Harriet Devine's Blog

A Couple of Sparks

As I think I've already said, I've read four novels for MSRW, and another three over the past two years. I had been thinking that seven in all wasn't bad going but I have already been amazed by the (to me) totally unknown corners of the Spark oeuvre that people are uncovering. Anyway, today I'm going to say something about two of the ones I've come to fresh, as it were, and they are:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm not really sure why I chose The Finishing School. I suppose I may have liked the sound of the plot, or the fact that it was set in Switzerland, but I have a feeling it was a fairly arbitrary choice. I certainly hadn't realised until I picked it up that it was MS's last novel, published in 2004 when she was 86. Briefly, the novel tells the story of the events of a term at College Sunrise, a mixed-sex finishing school. Run by would-be novelist Rowland Mahler and his wife Nina, the school started in Brussels but has become a 'mobile school', moving first to Vienna and now located in Switzerland. Rowland's teaching speciality, not surprisingly, is creative writing, and one of the students, seventeen-year-old Chris, is writing a novel which is proceeding at a tremendous rate. Rowland, meanwhile, has a complete writer's block and sits day after day in his office staring at a blank page. This is the central concern of the novel, and very entertaining it is. Rowland hates Chris and would like to drown him in the lake, especially when publishers and film-makers start to take an interest in him and his work. Chris meanwhile resents Rowland's interference, but at the same time is unable to work unless he is somewhere in Rowland's vicinity. Nina is fed up with Rowland and falls into an affair with an attractive local art dealer, while Rowland rather feebly pursues one of the French maids, who is also sleeping with Chris.

I found the novel really charming and often funny. Certainly it's not the best of Spark's work, but even slightly less wonderful Spark is still well worth reading. 

The Driver's Seat is quite another kettle of fish. First published in 1970, it was advertised as a 'metaphysical shocker' and is sometimes described as a psychological thriller. Clearly, as you'll know if you are a regular visitor here, this was what attracted me to the novel, but believe me this is quite unlike any psychological thriller I've ever read before. Set somewhere in Northern Europe, perhaps Scandinavia, this novel concerns a young woman called Lise who, at the start, is buying clothes to take on a holiday to warmer southern climes (Italy?). She is trying on a dress which is patterned with green and purple squares on a white background, with blue spots within the green squares, cyclamen spots within the purple. Delighted with the colours she is all set to buy it until the salesgirl says 'And it doesn't stain'.

"Doesn't stain?" The customer has flung the dress aside.

The salesgirl shouts, as if to assist her explanation. "Specially treated fabric...If you spill, like, a drop of sherry you just wipe it off. Look, Miss, you're tearing the neck'.

"Do you think I spill things on my clothes?" the customer shrieks, "Do I look as if I don't eat properly?" 

Clearly, Lise has severe psychological problems which become increasingly apparent as the story proceeds. But as the narrative is told from her point of view (and in the present tense) the reader is caught up in her bizarre logic and forced to some extent to go along with it. Her strange taste in clothes, which have to be violently brightly coloured, her sparse room with its interior straight out of, presumably, Ikea, her sudden bursts of anger, and her insistence that she is going on holiday to meet somebody, a gentleman, who she is sure she will recognise once she sees him -- all these and more add up to a very disturbing and disturbed young woman. What's more, Spark tells us at the beginning of Chapter Three that

She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man's necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is now travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.

If you are at all familiar with Spark's novels you will recognise this kind of time-shifting as a very common method of hers -- she uses it a lot, for instance, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Here of course it powerfully affects our reading of what follows. Who is going to perpetrate this act? Could it be macrobiotic Bill, who she meets on the plane, and who wants to sleep with her because his strict diet and lifestyle includes the requirement of one orgasm a day? Or will it be the businessman, also on the plane, who she feels sure is her gentleman but who moves seats quickly to get away from her? Or what about old Mrs Fiedke, who she drags around a department store, tormented all the time by the thought of never knowing  exactly when or where he's going to turn up? 

As you can probably tell, I really loved this novel. Yes it does contain violence and so some people (Simon for example) may not want to read it. But that is, I would argue, secondary to the brilliance of the characterisation of this extraordinary woman who, for all her borderline insanity, became for me strangely loveable. Highly recommended!

First Known Writer Was a Woman -- Who Knew?

I certainly didn't, until I saw something on Facebook by Diana Birchill about Enheduanna, who may or may not have looked like this -- the picture came from here. 

