The Brooknerian

Do you read for pleasure? I do, and I know it is wrong. I know I should read to be challenged and discomforted. But I want consolation. I'm nervous of very short novels, and almost never read short stories. Having to work out what's going on and who everyone is! The stress and anxiety of it! Some writers make almost no effort to put the reader at their ease. Muriel Spark is one of these, especially in her later work. I read Aiding and Abetting (2000) recently, and it was an alienating experience. Two men, each purporting to be Lord Lucan, consult a psychoanalyst in Paris. The analyst has her own preposterous secret: she is wanted for fraud after pretending to be a stigmatic and harvesting money from the gullible. Then we're in Scotland with two fresh characters who are in pursuit of one of the Lucans. Then Spark starts to tell the story as though one (or possibly both) of the Lucans were the real thing. The novel ends in Africa and involves cannibalism. Aiding and ...

Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark A very short novel, told almost entirely in dialogue, Not to Disturb (1971) has much in common with The Abbess of Crewe (1974) (see here ). Both have preposterous plots, a devious central character, and themes of surveillance and control. In Not to Disturb , Lister is the butler of a grand Swiss establishment. Relations among his employers are such that a murder or murders are imminently expected. The servants - theirs is the only view we get - must make future plans, which include deals with the newspapers and unlikely marriages. Structured in five chapters over the course of a night, the novel is an exercise in form, with debts to the Elizabethan dramatists as well as to moderns like Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henry Green. I didn't much like it. Mrs Osmond by John Banville A 'niche' read, this, if ever there was one. Mrs Osmond, formerly Isabel Archer, has left Italy to attend the funeral of Ralph Touchett. As she wanders a midsummer ...

What a subversive joy it is to discover Muriel Spark. Of course I knew The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , but I left it at that. But this Spark centenary year I've delved further, and Loitering with Intent (1981), Spark's sixteenth novel, is easily the most pleasurable so far. On one level it's because of the story, a social comedy about a fairly ridiculous organisation called the Autobiographical Association. Why has Sir Quentin Oliver set it up? Why does he want to entice old friends to commit their scandalous secrets to paper? Has he blackmail in mind? And what are the connections between these events and those to be found in the novel the beady-eyed narrator is writing? The plot is intriguing; the atmosphere of post-war London is precisely evoked; the characters ('which resembled more and more the bombed-out buildings that still messed up the London street-scene') are funny and surprising; and the narrator, a true Spark avatar, is sharp and engaging. But it is...

Muriel Spark, a 'fundamentally alarming' author, was, Anita Brookner goes on to say, greatly admiring of Ivy Compton-Burnett, to whom her novels 'owe something' ( Observer , 19 July 1992). One thinks of those schools in Compton-Burnett, in Two Worlds and Their Ways and others, establishments that bear next to no resemblance to any in reality and yet which somehow get at the strange, often extreme microclimatic atmosphere of all educational institutions. The school in Spark's last novel The Finishing School (2004) is odder than most. Sited on the banks of Lake Geneva,* the place is run on the most liberal of lines by a young man Rowland Mahler and his wife. There are a handful of pupils, including an aspirant novelist called Chris. Rowland, who is himself, as Spark puts it, one of those people who can't get by without writing a novel, is deeply envious of Chris. Chris, he believes, shows great talent, whereas Rowland, only a decade older, seems at the out...

I continue my random survey of Muriel Spark's works in her centennial year with her 1974 novella The Abbess of Crewe , 'A wicked satire on Watergate', as the cover teasingly but rather heavyhandedly puts it. Soon to be re-released (by Polygon in summer 2018),  The Abbess of Crewe  occupies a truly bizarre and striking place in Spark's bizarre and striking middle period. Scandal has hit the Abbey of Crewe. Reporters are at the gates; police patrol the grounds. There has been an election: Sister Alexandra was victorious and is now the Abbess. Her rival, the younger Felicity, has run off with a local Jesuit and told her story to the papers. The new Abbess is accused and indeed guilty of orchestrating a robbery and of covertly and extensively electronically bugging the convent... Abbess Alexandra is Miss Jean Brodie reborn: patrician, charismatic, amoral. Secretly, it is hinted, she believes in nothing - nothing but power. Or nothing, perhaps, but literature, which s...

The tone, from the start, is unsettling, uncanny: over-detailed, affectless, and then with sudden accesses of poetry and metaphor. Of the heroine's pinewood furniture: 'The swaying tall pines among the litter of cones on the forest floor have been subdued into silence and into obedient bulks'. What is Spark's game? For she's certainly playing a game. Like Anna in Anita Brookner's Fraud , Lise in Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat (1970) has gone missing - or rather is about to go missing. Or rather is about to be brutally murdered. Spark, in typical postmodern Sparkish fashion, larks around with chronology. We know early on, even before Lise has arrived at her final destination - an unnamed probably Mediterranean city - that she is to die. We find out by the end how this comes about, and why. The ending is chillingly bleak. Lise is unknowable, even by Spark ('Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?'), an author who's in the driver'...