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Episode 21: "The Bachelors" by Muriel Spark
66 Plays10 months ago
We stand on the precipice, one episode away from THE PRIME! Before that, though, we discuss The Bachelors, a fantastic novel chock full of some of the strangest characters Spark has written, which is really saying something. Mediums, epileptics, blackmail, criminality, and much, much more abound in this one. And one of the funniest scenes yet involving a gentleman’s club, a game of hide-and-seek, and drapes. As always: a really great time.
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Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to Lost in Redonda and Muriel Spark
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hi Lori, how are you doing today?
00:00:18
Speaker
Tom, I'm doing well. I'm looking forward to talking to you today about Muriel Spark's The Bachelors, which is on our ticket for today in our ongoing Muriel Spark project. I guess this is what, novel number four, five?
00:00:42
Speaker
I believe it is number five. We've had the Comforters, Robinson, Memento Morrie, the Battle of Peckham Rye, and now the Bachelors, which puts us one away from the Prime, as I keep referring to the Prime of Miss Jean Brody.
00:01:02
Speaker
which will actually wrap up this first part of this second season.
Holiday Break Announcement
00:01:07
Speaker
That one will be out in a couple of weeks time. And after that, we're going to have maybe a couple of week break over the holiday period just so that we can give our voices a break. Laurie can mind her store during the holiday rush. And we can come back to y'all refreshed in the new year with
00:01:25
Speaker
yet more of a Muriel Spark and yet more backlist picks with some amazing booksellers, authors, what have you. I'm looking forward to selling some Muriel Spark over the holidays. We've got some in the store and I'm definitely hand-selling it. You should definitely give us a tally at the end. When we come back, we should hear how did the Muriel Spark go over, how many times you have to reorder, all those good things.
00:01:53
Speaker
If it doesn't go well, well, we don't have to ever bring this part up.
Overview of The Bachelors and Spark's Style
00:01:58
Speaker
But yeah, so today we're talking about The Bachelors. This is a really weird novel. Like this is just very strange characters, very strange circumstances running through it.
00:02:15
Speaker
Incredibly funny. Spark has such a an amazing comic touch. And of course, you know, beautiful writing, amazing characterization, just it's
00:02:30
Speaker
you know, we're running out of superlatives, I think, to apply to her work. This one came out in 1960, much like the bout of Peckham Rye. So, you know, from The Comforters to this novel, it's been what, four years for her at this point, four years and five books, something like that, which is a mind boggling pace. But hey, she was she was able to pull it off, I think. Yeah. And so
00:03:01
Speaker
I think that at this point, after reading our fifth work by her together, we can definitely come up with themes like Catholicism, stylistic features such as dialogue heavy narrative,
00:03:26
Speaker
But what's pretty remarkable that in such a condensed period of time, she's able to pull off five novels that are wholly distinct, not only in terms of what happens, but
00:03:44
Speaker
you know, she just seems to be able to come up with these character types.
Spark's Unique Characters and Inspirations
00:03:51
Speaker
And we've must in the five novels now have encountered 75 characters that she's presented to us. And this novel has a lot of characters in it. There are a lot of bachelors that were that were introduced to in this novel, but each of them feels like
00:04:14
Speaker
a different, unique person. And you don't really, I don't feel like, oh, here's her stock X character or her stock Y character. They all are so individually quirky that they really don't seem to overlap. It's interesting that when you bring that up, because to create this many characters in that period of time,
00:04:42
Speaker
kind of wonder a little bit where the inspirations are coming from. And is she drawing from some of the people in her life, those sorts of things. So I almost wish there was a, maybe there is somewhere off to take a look, but a dark back of time response to some of her novels where folks got a little, their noses turned or, or puff themselves up with pride that they were the model for a certain character in one of her novels. But yeah, they are,
00:05:11
Speaker
They are all distinct.
London's Social Dynamics in The Bachelors
00:05:12
Speaker
They are fully realized characters. 75 sounds actually about right, and she's almost writing plays, right? With the amount of dialogue that's taking place here, with the range of characters, and everyone kind of having their own moment to have a bit of banter and a bit of back and forth.
