A 1981 Booker-shortlisted novella, which I read for the upcoming forum book tournament Mookse Madness 2019, scheduled for March.
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The premise befits a nice Sunday evening TV drama - London, 1949: a young writer takes a job as secretary to an eccentric association of minor aristocrats working on their autobiographies - but it soon becomes apparent that this is more discomfiting than cosy. This happens with Muriel Spark books: I expect and want them to be cosy, and then they're not.
Fleur, the narrator, is very interesting, as are the varied responses to her in other reviews - among them 'likeable', and 'unreliable' (in the literary sense). She's strangely unsettling, and part of that is that she also isn't as unsettling as you sometimes expect she may become. In the first couple of chapters, I had déjà vu - perhaps I had read a few pages of this standing in a library or bookshop in the 90s - and I kept thinking how, as a teenager, I'd might have taken Fleur's opinions as right all round and to be emulated. Now I could see that she coded, sometimes, as intended to be unlikeable - yet she never actually became nefarious. In the end I concluded she was a type of spiky individual I like and when I meet one, I'm so glad to find someone who agrees with me about xyz and who doesn't fit in in certain ways I recognise, and sometimes tries to play the game, sometimes not. (‘You know,’ Dottie said, ‘there’s something a bit harsh about you, Fleur. You’re not really womanly, are you?’ …To show her I was a woman…) But on the other hand it's probably best that with them I never talk about abc, because we'd definitely disagree, and that I don't confide about anything that sounds a bit soft. She was another of these characters, like Gretel in this year's Booker shortlisted Everything Under, whom I'd perhaps prefer to talk to than read about within the confines of the novel. Fleur seems so real in her unstereotypical personality, which itself has twists and turns compared with most literary characters who seem cardboard cutouts by comparison: sometimes she's kind when you hadn't expected it, and just when you figured she's actually really nice after all, she says something catty. This is how people are in real life, not in books, perhaps especially when young and still figuring things out.
Yet she is also a notably unrealistic device of 1980s metafiction - a loud, raucous context (alongside Martin Amis) in which I never would have thought, of my own accord, to place this tale of more-or-less genteel machinations. (It's only a few open references to bodily fuctions and sex that indicate it wasn't written in the 50s or early 60s; otherwise it feels very much of that era.) Understanding, via the introduction by Mark Lawson (in the 2007 Virago edition), that there are 'autobiographical associations' lurking in the novel made me more interested in Muriel Spark as a person. I've never especially liked Lawson on TV and radio, but here, without his broadcast manner or the glibness of newspaper columns, it became apparent that he has some good insights into literature. There is plenty explained here which I wouldn't have spotted otherwise, as I've only read two or three books of Spark's previously and had read very little about the woman herself. If I'd ever known she was Catholic, I'd forgotten, and because I was used to seeing her defined foremost as a Scottish writer, had no idea that back in the 70s she'd been seen as one among Britain's major Catholic novelists of the 20th century, along with Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess. (I'd tended to bracket Burgess with Ballard instead, as one with an interest in the shock of the new, whilst Waugh and Greene, it's easier to understand grouped together.) David Lodge, too, is mentioned, for metafiction, though Catholics were also a feature of several of his novels.
I love the book's milieu of shabby-genteel bedsit life and full time work with strange characters, which feels far more realistic than most contemporary books about young writers. Regardless of the non-existence of internet, this is still way realler now than Tao Lin or Sheila Heti. (Where are all the great new novels in which authors house-sit and work in temp admin jobs, and pare down that online grocery order to as little as possible over the minimum £40?) Spark's phrase for these circumstances "on the grubby edge of the literary world" also gives me the pithy description I'd been needing for Vernon Subutex - which I've been reading slowly for the last couple of weeks - vis a vis the music world. Fleur has a tacit self-assurance which is unaffected by the differences in wealth and class she encounters at work; there's no reason to believe she isn't English, but this kind of confident semi-detachment from English social structures strikes me as characteristic of educated Scots people, perhaps especially of an older generation. This attitude, and the setting made me want to love the book, although the narrative was too unsettling for that. It was hovering at 3.5 stars a lot of the time - I just don't love 'unsettling' the way some readers do - but the final pages had the warmth I'd been foolishly wanting, and so up it bumps to 4.
This, in its recent Virago edition is my least favourite cover among books I've read this year.
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