British and Irish Literature Archives - Page 9 of 14

The Letters of Joseph Conrad

I read Conrad’s letters because I find him a powerful if at times impenetrable artist. Unlike with other favourites, whose works may be complex but nevertheless generally manage to be at least somewhat clear to the reader, Conrad’s tales often are opaque in both language and content. I wanted to see whether his letters would help clarify matters. Another reason is that Conrad is one of the English language’s most interesting stylists. His tales are dark, gloomy, illuminated only by brief flashes of lightning. I thought that perhaps by going behind the scenes I might discover the system of cogs and wheels that made possible such great works as Nostromo and Heart of Darkness.

Over the course of five hundred pages we get to know Conrad reasonably well. The author, who spent the first half of his life at sea, has few surviving letters from that time, making him as much of a biographical mystery as any of his characters. Instead, we read the letters of Conrad the writer. These are at times touching, as when he writes to his wife, or funny, as when he writes of his critics (“There is even one abandoned creature who says I am a neo-platonist. What on earth is that?”), and at times merely dull. As with Dostoevsky, Conrad spent most of his life without much money and was always asking to borrow some from his friends. I also got almost as fed up of Conrad denying he was a writer of the sea as he got from being accused of it. And as for his gout…

The letters are interesting to people who want to get a feel for how Conrad created his own works. I particularly liked his comment on Lord Jim being but “a hash of episodes, little thumbnail sketches of fellows one has rubbed shoulders with and so on”. But they are more interesting for providing clear – for Conrad – statements about how he wrote and what he thought. Such things we might pick up from his work but when laid out here they may still be useful or at the very least interesting. It is around these areas which this piece will be structured, with the result that my comments will be limited. Conrad can speak, or rather write, for himself.

Life

Conrad’s view of the world is often described as pessimistic, even nihilistic. Fate is cruel, merciless, and incomprehensible. This comes across in his letters too, although it is more pronounced earlier on – at the time of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim – than when he was more established as a writer:

“Life knows us not and we do not know life – we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow”

A certain lack of faith in humankind is the keynote. He writes of injustice that the best way to deal with it is to accept it. We might say that he is realistic, rather than pessimistic. It is of no great consequence either way, for a man with a “deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world”.

Our problem, as he sees it, lies in our being conscious of the world. Unlike the brute beasts of the earth, humans are aware of the world’s terrifying valuelessness and suffer all the more for it: “What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.” This is a view shared by other pessimists like Thomas Ligotti or Arthur Schopenhauer.

How does Conrad fight off this gloom, what does he believe in? Certainly not Christianity – “Christianity is distasteful to me. I am not blind to its services but the absurd oriental fable from which it starts irritates me”. Instead, Conrad clings to traditional values as his ballast: “What I believe in most is responsibilities of conduct.” When spelled out, his values are spoiled by the sense that they are impossible things, lying beyond our reach:

“I respect courage, truth, fidelity, self-restraint and devotion to the ancient ideals of mankind; and am sorry that, like most men, I fail in the practice of these simple virtues.”

We learn of Conrad’s politics, which are fairly sound. He has sympathy for the Africans and other non-white peoples, even though his views would be old-fashioned today, and his views on slavery are a little tainted by his experience growing up in Poland-Ukraine. Mostly, his politics is marked by the same sense of tireless hopelessness as the rest of his views:

“Every cause is tainted: and you reject this one, espouse that other one as if one were evil and the other good while the same evil you hate is in both, but disguised in different words… What you want to reform are not institutions – it is human nature. … Not that I think mankind intrinsically bad. It is only silly and cowardly. Now You know that in cowardice is every evil – especially that cowardice so characteristic of our civilization”.

Work

So much for Conrad the man. Now we must get to Conrad the writer. This was what I enjoyed the most. Conrad comes across in these letters as a thoroughly human writer. He goes from hope (“labouring against an anxious tomorrow, under the stress of an uncertain future, I have been at times consoled, re-assured and uplifted by a finished page”) to despair (“…writing as I did with a constant, haunting fear of being lost in the midst of thickening untruth”), he struggles with English – his third language – but at no point does he give up completely.

And so, what is his advice to us humble novices?

