Spark

It’s been so long since I wrote a proper review that I’m wondering whether or not I can still do it… I don’t know about other bloggers (I would be interested to know, actually) but it usually takes me an hour or more to write a full-length book review on here. And whilst I love doing it, I do seem to come to my laptop most evenings too tired to do anything that complex! So, if this turns into a series of zzzzzzzz somewhere in the middle, you’ll know why. Still, I am always amazed, flattered, and delighted that anybody would want to read my musings on the books I read – so thank you in advance!

In fact, that’s as much as I managed to write last week, before getting too sleepy and going to bed. I didn’t even get as far as writing the title of the novel – which is Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959). Congratulations to Terri for correctly working out the book from my clues.

Giving Muriel Spark a second chance is one of the best results of blog-reading, for me. The enthusiasm of Simon S and Claire led me back to Spark, after finding a couple of her novels a bit underwhelming six or so years ago – and, as regular readers will know, I now adore her. Over the past couple of years I’ve read The Driver’s Seat, Loitering With Intent, and Not to Disturb – and I have plenty on my tbr piles. I fancied seeing what my book group in Oxford would think of Muriel Spark, and so picked one almost at random because I liked the title. Memento Mori it was.

Despite coming quite early in her career, when Spark was only just over 40 years old, the novel concerns almost exclusively old people. Many of these live on a ward, where their different classes and personalities are swept away into being termed ‘Granny Duncan’, ‘Granny Barnacle’, ‘Granny Trotsky’ etc. But others amongst the sizable cast of characters still live in their homes – notably Dame Lettie Colston, her philandering brother Godfrey, and his wife Charmian, once a famed novelist and now suffering Alzheimer’s. These three are all heading towards their three-score-and-ten. In the first few pages, Lettie is visiting her sister-in-law, and their choppy dialogue reveals both the extent of Charmian’s declining faculties, and the irreverent but grounded approach Spark takes.

“Did you have a nice evening at the pictures, Taylor?” said Charmian.

“I am not Taylor,” said Dame Lettie, “and in any case, you always called Taylor Jean during her last twenty or so years in your service.”

Mrs. Anthony, their daily housekeeper, brought in the milky coffee and placed it on the breakfast table.

“Did you have a nice evening at the pictures, Taylor?” Charmian asked her.

“Yes, thanks, Mrs. Colston,” said the housekeeper.

“Mrs. Anthony is not Taylor,” said Lettie. “There is no one by the name of Taylor here. And anyway you used to call her Jean latterly. It was only when you were a girl that you called Taylor Taylor. And, in any event, Mrs. Anthony is not Taylor.”

Godfrey came in. He kissed Charmian. She said, “Good morning, Eric.”

“He is not Eric,” said Dame Lettie.

What makes me love Spark – and, indeed, what made me underestimate her six years ago – is her style. It is understated, so that a fast read through reveals little of its richness – Spark can even feel a bit bland at that pace. But once I’d stopped and begun to appreciate her writing, I realised how brilliant it was. Unsentimental, a little discordant, wry, ironic, and ever so slightly surreal. The first words of chapter five illustrated what I mean: ‘Mrs. Anthony knew instinctively that Mrs. Pettigrew was a kindly woman. Her instinct was wrong.’ Spark keeps the reader of his/her toes – conventional emotions or responses are dangled before the reader’s eyes, then turned on their head. We had an interesting discussion at book group about whether or not Spark’s style was funny. I suppose it isn’t. Certainly not in the way that Wodehouse is, or Stella Gibbons is, or Austen can be. But it’s an experience – a tone which diverts and engages and draws me in.

But I have yet to address the central momentum of the novel. On the opening page, Dame Lettie receives an anonymous phone call; a voice simply saying ‘Remember you must die.’ In fact, it is the ninth time she has had this call. But she is not the only victim – increasing numbers of people get the same phone call, with the same words (even if they cannot agree on the voice). Everyone from Charmian to the Inspector investigating the case receives the same message – each responding to it in different ways. Some are scared, some indignant. Mrs. Pettigrew (involved in a very Spark-ian blackmail plot) simply wipes it from her mind. Charmian gives the best response: “Oh, as to that, for the past thirty years and more I have thought of it from time to time. My memory is failing in certain respects. I am gone eighty-six. But somehow I do not forget my death, whenever that will be.” The response of the anonymous caller? “Delighted to hear it. Goodbye for now.”

If this were an Agatha Christie novel, then the Inspector would gradually eliminate characters from suspicion, and we’d witness an elaborate denouement, discovering that the least likely person had actually done it because they were the twin sister of someone who everyone thought had died decades ago, etc. etc. Whilst I love Dame Agatha, I’ve now enough experience with Dame Muriel to suspect it wouldn’t work quite like that. I shan’t spoil the surprise, but suffice to say that the outcome is unmistakably Spark-like.

