The Bell

Priase for Iris Murdoch and The Bell

"Murdoch was the rare kind of great, buoyant, confident writer who could drive the whole machine. She was as in touch with animal instincts as intellectual ones. The scope of her vision makes you feel, when you are close to her fiction, that you have glimpsed the sublime." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Funny, sad, and moving . . . The Bell is a novel about people who have ideas, people who think, people whose thoughts change their lives just as much as their impulses or their feelings do." --A. S. Byatt

"Like the best of Murdoch's novels, The Bell is about love and freedom, the interplay between the two and the destructive force of love-gone-wrong . . . her dialogues exist on a bright, self-aware plane . . . she's writing about the only things that matter--love, goodness, and how to be happy without hurting others." --The Independent

"In my late teens, A Severed Head and The Bell opened my eyes to another world. I took them as a rather elegant form of social realism, and I loved the new world they opened up to me." --Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement

"Wonderfully lively and poignant at the same time, tender with a sprightly social commentary." --The Guardian

"A new level of sophistication for Murdoch . . . effortless shifting between the grim and the humorous." --Richard Nicholls, The New York Times