On le mot juste:

“No word is adequate. The imagination of the reader should be left free to arouse his feeling.” Instead, what you want is “a picture of a mental state”.

On scepticism and truth:

“The fact is you want more scepticism at the very foundation of your work. Scepticism the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth – the way of art and salvation. In a book you should love the idea and be scrupulously faithful to your conception of life. There lies the honour of the writer, not in the fidelity to his personages.”

On the use of detail for establishing reality, and the truth we must hold to, consciously or not:

“A picture of life is saved from failure by the merciless vividness of detail. Like a dream it must be startling, undeniable, absurd, and appalling… Our captivity within the incomprehensible logic of accident is the only fact of the universe. From that reality flows deception and inspiration, error and faith, egoism and sacrifice, love and hate. That truth fearlessly faced becomes an austere and trusted friend, a companion of victory or a giver of peace. While our struggles to escape from it – either through drink or philanthropy; through a theory or through disbelief – make the comedy and the drama of life. To produce a work of art a man must either know or feel that truth – even without knowing it.”

In short, what he recommends is a fidelity to one’s convictions, to one’s vision of the world (though we should know it before we write):

“Everyone must walk in the light of his own heart’s gospel. No man’s light is good to any of his fellows. That’s my creed – from beginning to end. That’s my view of life – a view that rejects all formulas dogmas and principles of other people’s making. These are only a web of illusions. We are too varied. Another man’s truth is only a dismal lie to me.”

And his other useful advice is to be careful about the creation of mystery:

“Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion”. Explicitness concerns spelling things out, it does not mean that we must rely on deliberately confusing language. On the contrary, “in letters suggestiveness itself – a great quality – must be obtained by precise expression”. There are a number of times when Conrad advises his friends by doing some close reading on a few of their sentences, and changes them to make them less obvious, but much more powerful suggestive, by adding in a perfect turn of phrase.

Conclusion

However much we may struggle at times with Conrad’s own style, and I know I do, it comes from a particular worldview, and fits that view like a glove. The dark world is depicted with a dark and flickering style. And that is what, to me, makes Conrad so great. For it is a style that has only grown more effective over the years and it is the style that is best suited to our own day, with its ambiguity, its dashed hopes, and its great uncertainty.

For readers who have no sympathy for Conrad’s writing, and for those who do, I end on an amusing quote from him about Nostromo, which he had edited lightly over ten years after it had first been published:

“A paragraph of about ten lines has been taken bodily out, for the simple reason that reading it after ten or twelve years I could find no intelligible meaning in it.”

Who has not felt that with Conrad? But who has not, at the same time, felt that even in the vaguest, the most tenebrous of phrases, there lies a suggestion of the dark forces that, like it or not, bubble underneath our world? He’s alright, Conrad, really.

Two Postmodern novellas – A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects

A friend of mine is named Antonia, after A.S. Byatt, which was reason enough for me to want to read the author. If any writer can inspire someone so much that they are willing to name their child after them, then that author must be doing something right. I asked my Antonia where to begin with Byatt (thankfully, Antonia is a fan of her namesake) and she suggested I try this collection of two novellas, Angels and Insects. The two stories here, “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugial Angel” are both set in the Victorian period and engage with anxieties relating to the advance of science and its relation to the spirit.

“Morpho Eugenia” tells the story of how a young explorer’s experience of the Amazon and study of Darwin draw him into conflict with the patriarch of an English country home who does not want to see science undermine his religious beliefs. “The Conjugial Angel”, meanwhile, is the story of a group of spiritualists at a séance and the relationship between Emily Jesse, née Tennyson, and her dead fiancé, Arthur Hallam, who was immortalised through her brother Alfred’s poem “In Memoriam”.

Byatt is often named as a postmodernist English writer, and Angels and Insects provides ample evidence for that claim. These novellas are formally inventive, with scientific quotations, real characters, stories-within-stories, and plenty of poetry. At the same time, their settings and topics make them cousins to the German novellas of the nineteenth century, which like Angels and Insects were highly symbolic works, densely packed and interpretatively complex. Byatt’s intelligence is unmissable – she clearly did her reading, whether it be on mediums or on entomology. But is there a heart here, too? I propose to focus on the first story, “Morpho Eugenia”, to answer.

