A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is very clever and droll. Understated British humor. I’ve been on a long quest to find a British author as funny as Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett or P.G. Wodehouse. I love Muriel Spark, but… she’s not it. It’s witty, but you would never laugh out loud at it.
The protagonist and narrator, Mrs. Hawkins, loves to give advice to the reader. She’s an editor, and she says to imagine writing to one specific person, which is a good technique. Other great authors have said the same, and I’ve found it useful myself.
Make sure that person would find the story interesting, she says. And I suppose Muriel Spark’s person would have found this story very interesting.
But that person is not me. And it’s hard for me to tell what the point is. You can kind of figure out the plot after it’s over. But everything interesting that happens, happens behind the scenes. Post-war Kensington is not interesting on its own.
It’s almost a tragedy. She just cannot stop calling this one guy a piseur de copies and all sorts of bad stuff happens because of it. If only the terrible consequences of her heroic flaw had fallen on her own head. Then it would have been a real tragedy. But the vengeance she called up from this piseur de copies, she doesn’t even notice. It all lands on her innocent dressmaker neighbor Wanda and Emma Loy, an Important Author.
In fact, nothing that happens seems to catch the attention of the protagonist very much. She loses her job twice, doesn’t seem to care and keeps doing what got her fired. I mean, obviously it’s not her job to keep this psychotic piseur from molesting her and her friends. He’s the villain, not her. But geez, she can maintain her literary integrity without consistently insulting the guy.
Emma Loy, who Mrs. Hawkins respects, is in there to let us know that the piseur de copies is actually not that bad. She says as much to over and over again, and the fact that she renounces him decades later doesn’t undo it. If Emma Loy can like him, why can’t you, Mrs. Hawkins? Because: she is an unreliable narrator.
I do enjoy the sinister British spiritualism. This is one of the most interesting aspects of post-war London, to me, and it seems to show up in a lot of Spark’s novels.