00:05:29
Speaker
I don't know this for a fact, but I would just bet that Muriel Spark had a very rich social life during this period of time. I mean, she had to have, right? I can't imagine. Well, I mean, that's sort of the balancing act, right? Where is she finding the time to get all this done while also clearly engaging and interacting and going to cocktail parties and meeting people for coffee? I mean, she has such a clear command of
00:05:59
Speaker
the London of her time. And I think that's kind of what she's been doing in these novels is she's really documenting and evoking a period of time and really digging into how the social classes are flowing together, are interacting, are not interacting, what the thoughts of the day are and how
00:06:24
Speaker
how kind of, I don't know, how kind of up for grabs things seem to be. This novel focuses on a spiritualist circle, but when they kind of rattle off who's a part of the circle, it's a combination of the very wealthy, right down to day laborers, or they're attempting to get a day laborer, but they couldn't quite find one at one point, but a school teacher.
00:06:50
Speaker
There's this unity via belief that kind of chafes against notions of stratification in British society that I think are kind of, at least in my mind, have come and baked in about this time period and perhaps quite incorrectly.
00:07:08
Speaker
Yeah, I really love the way this novel opens. It opens with two bachelors meeting on a street, acquaintances of one another, and they're each doing their weekly grocery shopping. They're bachelors. They live alone.
00:07:27
Speaker
they cook for themselves. And they're kind of swapping notes on how much did you pay for those frozen peas? You know, and where did you get those carrots and just kind of like really, really every day things but what she kind of amplifies in this
00:07:48
Speaker
opening dialogue between these two bachelors is how bachelors in London at the time, if you want to think of them as maybe a type of class almost or a subset of the population,
00:08:04
Speaker
really had these kind of very regimented schedules, habits. They were kind of fixated in the way they did things, and they did things the same way all the time. And they had their own patterns that she kind of explores here to pretty funny effect.
Chaos Introduced by the Medium
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah, I can't help but read some or maybe all of the second paragraph because it's just it sets it up so perfectly. In Queensgate, Kensington, and Harrington Road, the Boltons, Holland Park, and in King's Road, Chelsea, and its backwaters, the bachelors stirred between their sheets, reached for their wound watches, and with waking intelligence as noted the time.
00:08:46
Speaker
Then, remembering it was Saturday morning, turned over on their pillows. But soon, since it was Saturday, most would be out on the streets shopping for their bacon and eggs, their weak supplies of breakfast and occasional suppers. And these bachelors would set up early before a quarter past 10 in order to avoid being jostled by the women, the legitimate shoppers.
00:09:04
Speaker
It sets the scene so amazingly, but I think also to your point about routine and ritual, the wound watches bit. At this time, there are no courts-driven watches. They're all automatic, manual, what have you, or wound.
00:09:23
Speaker
And so all these men, the last thing they did before they went to bed or when the last things they did was they stood there or sat there and they wound their watch so that it would be at the right time in the morning. And so like, but that's just part of their everyday life. That's part of their everyday routine because they have to maintain those routines because they are bachelors, because there is no one else to make sure the watch is wound, make sure that the the shopping has been done. And it's yeah, it's it's so.
00:09:51
Speaker
It's such a specific detail to throw in there, but it speaks volumes to how these lives are structured and are executed against. Yeah, there's very little impromptu things happening in their lives. They know what to expect.
00:10:15
Speaker
variables of children and wives and crazy things happening. They've got pretty standard jobs and they live in, you know, walk ups or flats in the middle of the city. They have their usual drinking hole, their usual pub. But I guess that kind of leads to something kind of extraordinary and that is kind of where the movement in this novel comes from.
00:10:44
Speaker
is when you plop a medium down in the middle of this group of bachelors, what havoc can ensue?
Dynamics of the Spiritual Circle and Patrick Seton
00:10:54
Speaker
As Laurie said, there are so many characters in this novel and there are so many scenes that it would be a fool's errand for us to even really try and get into even a quarter of it, quite frankly.
00:11:06
Speaker
It's it's a lot. It's I think actually probably the slowest moving of her novels, at least for me. That was my feeling. I think it is because of the constant jostling of characters and the constant reorienting of, OK, who is this person? Right. Right. That, you know, it's Tim this time and all those sorts of things. But to give a sense of what's taking place in this novel, there is this spiritual circle. Their primary medium is a man named Patrick Seton.