Morpho Eugenia

Morpho Eugenia is a clever and decidedly strange novella. It begins with William Adamson having returned to his benefactor’s home from an expedition to the Amazon, penniless after a shipwreck. Lord and Lady Alabaster have a great many children, and William finds himself falling in love with the eldest daughter, Eugenia. A marriage would be inappropriate, because of the differences in their stations, but William so impresses Lord Alabaster that eventually he grants him his daughter’s hand, and the two end up wedded together. At the house and surrounding estate, William works to sort through Lord Alabaster’s collection of scientific specimens – though the old man does not leave the house himself, still he has his passions and interests.

In addition, William helps Lord Alabaster with a book the latter is working on. Lord Alabaster is determined to prove the “argument by design” – that nature’s complexity proves God’s existence. William, a Darwinist, is to help Alabaster by challenging his ideas. William’s final role is to provide some education for the younger Alabaster children, and to this end he builds various exhibits in the house – anthills to be monitored, and the like. In this he is helped by the servants and by a young woman attached to the household, Matty Crompton.

Insects and People

At first “Morpho Eugenia” appears to set itself up to be a standard tragic love story, as so many novellas are – I thought of Storm’s “Aquis Submersus” and Hofmann’s “Sandman” when William wrote in his diary that fatal phrase “I shall die if I cannot have her”, referring to Eugenia. Instead, William marries Eugenia quite successfully, and they produce many children of their own over the course of the story. But at this point the story seems to take on another classic novella idea – that of madness. William has returned from a world untouched by civilization, as his fellow Englishmen might understand it, to a luxurious country estate. Yet from the first moments, when William takes part in a ball, he finds himself noting many similarities between the two worlds- from the elaborate dresses of Amazon women and young British ladies, to the dances themselves.

As time goes on, these comparisons become more and more forceful. Eugenia, whose name connects her to the butterfly, morpho eugenia (of the novella’s title) is described like an insect in her pregnancy: “his wife slept alone in her white nest, and swelled slowly, developing large breasts and a creamy second chin.” When Eugenia keeps producing twins, the comparison gets even stronger – she seems less and less human to him. Meanwhile, the aristocratic house and the anthills are also a site of obvious comparison. For the powerful figures of both places are served by countless servants, darting through dark corridors. William’s sanity seems constantly under threat of splitting in this world, and he longs for the Amazon he left behind.

But with that said, I think Byatt’s story hints at a madness that never truly arrives. William does not do anything in the novella, and his thoughts ultimately remain more or less under control. Perhaps the place where the insect-human comparison is most forceful is in the story’s treatment of the aristocracy, who are depicted as either indolent, or selfish, or outright cruel. Edgar Alabaster, who despises his new brother-in-law, is once found by William as he forces himself upon one of the servant girls. When William tries to stop him, Edgar declares that she – still a child – is “a nice little packet of flesh”. What appears to be William’s unstable psyche is used more effectively for social critique, suggesting that human beings may not be nearly so respectable as our insectoid brethren.

Religion and Science

William’s father, a butcher, believed in a God of hellfire and brimstone. William himself has little sympathy for religion as a result. Both stories in Angels and Insects are set after Charles Darwin’s work had revolutionised our understanding of the development of life on earth, and many of the key characters feel the impact of Darwin’s views upon the validity of their faith in God. Lord Alabaster has collected crate upon crate of animal and insectoid specimens from around the world, and he asks William to “make sense of it, lay it all out in some order or other” during his stay. His decision reflects a feeling that religion can no longer order the world, and that it must surrender that right to science. At the same time, Alabaster – who trained as a priest – is unable to relinquish his faith. Over the course of the novella, he makes spirited – but unbelievable – defences of God’s creation. At one point he suggests that love provides evidence of God’s existence. But William is ultimately only annoyed by these suggestions, based as they are not on reason at all.

There are many who refuse to believe in a world without God. When William raises the possibility to Alabaster the latter is aghast: “I cannot believe that, Mr Adamson. I cannot. It opens the path to a dark pit of horrors.” And “Morpho Eugenia”, with the constant presence of insects, reducing human beings into creepy-crawlies, certainly hints at what a horrific world such a godless world would be for some of its inhabitants. And yet at the same time, it falls into the clear anti-aristocratic undertone of the work. If there is no God, then why do the idle rich inhabit great country houses, while servants toil and suffer rape and abuse without a word of complaint. The Alabaster house becomes a microcosm of the world, and it shows how fragile that world is.