There are any number of subplots in this slim novel, and dozens of characters. Memento Mori, whilst excellent, isn’t quite as accomplished as some of the other, later books I’ve read by Spark – and I agree with the original New York Times reviewer that she could have achieved more had she included less. Occasionally I had to flick through the pages to work out which character was which. But there are a central few (the ones I have already mentioned) who are striking and memorable – with starkly human qualities coming through the veneer of quirkiness.

I don’t think I’d recommend Memento Mori as a starting point for somebody wanting to try Spark – it might just be a bit overwhelming. Having said that, several people at my book group were reading Spark for the first time, and wanted to read more. I’d still put Loitering With Intent into the hands of anyone eager to sample Dame Muriel – but Memento Mori, for the Spark fan, is a wonderful slice of the bizarre and acerbic. It is not quite unsettling, but it certainly isn’t cosy. There is humour, but mostly there is the delight of being carried along by an author who is entirely in control of her tone, with never a misplaced word or errant sentence. Perhaps, were I fifty years older, I would also embrace Spark’s profundity – but, for now, I’m going to place it back on the shelf, anticipating picking it up again in a few decades’ time. I rather suspect it will have changed a lot.

Laura, who joined my book group this month, later emailed a link to a really good article by David Lodge on Memento Mori, which I recommend you read – here it is. If I haven’t convinced you, then I think Lodge might.

32. Loitering With Intent – Muriel Spark

I do love the blogosphere… all the bloggers and blog-readers, and all the talk of books going on all around the place. I am probably a little hypocritical, in that relatively few of the books I read come from blogger recommendations. So much of my reading time is taken up with book group choices and the occasional review copy (not to mention, of course, all the books I have to read for my studies) that when I can be self-indulgent and simply pick something off the shelf, nine times out of ten it’ll be something I’ve been saving for years, or know that I’ll like. If I read a great review, quite often I’ll buy the book or pop it on a bit of paper somewhere, but it’s not all that often that I’ll have the reading space for it to swoop to the top of the pile. Bloggers – you’re setting me up for my retirement. I just need the career bit in between.

Which makes me realise that I should find some more hours in the day, to fit in all your fab suggestions. If it weren’t for the blogosphere, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with Muriel Spark again. I’d read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means, and not been bowled over by either of them. It was a couple of bloggers who made me pick up The Driver’s Seat, and I loved it. I reviewed that novella here, and it led to a discussion of ‘Third Time Lucky‘ – when the third book you read by an author is the one to grab you.

Well, if third time was lucky, fourth has unearthed a gold mine, if that mixing of metaphors works. When I wrote about The Driver’s Seat I asked which Spark I should read next, and ‘N’ (gosh, isn’t that mysterious?) recommended Loitering With Intent. I have a feeling someone else did, maybe even in Real Life – and so I took myself off to the library and borrowed it. The return date was hastening, and I thought I’d take it with me to Devon.

All of which is a lengthy introduction to saying that Loitering With Intent (1981) is possibly my favourite novel read this year, and certainly proves to me that Spark is very much my cup of tea. (By the by, I don’t think I like any of the covers I’ve seen, so I’ve just gone with the one I read. Spark deserves a nice cover designer! I hope someone’s listening…) Maybe it’s too well known to get onto my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About, but I won’t take the risk of not broadcasting how good it is…

Loitering With Intent somehow manages to be an incredibly clever novel, without being in the least self-congratulatory or off-putting. Even more dangerous, Spark’s novel is narrated by a novelist, and largely concerns the writing of a novel – so many pitfalls to avoid, and so much potential pretension – all of which Spark skirts around without even a hint of self-importance. Fleur Talbot is writing her first novel, Warrender Chase, and it is occupying all the time that she isn’t at work, and quite a lot of her thoughts when she is at work. Her job is as a secretary to Sir Quentin Oliver and his Autobiographical Association – he has gathered luminaries and ‘characters’ to write their memoirs, which he will seal in a vault for seventy years.

Fleur is not dissimilar from her near-namesake Flora in Cold Comfort Farm, inasmuch as she sits back and records the eccentrics and strange creatures around her. But where Gibbons’ Flora documented – she got involved with their lives no end, of course, but never really seemed unduly affected by their idiosyncrasies – Fleur isn’t so invulnerable to the bizarre behaviour by which she is surrounded. It rather seems to rub off on her. She grows varyingly attached to various members of the Autobiographical Association, such as snob and scented Lady ‘Bucks’ Bernice Gilbert, and young(ish) Maisie Young, who has one permanently disabled leg and is fixated upon the Cosmos and ‘how Being is Becoming’. Above all, Flora develops a fondness for Quentin’s mother Edwina – a mad, lively, incontinent, and be-pearled old lady bursting with character, but somehow more ‘real’ than many old-women-with-gusto who crop up in fiction. In amongst these weave a whole cast of wonderful creations – focally, Dottie: the wife of Flora’s lover. Flora is an odd sort of Catholic…

As I have said, Flora is not invulnerable to the group’s eccentricity – and we’re never quite sure how far we can trust her narrative voice, or to what extent we are supposed to identify with it. Which, since Fleur is an authoress, is interesting. Throughout the novel the reader gets glimpses of a treatise or two on novel-writing – how much of it is Spark’s own view? Does Loitering With Intent have, hidden within it, the rudiments for a how-to of creative writing? Impossible to judge… but here are three snippets which I enjoyed pondering:

But since then I’ve come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little.