00:11:36
Speaker
We see him very like within the first chapter of the novel without yet knowing his name or precisely who he is, except that we do know that he is about to appear in court on charges of fraud. As we get further into it and further into this spiritual spiritualist group, it basically comes out that there was a member of the group who Patrick Seton was spending quite a bit of time with.
00:12:02
Speaker
giving information to her. Her name's Freda. Or is it Freda? It's F-R-E-D-E-A. I guess Freda.
00:12:12
Speaker
Fred is probably more accurate. Gave her information from her husband from beyond the grave and he stands accused of having taken a check of 2,000 pounds and basically stealing the money. There is a forged letter or a letter that is asserted as a forgery that Patrick supplies to the police stating from Fred that the money is a gift to him.
00:12:42
Speaker
the concern over Patrick being arrested, being found guilty and sent to prison and what that will do to, as it turns out, a large number of people. The spiritualist circle, his seemingly girlfriend, it's a little unclear, I mean, they are together, but he clearly would rather
00:13:04
Speaker
His relationship with Alice, we should probably touch on a little bit, but she's pregnant. So obviously she has a concern about him going away. And then all these bachelors, most of whom are not even members of the spiritual circle, are brought into the orbit of Patrick's case and its consequences and its consequences for their own lives. It's really something.
00:13:32
Speaker
Well, it's clear pretty early on that Patrick Seton, the medium, has this kind of, I don't know, magnetic pull when it comes to women.
00:13:45
Speaker
He's apparently, we learn, well, he tells Alice that he's married and that's why he cannot marry her in her compromised position carrying his baby. And we find out that he's allured and manipulated any number of women before we get to Alice. His main benefactor or supporter is this widow named Marlene.
00:14:15
Speaker
who kind of hosts the spiritualism sessions where they, this sounds so weird to me, they bind Patrick to a chair and he kind of goes into a trance and his eyes roll up in his head and he starts foaming at the mouth
00:14:38
Speaker
and he presumably talks for or through their deceased loved ones. In the case of Marlene and Freda Flower, it's their deceased husbands. And of course, they're convinced that he's legitimate because he's saying things that there's no way he could know otherwise unless he were talking
00:15:05
Speaker
to their husbands in the afterworld. I find it interesting that he is alluring and he does have this sort of effect on people. And we just read a novel of hers with a similar character in Dougal. But Dougal
00:15:26
Speaker
You could almost understand why he was so magnetic. I mean, he was a fast talker. He was interesting. He could wrong-foot people well and then reorient them to what he wants, but he was frenetic, whereas Patrick is very much
00:15:43
Speaker
I mean, he's described as being he sounds like he's gaunt practically. He's very milk toast. Absolutely. And much older than Alice. Alice is clearly suggested to be in her like at most early 20s from the descriptions of his life that we get and just sort of his physical description. He sounds like he's probably at least 40 or so. And so like I just find.
00:16:09
Speaker
That's just kind of neat in a way. I guess I just wanted to remark on that. We have two such similar characters in Dougal and Patrick that present in such wildly different ways. Although when Patrick is on the stand in his trial towards the end of the novel, he sounds completely different than he sounds the rest of the time. So there may be a little bit of masking going on there.
00:16:37
Speaker
A lot of the humor in the first part of the novel is Marlene because Marlene is trying to form this coalition that will testify on Patrick's behalf during the trial.
00:16:56
Speaker
Basically, the defense seems to be for Patrick that although he kind of admitted to the police that he forged this letter and used the check from Freda Flower
00:17:16
Speaker
not for the purposes that she gave it to him apparently, which was to invest, but for his personal reasons or for purposes of the spiritualism movement. But when he made that confession,
00:17:31
Speaker
he was still under a trance or he had so recently been in a trance that he was not yet out of the trance enough to really know what he was doing. And so Marlene is frantically trying to round up
00:17:50
Speaker
number of people that were with or witnessed Patrick doing his medium thing and and Can say that yes. Well anything that he would have said to the police that soon after Having been in a trance is totally unreliable because he wasn't in control of what he was of what he was saying and one of the main people that she tries to
00:18:20
Speaker
to get to testify in Patrick's defense is, I think he's her nephew, Tim. And Tim is a beneficiary that's been named in Marlene's will. So Tim is a very, very reluctant witness, does not really want to be involved. He's a bachelor, one of the bachelors.