Formal Ingenuity

“Analogy is a slippery tool” says William at one point. “Men are not ants”. This is perhaps one of the key phrases of the novella. Another is “things are not what they seem”, which Matty Crompton offers. Byatt is great at confusing us by the sheer density of her reference and allusion. She quotes from the scientific treatises of the day freely alongside poetry, so that we feel she is hinting at much more than what she spells out. Men may not be ants, but “Morpho Eugenia” asks us to what extent a comparison is valid, and what kind of a comparison. Each metaphor is developed constantly, and always taken in new directions. My only complaint is that Byatt’s descriptions are far too rich, too colourful, so that she can belabour her ideas too heavily at times. The story would have been better, shorter, in other words.

To be told that things are not what they seem is to encourage us always to be on the lookout for new interpretations. Byatt includes a story, written by Matty Crompton, alongside scientific descriptions written by William himself. Each of these appears only tangentially related to the story, at least at first. But we know that something is there, and if we have the energy for it, certainly the story has a wondrous richness to it that will reward further thought and analysis.

The Heart of the Story

Yet I cannot say it came together perfectly. Leaving aside the overly flowery descriptions, and the occasionally clunky dialogue – characters often speak as though they are scientific treatises themselves – another problem in “Morpho Eugenia” is a certain absence of heart. William’s love for Eugenia turns out to be false, and this is understandable. There’s an easy moral in that about the fallibility of the heart and whirlwind romances. But the actual meat of the story has very little to get us emotionally invested. William’s madness never goes anywhere, meaning that we just have to read repeated unpleasant descriptions of women as egg-laying ants and vice versa without there being anything at stake. In the final ten pages of the story there is a turnaround, suddenly there is a character worth caring about and some action we might call heroic, but it is rather too late. There’s too much mush beforehand.

The Conjugial Angel

The second novella of Angels and Insects, “The Conjugial Angel”, is focused on a group performing seances to communicate with the world beyond. This kind of thing was popular in the latter part of the 19^th century – there’s a bit of it in Anna Karenina, for example – and was inspired by the works of the Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, who had apparently visited Heaven and had a guided tour. There are several characters at the séance, but the focus is on Emily Jesse, who was once Emily Tennyson, sister of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Emily was once engaged to Arthur Hallam, about whom Tennyson wrote his great long poem “In Memoriam”. That poem is quoted liberally throughout the text, which is nice because it’s a lovely piece of work.

During the séance Emily hopes to hear from Arthur. Though she has now married – and been married for decades – still she treasures the memory of her first love.

Representing the dead

I do not want to go into the details of “The Conjugial Angel” – it has an even weaker plot than “Morpho Eugenia”, and the themes do not come together quite so well. However, what it does do of interest is depict the dead. Authors regularly use real figures in their stories – after all, it is part of the appeal of historical fiction. But using dead people is another matter. Even today, in our comparatively godless world, there is something of a taboo on the dead – we try not to speak ill of them. Byatt brings Arthur Hallam back as a spirit to guide the automatic writing at the séance, and I felt more than a little uncomfortable by the whole idea. I began writing in my margins that this was hugely inappropriate and morally absurd.

But then Byatt gives our medium, alone at home, another vision of him. I shall not spoil the details but it is one of the most extraordinary sequences I have yet read in a work of fiction. There was a gruesome, terrifying intensity to it. I felt as though Byatt truly had brought the dead man, maggot-stained, back to life, and I was so impressed. For that reason alone this novella is worth reading.

Conclusion

German novellas, which I know well, are focused on individual characters much more than on the plot or society which form the centres of novels. The force of a strong character can sustain a novella-length work, but rarely manages to sustain something longer. The plot of a novella cannot be a situation, because these are better suited for short stories; while a drawn-out plot often needs the development of a novella to truly draw us in. For that reason, though novellas are jewel-encrusted – densely symbolic and full of things to think about – they work best when driven by a character. The character of William Adamson does not provide sufficient backbone in “Morpho Eugenia” to make us want to keep reading, however clever the work is. The really interesting character is hidden from view until near the end, at which point we’ve already decided whether we’ll read the story or not.

