Dave's Book Blog: "A Far Cry from Kensington" by Muriel Spark

Sunday 14 April 2024

"A Far Cry from Kensington" by Muriel Spark

For a short novel, this book is crammed with characters and plot. Mrs Hawkins, the narrator-protagonist works as an editor at a small publishing house heading towards bankruptcy. She offends a wannabe writer whose malevolent revenge includes getting her sacked, twice, and attempting to make her die. The story also includes poison pen letters, radionics, blackmail, unwanted pregnancy, and suicide. But it takes some time before the meandering threads of this tale are brought together into a tapestry and even afterwards there are loose ends, for example, Isabel. It feels like a real memoir (it is written in the first person and from a perspective of thirty years later) even though the single evil genius presiding at the heart of all the misfortunes is highly unlikely, so full marks for verisimilitude. Apparently it is a roman a clef, Spark's revenge on an ex-lover who trolled her.

But the prose! There are times when it becomes tortuous and I had to read a sentence several times just to understand what it was saying. For example: "But even now when I return to London, to Kensington, and have paid the taxi and been greeted by the people waiting there, and have telephoned the friends and opened the mail, that night I find again my hours of sweet insomnia and know that it is a far cry from that Kensington of the past, that Old Brompton Road, that Brompton Road, that Brompton Oratory, a far cry." (Ch 1) This is ironic when you consider that the narrator-protagonist is supposed to be a respected editor in a publishing house and that the antagonist becomes an enemy because she criticises his writing: "His writing writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long Latin-based words." (Ch 4) Pot and kettle?

The first chapter introduces the characters of her rooming house: the narrator, the landlady Milly, Basil and Eve Carlin, Wanda, Kate, Isabel and William Todd. We are also introduced to Mr Twinny, who redecorates, and to the people working at the narrator's office: Mr Ullswater and Martin York, Cathy, Ivy and Patrick. Almost all of these people, and quite a few others, play a significant part in the story to come. Nevertheless, introducing fourteen characters in the first twelve pages seemed a rather steep start for the reader. I was concerned that not only could I not cope but also that the author would not be able to do more than give us silhouette characters, without flesh. However, despite the limitations of space, Spark breathed life into most of the major characters (Wanda, Milly, Hector Bartlett, Isabel ...) and made even the minor characters appear real.

As so often in books of this period, the world is inhabited by posh people. The narrator, Mrs Hawkins, works in publishing. Other inhabitants of the rooming house include a nurse, a medical student, and engineering accountant and Isabel who is decidedly posh. There always seems to be money for eating out and taking cabs even when unemployed: "I always took a taxi to an interview." (Ch 6) Being sacked (twice) doesn't bring on any sort of panic about poverty: "I had some savings and a small pension, so I had no need to find another job immediately." (Ch 5) How she had any savings from her poorly paid job in publishing, her last week's work unpaid, I have no idea. Perhaps life was much, much cheaper then.

There was one point in which I recognised a fellow feeling. After being sacked the second time, she spends weeks travelling London on buses. When I was depressed, nearing a nervous breakdown, and coming to the end of working as a research assistant, I did the same, taking a bus to wherever it was going, alighting at random, and taking another, crisscrossing London.

It was pointed out by other members of my reading group that the narrator-protagonist lacks any sort of back story before her (very brief) wartime marriage. Does she have parents? Siblings? In-laws? How and where was she educated? The transition from land girl to editor in a publishing house is unchronicled. She just appears, fully formed.

It is an entertaining novel which reminded me of a light drawing room comedy stage play; one critic compared it to the Ealing Comedy film 'The Lavender Hill Mob'. Witty and charming but somewhat lightweight.

But sometimes it was very funny:

"I had a sense he was offering things abominable to me, like decaffeinated coffee or coitus interruptus." (Ch 8)

Selected quotes:

"So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to the silence." (Ch 1; first line)
"Basil, by his own definition, was an engineering accountant." (Ch 1) He was. It's a perfectly respectable career. So why the 'by his own definition'?
"Wanda, the Polish dressmaker, whose capacity for suffering verged on rapacity." (Ch 1)
"Wanda looks out of the window. ... She sees spies standing at the corner of the road. She sees spies in the grocer shop, following her. Private detectives and government spies." (Ch 4)
"There isn't an author who doesn't take their books personally." (Ch 6)
"I concluded that it was better to belong to the ordinary class. For the upper class could not live, would disintegrate, without the ordinary class, while the latter can get on very well on its own." (Ch 7) She works in publishing, an industry which seems unlikely to provide someone with the skills to survive the collapse of civilization.
"The advice of St Thomas Aquinas had been to rest one's judgement on what is said, not by whom it is said." (Ch 8)
"One might as well have taken a carpet sweeper to clear the jungle as edit that book." (Ch 8)
"My advice to any woman who earns the reputation of being capable, is not to demonstrate her ability too much." (Ch 11) She's not exactly a feminist.
"He can quote chapter and verse, any of my novels. It's amazing. ... He generally gets it wrong, I'll admit. But his dedication to me is there." (Ch 11)
"It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians." (Ch 13)
"Fred talked like the sea, in ebbs and flows each ending in a big wave which washed up the main idea." (Ch 13)