00:18:43
Speaker
He doesn't want to be involved in this at all.
Ambiguity of Patrick's Powers and Inspirations
00:18:45
Speaker
And so she really tries constantly to strong arm him by threatening him with removing him from her will. Again, we get the threats of passing along of money being employed to keep the younger generation in line a bit more.
00:19:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this definitely seems to be an aspect of this period and something that is used for social pressure. I mean, it's not like that's not true still today, I don't think. But I think, I mean, I think on the point of the trance and Patrick coming out of it, we should say something along the lines of it's asserted pretty
00:19:30
Speaker
clearly that Patrick does have powers of some sort. Whatever else is going on, whether he is engaging in some back rooms dealings to get more information about people, which he clearly is doing on some level, he certainly can access something else. And that is just sort of like laid out a bit.
00:19:58
Speaker
One person that he clearly, I think, I mean, it's not fully stated, but it seems to be the case. A doctor was brought to one of the seances and he, Patrick, suggested there was something in the man's past, a woman named Gloria reaching out to him from beyond the grave, which so scared him that whenever Patrick comes by, no matter how busy is, the doctor will see him.
00:20:21
Speaker
And it's established that before he was married, freshly a doctor, he had an affair with this woman named Gloria who had multiple affairs, but she came pregnant and he performed the abortion, left the country and she bled out the next day. And so this is what he, the doctor does not want to be out there and somehow or other Patrick knows it. But again,
00:20:42
Speaker
It is almost too perfect that Patrick would be able to hit upon this and be able to get access to someone who could help him the way he needs help. Specifically, he wants or he gets medication. I think it's actually anti-epileptic meds, which allow him to go further into his trance state.
00:21:06
Speaker
which is a really interesting thing because of the character named Ronald that we'll get to in just a moment. But it's never stated that he did do any of this, like anything, like he that he went through the wreckers or he figured things out. And also, this is an event from 27 years prior. How could he really dig that sort of information up? I mean, there had been a world war in between. So it's it's left up in the air just how
00:21:37
Speaker
how powerful Patrick actually is, but it is pretty well stated that he does have abilities and that what they are doing in the spiritual circle isn't entirely a fraud, which
00:21:56
Speaker
is an interesting approach, especially with how much, how much spiritualism has been showing up in all of these novels to date. Um, before we got on and started recording, we were just remarking on what an amazing social circle Muriel Spark must've kept. Um, but I think it's a good bet that she, uh, that she definitely had more than a, uh, passing familiarity, uh, with, with the spiritualists.
00:22:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I think she was drinking buddies with a bunch of bachelors. I would have to think so, yes.
00:22:29
Speaker
I think that one of the things, though, to think about with Patrick, he's a very enigmatic character because he's obviously manipulating a lot of people. And we learn that he's also a pretty effective blackmailer. So while I got the same sense you did, Tom, that there's something that's not
00:22:59
Speaker
It's not 100% artificial about his abilities as a medium. He's also able to use information and obtain information in such a way that it would almost lead to some people, depending on how
00:23:22
Speaker
naive they are about the way things work in the world to think that he's kind of all-knowing and has perhaps more powers than he actually does.
Supernatural Elements in Spark's Novels
00:23:35
Speaker
Right. I mean, he certainly feeds to both Marlene and Freda more than a bit of a line when he's in his trance and speaking on behalf of their husbands. He definitely puts in personal details that
00:23:51
Speaker
uh, convince them of the validity of what he's saying. But I mean, Marlene describes it as described as when her husband was alive, that they would have massive fights all over the world, that they'd be in hotel rooms and she would be standing there screaming at him, you know,
00:24:11
Speaker
hands flailing everywhere while he sat there, glowering and making short, you know, curt, hard statements to her. But when Patrick, when she goes to her first spiritualist meeting, and Patrick goes into a trance
00:24:30
Speaker
the husband is happy and he says that she should enjoy life and trust herself that she was always supposed to be a person who was in command and in charge and now that he's gone, she needs to take on that role and she's like, of course, that's exactly who I've always been. I mean, there's an element of wish fulfillment to it, but then there are all the details that convince her that this has to be her husband and this is what he really thinks now that he's on the other side.
