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.

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The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I think Muriel Spark is one of those writers who needs an entire novel to tell a story. That’s based on most of the really good stories being the longer ones. The shorter stories are more like long jokes, or very artful anecdotes. Still good, though, and there are a few that really shine.

The best story is Come Along, Marjorie, although I doubt very many people will agree with me.

There’s a story that seems to have been constructed for the sole purpose of leaving a character, at the end, certain that there was a deep and fatal mystery in one of his most important relationships, and giving him good reason for that certainty; but the narrator knows there was no mystery at all, that it was literally just a case of mistaken identity. And says nothing. The moral of the story is: your torment, in which you can see the whole of your life reflected, in which the entire meaning of your existence hinges on some fact you might be able to glimpse if only you worry at it thoroughly enough, may in reality be totally insignificant. It might mean nothing. The true explanation is totally accidental. Of course, the story itself was arranged with a literary purpose by the author.

Also, I’m pretty sure, without having studied her biography, that Muriel Spark had to leave Africa just prior to World War 2, because there are a lot of stories in which British people have to leave Africa because of the war. And there are a lot of stories about being a novelist, which, to me, have the same pointless, gossipy feel as rap songs about being a rapper. But that’s just a personal peeve, I know every genre of art has a degree of self-reflexiveness without which it probably wouldn’t be able to reproduce.



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Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I don’t know whether this is about witchcraft, metanarrative, or an unreliable narrator. I think part of my confusion comes from not knowing how to judge how evil the protagonist is. In her account she’s pretty much totally innocent, and then sometimes some relatively normal person out of the blue tells her she’s evil, in a very genuine way that I want to trust. If the protagonist is lying and she’s evil, the whole plot resolves itself as pretty uninteresting; so I’m apt to lend more weight to the metanarrative strands / references woven in throughout and to the pretty regular gestures toward the occult, and make it something with a little more mystery.

Also, I suspect that her novels are each built around some core joke that I don’t get. I love that so much! They’re hilarious, but not in the way that makes you actually laugh, and then take that to the second power: not only don’t you laugh, you don’t know what the joke was.

Put this on the ‘books to read again, with decoder ring in hand’ list.



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