I hadn’t realised I was quite so close to the end of Muriel Spark’s prolific output – having read The Mandelbaum Gate for the 1965 Club, I’ve now read 19 of her 22 novels. Yep, I like Spark a lot. And one of the things I tend to like about her is how much she packs into a short work. Many of her books are around 200 pages or fewer – whereas The Mandelbaum Gate is just a few pages shy of 400. How would I feel about one of her longest books?
Sometimes, instead of a letter to thank his hostess, Freddy Hamilton would compose a set of formal verses – rondeaux, redoubles, villanelles, rondels, or Sicilian octaves – to express his thanks neatly. It was part of his modest nature to do this. He always felt he had perhaps been boring during his stay, and it was one’s duty in life to be agreeable. Not so much at the time as afterwards, he felt it keenly on his conscience that he had said no word between the soup and the fish when the bright talk began; he felt at fault in retrospect of the cocktail hours when he had contributed nothing but the smile for which he had been renowned in his pram and, in the following fifty years, elsewhere.
That’s the opening paragraph, and we are immediately in Spark territory. Who else would have written that final bit? And who else would start off a novel with a quirky, irrelevant meandering about different forms of poetry. Freddy has something like diplomatic immunity, and crosses back and forth between Israel and Jordan – through the Mandelbaum gate – through which many others cannot pass. (By the way, the gate was named after a man who owned a nearby house, and so it sneaks into #ProjectNames by stealth.)
One of the people who probably should be more cautious about passing through the gate is Barbara Vaughan, a ‘half-Jewish Catholic’ who has followed her archaeologist fiancé out to the Holy Land. As a character points out, you can’t be half-Jewish – as her mother was Jewish, so was she – but Barbara is a keen Catholic who is awaiting confirmation about whether or not her fiancé’s first marriage can be annulled by the church.
And, indeed, something happens to her. In true Spark style, the moment is thrown into conversation casually, sometime after it has happened – before we dart back and forth in time and location. To add to the confusion, Freddy suffers temporary memory loss (perhaps because of sunstroke; perhaps because of something more sinister), and so when he is the ‘future’ section, he can’t remember what we have yet to learn in the ‘past’ section.
If you’ve read much Spark, you’ll be familiar with how she plays fast and loose with narrative conventions, and particularly the idea that things should be relayed in chronological order. In most of her novels, the narrator will throw in prolepsis that reveals, in a darting moment, something that might have been the denouement in the hands of another writer. Well, if she does that in a 200 page novel, she does it doubly so in a 400 page novel. I’m not going to lie – I was often quite confused, but I went with it.
Because what made The Mandelbaum Gate enjoyable is what makes most of her novels enjoyable – the peculiar characters, never quite behaving how you expect. The wry narrative voice that doesn’t trouble to make things too easy for the reader. And delightful turns of phrase. Always expect the unexpected.
It did feel to read something set in Israel and Jordan, and it is very concretely set in a particular time – 1961, to be precise, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which makes occasional appearances in the background. The cast of characters goes far beyond Freddy and Barbara, and I was particularly fond of Alexandros, a shopkeeper who has befriended Freddy.
As I said, I didn’t always know what was going on, and the disorientation is at least partly deliberate. And I don’t think The Mandelbaum Gate is quite the same success that her shorter novels can be – but I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I might. I thought Spark’s powers and peculiarities might be spread far too thinly over a longer book – but she sustained them in an admirable, if not quite as perfect, a way.
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