00:24:57
Speaker
It's an interesting combination of maybe some research, some cold reading, but then also, again, maybe something a little bit more on top of that too. It's such an ambivalent state that we're left in as readers as to how true these powers really are or are not that I think is
00:25:22
Speaker
Not really the main thrust of the novel, but it's interesting for it to be left so open-ended, I find. I was about to say I'm not sure that's been the case in other novels, but it kind of is. Memento Mori, the phone calls are left very open-ended.
00:25:44
Speaker
Elements of Robinson are similarly that way. The Comforters obviously has some incredible supernatural experiences in it. It seems that Spark really does want to put the supernatural at play in the reality of her character's lives.
Exploration of Ronald's Character
00:26:03
Speaker
It makes for a very enjoyable reading experience, I find.
00:26:08
Speaker
I agree. We probably should talk about, certainly Patrick Seton is one of the main characters in the book, but Ronald, one of the bachelors, is probably the other. He's one of the guys that's grocery shopping in that opening scene that we discussed.
00:26:31
Speaker
Well, he's a pretty unremarkable person, I think, throughout most of the book. He's not really into the spiritualism stuff. He's friends with most of the other bachelors. And one kind of interesting aside about his character, he was involved with a woman named Hildegard.
00:27:00
Speaker
she apparently wanted to take care of him and mother him too much. So they broke up because it just bothered him that she kind of was always doing everything for him, kind of arranging their theater tickets and mending his shirts and doing all these things. And when it comes to another character,
00:27:28
Speaker
that we haven't talked about much, but a young woman named Elsie, who is best friends with Alice, the woman who's pregnant to Patrick Seton, she would really like to have a relationship or at least a one night stand with Ronald. And she makes it very clear to him that that's what she would like. And Ronald is just, their interaction is so funny because he goes to her house
00:27:55
Speaker
And she says, well, do you want to sleep with me? No, not really. Would you like to come visit me again? I really doubt that will happen. He's friendly to her and even when he gets
00:28:13
Speaker
what he's come for, which is a return of the letter that was stolen from him. This is the forged letter, and Ronald, it so happens, is an expert in forgery and handwriting. Even after he has that, and he doesn't need anything from Elsie anymore. They still have a very fine conversation, but he's very, I don't know, disinterested.
00:28:43
Speaker
And there are homosexual characters in this book, but I didn't get the sense that Ronald was one. I don't know whether you did or not. No, I mean, he does. I mean, he does have relationships with with women, it seems. He also he does, however, see his friend Matthew's hair. Matthew is Irish, works for, I think, the Irish Times or the Irish News, something like that.
00:29:11
Speaker
but has this mop of black curls on the top of his head that everyone seems to want to run their fingers through. And Ronald finds himself, you know, thinking to himself, well, maybe there is such a thing as, you know, unconscious homosexuality, or maybe you can respond to certain people a certain way sort of thing. There is a whole spectrum of sexual interests, sexualities on display, just in the bachelors. I mean, it's really,
00:29:41
Speaker
Elsie is someone who seems to be looking for love and connection. Desperately wants to have a baby. Desperately wants a man to be with her fully and so far has been disappointed in every relationship, one night stand, longer term relationship she's had, something that Ronald in their conversation
00:30:05
Speaker
really does kind of warn her is going to be the case. If you're waiting for a man to be especially interesting, you're going to be waiting for quite some time. But the other interesting parallel between Ronald and Patrick is that Ronald
00:30:21
Speaker
is epileptic. So Patrick is taking these anti-epileptic meds to try and get deeper into his trance. Ronald has them in order to hold off a fit, a seizure. The opening chapter where Ronald is out shopping and runs into his friend Martin, who is actually a prosecutor and is the one that's going to prosecute the case against Patrick.
00:30:51
Speaker
It's just so neat how these like just.
00:30:55
Speaker
There's no reason for so many of these people to have any interaction with each other except that they all live in London. They all live in the same place, so they're never that far away from anyone else. There's really only one person at most between characters who have never met each other, may never actually interact in the novel, but you can almost see them like one leaving the gentleman's club at the same time the other one comes in, sort of ships passing in the night.
