A group of old people start getting anonymous phone calls: each one says, "Remember you will die." They attend one another's funerals. Old people in and out of geriatric wards write and rewrite their wills. A housekeeper companion, disappointed not to receive an inheritance from the woman she had been caring for, infiltrates another old household and tries to convince the elderly woman (a famous novelist) that she is losing her marbles; she blackmails her husband. Old people remember love affairs from long ago and the ramifications haunt some of them. Memoirs are written. One old man has a penchant for staring at suspenders and stockings in situ.As John Mullan said in his 2021 Gresham College lecture, "n Muriel Spark novels, murders are common while blackmail is more or less a narrative principle." In this novel, Spark considers the issue of ageing with her trademark humour. It's a fun book but it is dated and not just by the 'geriatric ward'. Almost all of the characters are posh (not just a famous writer but also a Dame) and wealthy, employing maids and manservants, and it says something for the author's prejudices that the main villain is one of the few lower class characters.
- Selected quotes:
- "Godfreys wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology." (Ch 1)
- "Godfrey ... took from a drawer a box of matches and a razor blade and set to work, carefully splitting the slim length of each match, so that from one box of matches he would eventually make two boxes." (Ch 3)
- "He ate half of what he had been sent." (Ch 5) In Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington (which also includes blackmail) the protagonist loses weight by eating half of whatever is on her plate.
- "Godfrey was turning upon her as one who had been awaiting his revenge ... It was an instinctive reaction to the years of being a talented, celebrated woman's husband, knowing himself to be reaping continually in her a harvest which he had not sown." (Ch 6)
- "These thoughts overwhelmed Mrs Pettigrew with that sense of having done a foolish thing against one's interests, which in some people stands for guilt." (Ch 6)
- "Then she suddenly felt sorry for him, huddled among his bones." (Ch 10)
- "How banal and boring, Guy thought, do the most interesting people become when they are touched by a little but of guilt." (Ch 14)
Not only entertaining but full of acute observations regarding old age and the approach to death. May 2024; 226 pages)
Also by Muriel Spark and reviewed in this book:
No comments:
Post a Comment