Book of a lifetime: The Bell by Iris Murdoch

From The Independent archive: Patrick Gale revisits one of the great writer’s best novels – an exploration of love and freedom, the interplay between the two and the destructive force of love gone wrong

Iris Murdoch wrote novels about the only things that matter – love, goodness and how to be happy without hurting others (The Independent)

The respectable titles to give would be Middlemarch or Howards End. Both pulled me up short in my late teens with their ability to make me care deeply about the emotional lives of unimportant people. Until then I’d thought novels were purely for bravura storytelling. I hadn’t noticed that, at their best, they involve a curious chain reaction of empathy linking reader, writer and character which leaves the reader not simply moved, but somehow altered. But I fear having to dissect and write essays about Eliot and Forster made them less an influence on me than they might have been.

The honest answer is probably The Bell by Iris Murdoch. I was horrified by meeting Dame Iris at a student dining society and having to admit (to her kind relief) that I had read nothing she’d written. I read this first, at her suggestion, then was hooked to the extent of reading no other author for pleasure for the next two years. That had the effect of blurring many of her plots but this one continues to stand out, perhaps because it is so simple.

A young, errant wife rejoins her humourless husband in a lay community, set up on the periphery of a closed order of nuns by an ill-assorted group of enthusiasts. As if re-enacting the subversion of a young nun said to have once brought a curse upon the abbey by taking a lover, Dora acts as a catalyst on the others. Cracks open in the community’s ideals before she leaves her husband for good.