00:31:24
Speaker
But on the point of Ronald being kind of, I don't know, not terribly interesting, I almost feel like that's a deliberate choice on his part because of his epilepsy. He wanted to be a priest. He wanted to be any number of things, but he was advised that because of his condition, he really couldn't overexert himself. He couldn't be put into positions of power. The civil service was likely out and that his mind
00:31:52
Speaker
His mind and his life could never be first rate because he's epileptic. It seems in a way that he decided that if he can't be first rate, then he'll just sort of drift.
00:32:05
Speaker
He also has this habit when he can't sleep of putting all of his acquaintances on trial, having conversations with them, pushing and prodding, getting a sense of what they would say, how they would react. He clearly has a really interesting mind.
00:32:28
Speaker
has found himself in a place where he can't exercise it the way he wants to. And since he can't exercise it the way he wants to, he's just not going to. He's just not going to do very much. One of my favorite personality traits about Ronald is he does let the epilepsy dictate
00:32:52
Speaker
his life and his life choices. And one of the things that he's particularly paranoid about is that the epilepsy is going to have some kind of effect on his memory. And so he does all of these things like in this opening scene at the going grocery shopping that we've talked about.
00:33:11
Speaker
He tells Martin, oh, I don't make a list. And Martin's like, well, that must mean that you've got a really good memory. And anytime that someone tells Ronald that he's got a good memory, he internally swells up with pride about this because he's very much concerned that because the epilepsy is something that is happening
00:33:39
Speaker
in his brain that that's going to, that's going to debilitate him and debilitate his memory in some way.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah, he has conversations with the doctors about what this will mean in terms of of his mind, and the doctor makes the point of this, the epilepsy affects your brain, not your mind, which that interesting dualism that's at play there that also kind of factors into the ambivalence about how
00:34:11
Speaker
how Patrick actually works. How does he do his thing? The difference between laying out all the facts of a case versus the feel of it.
Trial Scene and Themes of Facts vs. Feelings
00:34:24
Speaker
There's something really interesting going on in this novel in terms of what she might be approaching or assessing through the characters, through the setup. There is a scene at the end of the novel during the trial where
00:34:38
Speaker
Ronald is laying out all the exhibits and as he's saying an exhibit a you can see this and exhibit B you see this and the judge has to keep cutting in saying exhibit B is the suggested forgery and exhibit C is this sample handwriting and like it's this very technical almost CSI sort of like and this demonstrates this and the O was started at the top on this one bound the bottom of this one and no one writes like that and on and on and on and it's
00:35:08
Speaker
impossible to follow like it is scientific it is factual it is all these things but it it almost
00:35:18
Speaker
I would have been lost if not for the judge chiming in every so often, let alone the jury, right? And I think that in a way that's sort of a microcosm of a lot of what's happening in this novel, or even our discussion of it. We could go through all the incidents in the novel and kind of suss out how they interplay and what they mean for this character or that character or what have you, but that doesn't give you the feel of the novel. The feel is generated by
00:35:45
Speaker
by the interactions, by our reading it, by how it's coming across to us. And there's something of an argument for heart over brain there, I think, that's, or I guess to keep it consistent, mind over brain there, I think. Yeah, that's really a nice way of putting it. You know, the tone of these novels is at once
00:36:15
Speaker
serious, but really kind of infused with a lot of humor too. I mean, it's not slapstick silly, like a woodhouse or something like that, like some British writers. These are people that are going about their lives and with whatever they're dealing with.
00:36:44
Speaker
The way that she interjects the humor and some of the things that they say, some of the situations, like in this one, there's a scene that goes on maybe for five or six pages where Marlene is physically chasing Tim, trying to, I guess, wrestle him
00:37:07
Speaker
to testify. And what then is quite so humorous is the next morning, the day of the trial, Tim has evaded her and refused to testify.
00:37:22
Speaker
Marlene's packing a suitcase and she's getting the hell out of town because she's not going to testify either. And this is after she spent the first three quarters of the novel doing everything in her power to
00:37:39
Speaker
to get people to support Patrick and to try to keep him out of jail. But she gets spooked, I guess, or maybe she was never really serious about testifying in his favor in the first place. I'm not quite sure, but it's things like that where she
00:37:58
Speaker
She turns the character kind of inside out and you see that what you thought was their purpose and what their intentions were probably is not the case. I think what spooks Marlene is that no one else
00:38:18
Speaker
from their circle will testify until you get a father socket, who isn't even a part of their circle. He's a rival, rival spiritualists clearly engaging in all sorts of illegal activities.