So -- what have I found out so far? Well, Enheduanna lived from 2285 to 2250 BC in Akkad. The daughter of King Sargon, she was also a High Priestess and wrote many hymns and a celebrated poem called The Exaltation of Inana in praise of the goddess of that name. This is how it ends:

Inana's holy heart has been assuaged. The light was sweet for her, delight extended over her, she was full of fairest beauty. Like the light of the rising moon, she exuded delight. Nanna came out to gaze at her properly, and her mother Ningal blessed her. The door posts greeted her. Everyone's speech to the mistress is exalted. Praise be to the destroyer of foreign lands, endowed with divine powers by An, to my lady enveloped in beauty, to Inana!

I think we could do with a better translation. This one came from the Electronic Text Corpus. 

You can find out more about Enheduanna and read some more extracts from her poems here. 

History lesson over -- break time. 

The Meeting Point

 
Lucy Caldwell's second novel is a most thoughtful, and thought-provoking, book. Yes, it's partly a love story, albeit one which seems doomed from the start. But please don't run away with the idea that this is chick lit, even of a rather classy kind. It's much more than that.

It's 2002, and Ruth Armstrong, together with her husband Euan and their two-year-old daughter Anna, are newly arrived in the island kingdom of Bahrain. This is no holiday, though. Euan is here to do "God's work", a short spell as a missionary which, in this strictly Islamic land, is a delicate and challenging task. Before they left Northern Ireland, the young couple prepared themselves with Bible readings, and Ruth is convinced this is "a Calling...straight from God, sending them in the footsteps of the first Christian apostles". But, soon after they arrive, Ruth discovers the real reason that the church has sent Euan to Bahrain -- a reason fraught with danger to himself and to his family. Scared, full of new and terrifying doubts, she feels increasingly isolated in her rented ex-pat villa.

Meanwhile, in a nearby house, fourteen-year-old Noor rages against her Muslim father, her English mother left behind in London, her appearance, her addiction to food, and her loneliness. "Maybe", she writes in her diary, "maybe this is hell and I'm in it already." All this changes though, as Noor gets to know Ruth and soon proves to be a wonderfully loving and useful babysitter for Anna.  Before long she has developed a powerful fantasy of returning to Ireland with the family, perhaps even being adopted. She has also introduced Ruth to her nineteen-year-old cousin Farid, who has a car and plenty of time on his hands to drive them all to see the sights of Bahrain.

Well, you can probably guess where this may all be going. But any happiness -- and for a while there's plenty of it, both for Ruth and for Noor -- is much tempered by the pressures and conflicts of religion and of faith, by no means necessarily the same thing. Noor, whose father has started to insist she attends the mosque, has become fascinated by Christianity and persuades Ruth to help her to pray. Ruth, though, is increasingly aware that she has lost her faith and that her life with the devoutly religious Euan seems more and more like living a lie. 

So, in the end, this is a story of faith and doubt, of East and West, and of the impossibility of understanding even those people we feel the most love for. The double narrative helps here -- as the chapters alternate between Ruth's and Noor's points of view, so we see events from both sides, and come to see how easy it is to deceive yourself about what another person's real feelings and motivations are. Obviously I'm not going to tell you what happens in the end, but it will leave you thinking, about decisions, about love, about belief and what happens in its absence. 

Lucy Caldwell has kindly agreed to be interviewed for this blog, so watch this space for some questions and answers about the novel and about the writing life and future plans of this wonderfully and diversely prolific writer.

They Knew Mr Knight

 The Persephone book I meant to read this weekend was The Children Who Lived in a Barn, which I bought sometime last year. I was sure I knew where it was but when I looked it wasn't there, or anywhere else in the house as far as I could discover. So, determined not to be left out, I borrowed one from Simon, who kindly brought three along for me to choose from. I dithered a bit, but really there was no contest as I've been wanting to read another Dorothy Whipple since I so much enjoyed Someone at a Distance last summer. 

Dorothy Whipple is a writer who no-one really seems to know how to praise -- that is, they do praise her, but they tend to do so in terms which sound rather off-putting -- Persephone themselves say she is "not a great writer", and  describe her as "serviceable, perceptive and humane". Not the sort of terms that would make you rush to buy one of her books -- but nevertheless she is one of their best-selling authors. This seems a bit paradoxical, to say the least, and it raises interesting questions about quality which I'm not going to get into here. Suffice it to say that my second Whipple novel was a joy from start to finish and I whizzed through its 470 pages in no time.

