchanter was highly systematized and somewhat artificial. The Sandcastle, despite its overlays of symbolism, read much more like a conventional novel. The Bell is thoroughly realistic and yet crammed with symbols which sit easily within the plot. The most potent of these is the bell of the title. This is named for the Archangel Gabriel and it is inscribed Ego Vox Sum Amoris; it lies drowned in a lake in the grounds of a convent, the legend being that it got there miraculously. It is the still centre of a complex of human problems, the chief of which is summed up in the character of Michael Meade, the founder of a lay religious community on the family estate, where the convent also is situated. Meade has suffered a conflict between his homosexual tendencies and his desire to become a priest; the community he has founded is intended to be a way out of the conflict, a compromise and a compensation, but he learns the truth of the maxim: "to leave the world is not to leave the temptations of the world." There are other characters, all faced with the need to probe the limits of personal morality, to ponder the best means of ordering one's life -- by abiding by essential rules or following the Under the Net way of existential living, so that one is ruled by "the situation itself". Dora and Toby, intruders into the community, are impelled to drag the bell out of the lake and then to ring it: it is the voice of love, but it is also the cast metal of self-realisation. It is more besides, since it is not in the nature of a poetic symbol to be capable of easy interpretation: there are levels of unconscious myth and magic to which it appeals. This is an intensely poetic novel and beautifully organized.

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Mannix looked up from his shoe and at the Colonel. "You're goddam right, Jack, we're going to make it," he said. "My company's going to make it if I have to drag in their bodies." There was a tone in his voice that Culver had never heard before.Suddenly the Colonel's flat voice broke through the stillness: "All right, Billy, let's saddle up."'"Tallion saddle up!" The Major's words were eager and shrill, became multiplied down the long mile. "Smoking lamp's out!" The blue cloud dissolved on the air, the gnats descended in a swarm and the voices passed on—Saddle up, saddle up—while the battalion rose to its feet, not all at once but in a steady gradual surge, like rows of corn snapping back erect after the passing of a wind. Mannix got to his feet, began to sideslip in a cloud of dust down the embankment toward his company directly below. It was at the head of the column, right behind the command group. Culver, moving himself now down the hill, heard Mannix's shout. It rang out in the dusk with deliberate authority, hoarse blunt command: "All right, H & S Company, saddle up, saddle up! You people get off your asses and straighten up!" Culver passed by him on his way to the command group: he stood surrounded by a cloud of gnats, hulking enormously above the company, hands balanced lightly on his hips, poised forward badgering the men like some obsessed, rakehell Civil War general before a battle: "All right, you people, we're gonna walk thirty-six miles tonight and I mean walk! First man I see drop out's gonna get police duty for two weeks, and that goes for everybody. You think I'm kidding you wait and see. There's gonna be trucks going in for those that can't make it but I don't want to see anyone from H & S Company climbing on! If an old man with as much flab as I've got can make it you people can too . . ." There was a note, almost, of desperation in his voice. Culver, passing along the line of bedraggled, mournful-looking men, so few of whom looked like fabled marines, heard the voice rise to a taut pitch close to frenzy; it was too loud, it worried Culver, and he wished to caution him: no longer just admonishing the men to a simple duty, it was the voice of a man wildly fanatic with one idea: to last. "I want to hear no bitching out of you people! Take it easy on the water. You get shinsplints or blisters you see the corps-man, don't come crying to me. When we get in I want to see all of you people . . ." Not because the hike was good or even sensible, Culver thought, but out of hope of triumph, like a chain-gang convict who endures a flogging without the slightest whimper, only to spite the flogger. Culver joined the command group, heard the Colonel say to the Major: "Looks like H & S Company's going to make it en masse, Billy." It was just as Culver feared, for although his words were pleasant enough, his face, regarding Mannix for a brief moment, had a look of narrow scrutiny, as if he, too, had detected in the Captain's tone that note of proud and willful submission, rebellion in reverse. But there was no emotion in his voice as he turned quickly, with a glance at his watch, and said, "Let's move out, Billy."They started out without delay. A jeep, its headlamps lit, preceded them. The Colonel, in the lead, abreast of the Major and just ahead of Culver, plunged off into the deep dust of the road. He walked with a slinky-hipped, athletic stride, head down between his shoulders and slightly forward, arms bent and moving methodically; nothing broke the rhythm of his steps—ruts in the road or the deeply grooved tire tracks—and Culver became quickly amazed, and rather appalled, at the pace he was setting. It was the pace of a trained hiker—determined, unhesitant, much closer to a trot now than a walk—and only a few minutes passed before Culver was gasping for breath. Sand lay thick in the road, hindering a natural step. They had not gone more than a couple of hundred yards; already he felt sweat trickling down his forehead and beneath his arms. For a moment fear surged up in him unnaturally, and a crazy panic. He had been afraid of the march before, but his fear had been abstract and hazy; now so quickly fatigued, in what seemed a matter of seconds, he felt surely (as Mannix had predicted) that he'd be unable to last the first hour. A panicky wash of blood came to his face and he struggled for breath, wanting to cry out—it passed. His mind groped for reason and the terror receded: once he adjusted to the shock of this pace, he realized, he'd be all right. Then the panic went away; as it did so, he found himself breathing easier, freed of that irrational fright. The Colonel pushed ahead in front of him with the absolute mechanical confidence of a wound-up, strutting tin soldier on a table top. Culver, panting a bit, heard his voice, as calm and unwinded as if he were sitting at a desk somewhere, addressed to the Major: "We shoved off at nine on the dot, Billy. We should make the main road at ten and have a break." "Yes, sir," he heard the Major say, "we'll be ahead of the game." Culver made a calculation then; by the operations map, which he knew so well, that was three and a half miles—a mile farther than the regulation distance for an hour's march. It was, indeed, like running. Pushing on through the sand, he felt a wave of hopelessness so giddy and so incomprehensible that it was almost like exhilaration —and he heard a noise—half-chuckle, half-groan—escape between his labored breaths. Three and a half miles: the distance from Greenwich Village almost to Harlem. In his mind he measured that giddy parade of city blocks, an exhausting voyage even on wheels. It was like twisting a knife in his side but he went on with the mental yardstick—to imagine himself plodding that stretch up the sandless, comfortably receptive pavements of Fifth Avenue, past Fourteenth Street and the bleak vistas of the Twenties and the Thirties, hurrying onward north by the Library, twenty blocks more to the Plaza, and pressing still onward along the green acres of the Park . . . his thoughts recoiled. Three and a half miles. In an hour. With more than thirty-two still to go. A vision of Mannix came swimming back; Culver stumbled along after the dauntless Colonel, thinking, Christ on a crutch.