Most people are thicketed by their culture (to use a Murdochian word) to the extent that it bursts out of them without realising it. When I read Australian novels from the 1950s, I get the characters in a way that I don't entirely get these ones. I understand what is being said, and what the characters are feeling, but at the same time I really, really don't. So when I read "The Bell", sixty years after its publication, I am struck by how familiar and yet eerily unfamiliar everyone feels. I am not English, but I relate to that culture more than to any other (aside from my own Australian one). At the time of writing this, it has been 196 years since my ancestors left South West England to push out to Australia, and this sense of separation from the motherland is a strange, raspberry-coloured strain of my personality. There is something about Iris Murdoch's novels that haunts me in a rather profound way.
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