They Knew Mr Knight is a novel about a family, the Blakes. Middle class, middle income, middle England. Thomas Blake works in a small engineering works, once owned by his family but now bought out by his late manager. Celia is his wife, and the centre of the novel -- I'll say more about her in a minute. Then there are the three teenage children, beautiful, discontented Freda, happy, bright Douglas, and dreamy, imaginative Ruth. Their house is small, though they have a maid (this is 1934, by the way, when that would have been the norm), and Celia, at forty-one, is generally contented, though she worries as all mothers do about her children and their futures, and regrets the slow but inexorable loss of her beauty:

She had flowered, borne fruit, and was now fading. The inexorability of time and life made Celia turn on her back, and stare at the ceiling. The sweep of life was sad, even tragic, but it was magnificent.

Thomas, though, is not contented. He's resentful of the fact that he has to work for a man who once worked for him. And so it is that when he attracts the attentions of  Mr Knight, a hugely wealthy local financier who has recently moved into the district, he falls for him like a ripe plum. And, at first, this seems all to the good, as Mr Knight puts Thomas in the way of making a great deal more money. His income quadruples, he's able to buy back the works, the family moves house twice, ending up in the glorious little stately home the Knights have vacated after their move back to London. But lacking Mr Knight's interest and attention, Thomas starts to make a mess of his investments and disaster follows swiftly.

That's the bare bones of the plot, and a good one it is. But so much more is going on here. Each of the children has their own story -- Freda, unable to be happy with her life, incapable of sharing her feelings with the rest of the family, falls in with a fast set of young people a great deal wealthier than she is and suffers dreadfully from unrequited love -- Douglas, a brilliant career as a scientist ahead of him, falls for a beautiful young woman who turns out to be dangerously involved with Mr Knight,  and who breaks Douglas's heart -- and Ruth, sent off to France for a year, whose great ambition is to be a writer. Then there's Edward, Thomas's brother, seemingly a lost cause, who is redeemed by love; Thomas's dreadful, angry old mother; and wonderful, tragic Mrs Knight, whose early incarnation as a music-hall singer has to be concealed but bursts through from time to time despite her efforts to suppress it.

Above all, though, this is Celia's story. Celia, though absolutely human, is, essentially, a good woman. Now as anyone who has studied literature will know, goodness is the hardest quality for a writer to do well. Famously, Milton is said to have failed to make God a sympathetic character in Paradise Lost -- everybody who reads the poem is much keener on Satan. But Whipple seems to have succeeded where Milton failed. Clearly she was interested in goodness, as Ellen in Someone at a Distance is also possessed of it. In the Afterword to They Knew Mr Knight, the Reverend Terence Handley McMath puts this down to her religious beliefs. He tell us that "Dorothy Whipple inhabits a Christian world where religious truth and social feeling overlap", finds Christian language and images throughout the novel, sees Mr Knight as Satan and reads the plot as one of sin, love and redemption. Far be it from me to disagree with Rev. McMath. But though Celia undoubtedly has a spiritual inner life, it is not one in which church-going figures -- in fact she has tried a number of churches of different denominations and not found one she really relates to. But as she gets older, she has found herself increasingly on a search for "something in me" that

stretches out, like one of those caterpillars that cling to the end of a twig and wave themselves about in the air, feeling for something to hold onto. It's my spirit, I suppose. 

This search, "profoundly isolated" and unremitting, occasionally results in brief flashes of apprehension of what she takes to be God, until, near the end of the novel, when she is at her lowest imaginable ebb, she has a full-blown epiphany in which she is caught up in a state of ecstacy:

It was God. She was sure. She was drawn into love, warmed, reassured, made happy like a child by a father. Grief was wiped out. The light that she had seen in flashes now shone full upon her. She was amazed by its spendour. She sank to the floor and knelt there, flooded in radiance. She saw. She knew. For a little space of time, she lived at the height of perception; for one moment, which would illuminate a lifetime, she was able, in spite of her thick self, to apprehend God.

Well. I think that's all very interesting. But don't let it make you think this is a preachy novel, because it really isn't. It's witty, perceptive, and brilliant in its depiction of people and their complex relationships. Sorry, Persephone, but I think it does Whipple a great disservice to describe her as "serviceable'. 

Thanks so much, Verity and Claire, for this brilliant weekend.