The Comforters (Virago Modern Classics)

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Spark’s last publications appeared in 2004: her novel, The Finishing School, and All the Poems. The latter title is misleading: it is a selection of poems from 1943 to 2003, arranged according to theme by her editor, Barbara Epler. Spark herself provided the dates that enable a chronological reading, and a statement claiming that her poems are central rather than peripheral to her work: ‘I have always thought of myself as a poet … for creative writing of any sort, an early apprenticeship as a poet is a wonderful stimulant and start’ (AP, xii). Cada vez que compro uno de sus libros me sorprendo y este no fue la excepción. Seguramente, muchos lectores conocen a esta interesante escritora escocesa llamada Muriel Spark. Yo reconozco que no, pero seguramente no es fácil encontrar material suyo editado. Por suerte está LBE. There is also plenty of humour, and it is skilfully and playfully constructed. I am sure when I read more of here work, these skills will be even better employed, but The Comforters is still a remarkable beginning. Apparently The Comforters was lauded by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, both of whom saw a manuscript of the novel and encouraged Muriel Spark to find a publisher. Greene called it “One of the few really original first novels one has read for many years” while Evelyn Waugh deemed it “Brilliantly original and fascinating.” Poetry: The Fanfarlo, and Other Verse, 1952; Collected Poems I, 1967; Going Up to Sotheby’s, and Other Poems, 1982; All of the Poems of Muriel Spark, 2004.

The Comforters was Muriel Spark’s first novel published when she was nearly forty, she had only begun writing seriously after the Second World War. Spark, had previously suffered from hallucinations, and she brings this experience and her recent conversion to Catholicism to her extraordinary debut. It is a debut that is remarkably assured, in this her first novel, Spark really has set out her stall, showing her readers that they are in the hands of a different kind of writer. While the book was still in proof it was read by Evelyn Waugh, who praised it, the novel’s success meant that Muriel Spark could then afford to write full time. Caroline is converting to Roman Catholicism, feeling isolated in her belief and finding the other converts she meets either maddeningly sheeplike and unintelligent or, like Mrs Georgina Hogg, whose religious impulse is all material, repulsive. Meanwhile, there are hidden riches, it seems, in the everyday realist bread, and Laurence is piecing clues together to prove a most unlikely story, about his sweet grandmother running "a gang ... maybe Communist spies". But when Laurence asks too many questions of his grandmother's rather banal-seeming gentlemen callers, they worry, rather suspiciously, about him asking "who we are, what we're doing here". Religion plays a big part, Spark’s conversion to Catholicism which was in such evidence in The Comforters is present here too in the character of January Marlow, and in the arguments and discussions between her and other characters. The unpredictable and often absurd acts and assertions of Miss Brodie are precisely what amuses us; but they also have unpredictable consequences (one girl burnt in the fire, being Miss Brodie’s notion of dross; another, taught to transfigure the commonplace, herself uncomfortably transfigured). Miss Brodie fancies herself one of the secular elect, a modern justified sinner; and she assumes a novelist’s, or God’s, power over character. But her life assumes penitential patterns familiar to the instructed, and repeated with pain by the treacherous Sandy. Hindsight is liberally provided from the outset; but the dominant image is of the justified Miss Brodie presiding calmly over a lost innocence.There are layers to Robinson, which make the whole – reasonably slight – novel, deceptively complex. However, it is very readable and gloriously compelling. In this novel, Spark plays homage to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, often said to have been the first novel. However, as Candia McWilliam points out in her introduction to my Polygon edition, we can also be reminded of another island Robinson – the Swiss Family Robinson (they made me want a tree house). Muriel Spark’s son was called Robin – he lived with her parents and the two appear to have spent most of his life estranged. Layers, of fascinating possibilities to what might have inspired or driven Muriel Spark to write this extraordinary novel.

Every time Caroline has a thought, it gets echoed by the Typing Ghost. One day she has just written “ On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.” when she hears the sound of a typewriter. Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Once concerns the suspicions of Laurence Manders that his elderly grandmother Louisa Jepp is heavily involved in a diamond-smuggling operation. Randisi, Jennifer Lynn. On Her Way Rejoicing: The Fiction of Muriel Spark. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991.

References

She appears to be in a novel; but it's up to the reader to decide how much of this is a genuine piece of metafiction, and how much is purely in Caroline's mind. Just then she heard the sound of a typewriter. It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. It said: On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.” It is all held so lightly, so playfully. But this paralleling of cheap smuggling mystery and Roman Catholic mystery, this mischievous, merry challenge to British literary realism, this blatant parody of contemporary cold-war surveillance plotting and paranoia becomes a life-and-death struggle in the end. La intriga que se va gestando a fuego lento y la tensión que se crea entre los distintos personajes, hasta que a mitad del libro un misterio detectivesco aviva nuestro interés.

Spark went on to write a further 21 novels, gaining a reputation for blending wit and humour within darker themes of evil and suffering. This aspect of the novel grew increasingly irritating the longer it went on. A bit later Spark tells us apropos of nothing, “At this point in the narrative, it might be as well to state that the characters in this novel are all fictitious, and do not refer to any persons whatsoever.”Even after winning the Observer short story prize for ‘The Seraph of the Zambesi’, which made the literary establishment notice her and prompted Graham Greene generously to subsidise her writing, Spark did not become ‘only’ a writer of fiction. Everything about Muriel Spark remained heterodox: her fiction subverted the categories critics tried to impose on it – avant-garde, Catholic, magic realist; her Catholicism refused all rules, since she didn’t much like orthodox Catholics, didn’t regularly go to church, didn’t confess and so on; and she continued to consider herself as a poet even when her sixth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, made her internationally famous as a novelist and she had reinvented herself as a glamorous, and slim celebrity, living in Manhattan. Caroline begins to hear typing noises, and voices in her head reciting passages from a book; this book: the one we are reading. She tells her confessor, “‘It is as if a writer on another plane of existence was writing a story about us.’”