I anticipate criticism from those who’ve read the story that even this is part of Byatt’s argumentation, such as: the character cannot be more prominent, because the story is drawing our attention to certain oppressive structures, class and gender among others. Even so, a story must make us want to read it. “The Conjugial Angel”, meanwhile, is burdened by the focus Byatt places on the different characters. Emily Tennyson’s story is the most interesting, and with less of the trimmings and lengthy descriptions, it could have been even more effective.

Byatt is extremely intelligent, and I like her formal ingenuity. But my criticism actually has nothing to do with her postmodernism, and everything to do with the foundations of stories, such as they have existed for thousands of years. Her descriptions are too long, too florid; her characters don’t always speak like human beings; and the stories would be more effective, thematically and from a storytelling perspective, if they were a bit shorter and more focused.

Yet all the Angels and Insects collects two provocative and interesting examples of the novella genre, and it is a book well worth trying.

The “Free” and Fragile World of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell

Iris Murdoch is often considered one of the best English novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and The Bell is one of her best-known works. I bought it because I liked the idea, about a community of religious individuals living beside an order of nuns. These individuals are people who are disappointed with the world in one way or another, and yet are unable to withdraw from it completely, as have the nuns. (A little like your own blogger, in fact). Instead, they live in this fragile, liminal space, attempting to keep their lives in order. As newcomers arrive this space’s stability is put to the test. Rather than spoil the plot as I usually do, in this piece I will discuss the ways that the community crumbles from within, and comment on the question of freedom, as it applies to Murdoch’s characters.

Introduction to the Characters

At Imber Court, an old country house in Gloucestershire, there lives a lay religious community. It is lead by Michael, a closeted homosexual. Other members include James, his second-in-command, Nick, a man who once was dangerously close to Michael, and Catherine, Nick’s twin sister and an aspiring nun. The guests include Toby, a young man looking for a spiritual retreat before he starts at university, and a married couple, Dora and Paul. Paul is older, rich, and intellectual, while Dora is younger, cheerful, and trapped in a horrible marriage that she keeps running away from, unsuccessfully. Between all these people plays out a tragic drama, as past and present collide in the vulnerable space of Imber, which at first glance appears to offer a kind of isolated utopia, and yet in reality finds the world left behind much closer than at first anyone had assumed.

Shaky Foundations

Murdoch is good at showing the subtle ways that utopia fails to escape the old world. On the very first page of The Bell we are told that Dora comes from a “lower middle-class London family”, making us aware, unconsciously, that nobody is without background, even here. James and Michael, the leaders of the lay community, get on well not just because of their characters, but because both of them have “a certain clannish affinity” stemming from a shared upper middle-class background. Indeed, the utopia, where everyone lives in a rundown great country house and grows vegetables all day is only possible because someone owns that country house – Michael. Even as the community tries to emphasise equality – everyone addresses each other by their first names, for example – it is founded thanks to privilege, and within it a certain hierarchy still sees the well-bred and intelligent at the top.

Technology and Squirrels

Just as class undermines the community, so too do the differing conceptions of it that its members have. Michael thinks back to conversations with the Abbesshe had had before The Bell begins. She describes the people, “disturbed and hunted by God”, who can “neither live in the world nor out of it”. These people, who are looking for a way to make their “spiritual life most constantly grow and flourish”, are disappointed by the growing bureaucratised, technological world that was becoming ever more dominant in the years after the Second World War. They head to the lay community as an act of flight. It’s not clear what they want, so much as what they don’t want. For example, many of them see farming in much the same way as does Wendell Berry, aiming to use only horses and the simplest tools to provide for their own sustenance.

Michael, meanwhile, wants to purchase “a mechanical cultivator”. He doesn’t understand why they cannot make use of the good bits of the outside world – the technology – while avoiding the bad. For many of the others, the work loses its dignity when a machine is involved. Another argument breaks out of the squirrels and pigeons of the community. These and other pests have been eating the crops and fruits of the garden, and Nick and others have been shooting them. Long before tractors were invented, farmers defended their wealth from winged and furry intruders. But the community is divided yet again – Catherine does not want to see any of the animals getting hurt. Although they all want a bounteous garden in their utopia, nobody can agree on how to achieve it. They are united more than anything else by their desire to escape the world. Murdoch asks if that is truly enough.