** (I changed “beautifully” to “very well” before sending the book to the publisher. I had probably been reading too much Henry James at that time, and “beautifully” was much too much.)
**
I knew I wasn’t helping the readers to know whose side they were supposed to be on. I simply felt compelled to go on with my story without indicating what the reader should think.

But Fleur’s writing doesn’t end with her work-in-progress. As part of her secretarial duties, she has to edit the submissions of the Autobiographical Association. Spark is very funny about Fleur’s low estimation of the group’s writing abilities, and the manner in which Fleur augments the perceived dullness of their memoirs:
The main character was Nanny. I had livened it up by putting Nanny and the butler on the nursery rocking-horse together during the parents’ absence, while little Eric was locked in the pantry to clean the silver.
As a hint of what is to come, it turns out that Fleur’s flight of fancy does, in part, turn out to be truth. Which Stuck-in-a-Book reader could fail to notice similarities to Miss Hargreaves?

This becomes the crux of the novel – where does Fleur’s imagination end, and where does plagiarism begin? Similarities between the Autobiographical Association’s activities and the manuscript of Warrender Chase grow ever greater – how much is coincidence, how much does Fleur absorb, and how much does she write before it happens? The parallel stories – both (of course) fiction, but one accepted as ‘true’ in the novel; fiction and meta-fiction, if you’re feeling in that mood – intertwine and overlap, and Spark does it all so very, very cleverly. I won’t say any more.

As with all my favourite novelists – and Spark could swiftly join that group – style contributes heavily to my appreciation. Spark is sharp, witty, and sees straight through any form of dissemblance. I need to revisit The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means sometime, as I must have missed something. I’m late to the party on this one, but the latest converts are the most enthusiastic – I foresee more Sparks being read before 2010 is over. Thank you, blogosphere!

I’ll kick off with the first novella I read at the weekend… although, first, a detour via the word ‘novella’. Peter questioned the criteria for a novella – and he has a point. In the research I did once about short stories, the general consensus seemed to be that there was no strict definition for the novella. It’s basically just a short novel, without necessarily any structural differences from a novel proper – and who can determine what qualifies as ‘short’? Rather arbitrarily, I said 200 pages – but font and margin sizes can mean that 150 pages of one book would be 300 pages of another, and I didn’t have time or energy to make word count estimates… so 200 pages was the number I chose to signify novella! As it turned out, of the seven I read The Driver’s Seat (1970) by Muriel Spark was the thickest, at 160 or so pages – although I suspect it had fewer words than some of the others.

The Driver’s Seat came with recommendation from Simon S, as did one of the other titles this week – so thanks Simon! It was also, apparently, recently in contention for the ‘lost Booker’ of 1970. I have read some Muriel Spark before (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means) and, while I certainly enjoyed them, they didn’t quite click. The Driver’s Seat definitely did.

It tells the story of Lise, a woman who leaves work to fly south on holiday… but Lise is an oddball of the oddest variety. She is looking for her ‘type’ and isn’t afraid to accost strangers to tell them so – but, when pressed, isn’t sure what her ‘type’ is – just that she’ll know when she finds him. We first meet Lise whilst she is buying clothes for her holiday – settling on a dress: ‘a lemon-yellow top with a skirt patterned in bright Vs of orange, mauve and blue’ along with a red/white striped coat. “Of course, the two don’t go well together” says the salesgirl – but Lise thinks otherwise, and welcomes the attention such a brash outfit gives her.

About thirty pages in, the reader gets a bit of a shock. Although it comes quite early on, I won’t mention it here – suffice to say, it throws the rest of the novel into some sort of waiting game, the reader never being quite sure where they stand. Spark’s prose is deliberately – and deliciously – disorientating. We move in and out of Lise’s thoughts, never quite grasping hold of her perspective, nor yet letting it slip entirely out of reach. Eventually Lise takes a ball-point pen from her bag and marks a spot in a large patch of green, the main parkland of the city. She puts a little cross beside one of the small pictures which is described on the map as ‘The Pavilion’. She then folds up the map and replaces it in the pamphlet which she then edges in her hand-bag. The pen lies, apparently forgotten, on the bed. She looks at herself in the glass, touches her hair, then locks her suitcase. She finds the car-keys that she had failed to leave behind this morning and attaches them once more to her key-ring. She puts the bunch of keys in her hand-bag, picks up her paperback book and goes out, locking the door behind her. Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell? The ending didn’t come as a huge surprise to me – Spark leaves an enormous clue – but, as with Lise’s travel throughout the mysterious city, the journey is easily as important as the destination. I finally see what is so special about Muriel Spark, and will definitely be on the hunt for more of her work now. Suggestions welcome…