Christianity – various interpretations

Murdoch was not a Christian, but she was, from what I gather, what we might term “spiritual” these days, and she has a lot of sympathy for the religion of the majority of the characters depicted in The Bell. At the same time, it is religion that must also bear part of the blame for the fragility of the world of the novel. Just as people retreat from the world for different reasons, so too do they believe completely differently in the same religion. This is exemplified in the two sermons recounted in the story, one by James and one by Michael. James’s sermon talks of the need to “live without any image of oneself” in order to achieve the good life. Personality, he thinks, gets in the way of goodness. James’s vision of the community is one of order and – for some, stifling – conformity.

Michael’s sermon, given later, essentially says the opposite. His speech, as introduced, begins just as James’s had, with the phrase “the chief requirement of the good life”. But Michael argues that the secret is that “one should have some conception of one’s capacities”. Instead of destroying personality, we must work within it, using it to better live according to God’s wishes. Michael’s view is influenced by his actions earlier in the novel, in particular by his guilt over his love for Toby and Nick. He convinces himself that God would not have made him the way he is without a purpose, and that in his love there is a great value, however wrong the love is.

Bells themselves help make clear to the reader the conflicting interpretations of Christianity that Michael and James offer. Each of them uses the image of the bell in their sermons, but reach a completely different result thereby. Photo by I, Randal.J. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Both sermons sound, at least to a layperson like myself, sufficiently Christian. And both I think have merit too – for anyone who has found the evil in themselves will inevitably oscillate between these two views about how to exorcise it, through the destruction of the personality that contains the evil, or through the transformation of that evil into good through force of personality. Yet these two sermons make it clear that Christianity, at least as most of us understand it, is full of contradictions. Dostoevsky, at this moment, would step up and say that that is the point. Only Christianity is capable of offering a way of life that can deal with human contradictions, thanks to its own contradictions – any other ideology will inevitably disappoint. However we look at it, though, within the context of The Bell religion has an ambivalent role, being another site where a supposedly united community divides.

Are Murdoch’s Characters Free?

I remember reading a comment from James Wood, a critic I like, that although Murdoch “again and again stresses that the creation of free and independent characters is the mark of a great novelist … her own characters never have this freedom”. There are some excellent things in The Bell, but I cannot help but agree with Wood’s assessment. Murdoch’s characters are intelligent, they have their own personalities, but they are not at all free. Not in the sense that they are bound by external forces, like class – that kind of unfreedom is de rigueur for a realist novelist. Nor are they unfree in the sense that Bakhtin thinks Tolstoy’s characters are unfree – that they all, consciously or not, reflect Tolstoy’s way of thinking and force the reader into it. Murdoch’s characters are unfree in the sense that they do not escape her.

In preparation for this piece I watched an interview with Murdoch that I enjoyed a great deal, but one thing that struck me was the way that she emphasised just how much planning goes into her novels. The whole book is planned in great detail, even on the level of chapters and dialogues, long before she begins to write. It is perfectly reasonable to plan things, but I think that in this lies the unfreedom of her characters. They always feel incapable of spontaneity, even if they are supposed to be spontaneous, because any spontaneous actions have been meticulously planned out already. Whatever freedom they have is structurally insincere, and we feel that, reading the book. Murdoch is hostile to things like the “machinery of sin and repentance” that govern the characters’ personalities, but she seems to have overlooked the machinery of control that her own writing places upon them.

Conclusion

That her characters feel unfree is not, however, as big a criticism as it might seem. There are fewer free characters in fiction than it seems at first glance. It is only when characters claim to be free – as they do here – but are not, that we have a problem. Murdoch’s planning does so much good for The Bell that I do not want to seem like I am criticising it. The work is extremely intelligent, at times funny, very well written, worthy of analysis, and – what is far more important anyway – worthy of thought. Whether or not the characters are ultimately free and real is secondary to this. It deals with these simple, but rather important questions – of how we should live, what we should believe, and how to be good and free – in such an effective manner that I do not mind its one, rather small, fault.

The Bell is a novel I can certainly recommend, from an author I know I will read more of.