00:38:35
Speaker
But he shows up and is willing to testify and is coached to say what happened. And the thing is, Marlene knows what the sequence of events was. There was a seance at 1130 in the morning. Patrick did go into a trance. He was taken to the police station at noon, thereabouts. He may have still been in a little bit of a compromised state. That's all true. But the moment that Father Sockett, who absolutely was not there,
00:39:03
Speaker
comes into the picture and is willing to give false testimony. And then she gets a call from Tim saying, by the way, what you're about to do is really bad and could land you in prison. Once there were sticks for her, you know, that's when she picked up sticks and was was ready to. So I don't think it's that she believes less in Patrick, but I think it's
00:39:27
Speaker
She doesn't believe in spiritualism and Patrick's ability and the need for his ability at the risk of her own freedom, which I guess, fair enough, she isn't exactly the most pleasant character throughout the novel. She's very funny and she's definitely a force of nature.
00:39:48
Speaker
She's she's not the most fun person to be around, I don't think, for most of the characters.
Biases and Social Dynamics in 1950s London
00:39:53
Speaker
And no, she seems to annoy pretty much everyone. And Patrick puts up with her, I think, because she's got some money and she hosts all of the all of the sessions for him to do his thing. Two things about Father Sockett. One, it is with him that we get the the most clear
00:40:16
Speaker
idea that Patrick Seton is blackmailing people because he's clearly blackmailing Father Socket and that's why Father Socket, who is a rival, agrees to testify. The other thing about Father Socket is he's got some
00:40:35
Speaker
Well, at least one interesting bedfellow, a guy named Mike Garland, who is apparently, at least when he's with Father Sockett, a cross-dresser. I feel in this novel more so than others, there's a very anti-homosexual
00:41:00
Speaker
vein running through it. And I'm not sure that I think that Muriel Spark is that's that's reflecting her views. I think it's to me, it feels more like she's reflecting the views of 1950s London at that time. I would agree with that. Elsie specifically has a very visceral reaction to the idea of anyone who's gay.
00:41:26
Speaker
She was connected with Father's socket and then comes to his apartment one day and Garland answers the door in a dressing gown with lipstick on his face. And she, you know, decides that they're both gay and that that's the worst thing possible. And yes, there's there. There's a good bit more of biases and
00:41:51
Speaker
social hatreds on display in this novel than in some of the others, I think. Marlene has an interaction with Ronald, where when it comes out that Ronald is Roman Catholic, without missing a beat, she says that she's anti-RC. I mean, this is cropped up in some quieter ways, a sentiment against Roman Catholicism within this society, but to have it so plainly and baldly stated is, I mean, plainly and baldly are basically the same word, but anyways,
00:42:20
Speaker
Um, to have them have it so, so stated is, I mean, it was jarring, quite frankly. Um, Ronald's response was amusing and he has a range of responses that he's developed over the years. And I mean, in regards to Garland, uh, he is stated as he's the only character in the novel that is outright stated as being homosexual. Um, he did time in prison for solicitation.
00:42:46
Speaker
when he gets out of prisons, when he meets Socket and unlocks his clairvoyant powers. And again, this is where it's suggested that there is something to that. He does spend a lot of time digging up dirt on people, but that's just to make sure that he can embellish things right.
00:43:06
Speaker
It is suggested that he does have a certain level of clairvoyance going on, which again is just sort of muddying the waters a little bit. But he finds acceptance in Sockett and a way of being in the world and acceptance of his own homosexuality.
00:43:24
Speaker
More on the secret life of Patrick Seton, there's so many layers to this guy. We learn that he's got a history of stealing money from women. He's not married, even though he tells Alice that
00:43:44
Speaker
he is because he doesn't want to marry her. And that whole vein of the story is interesting because when we get into Patrick's point of view,
00:43:58
Speaker
He feels that he needs to shed Alice, that he doesn't have any intention to marry her. He doesn't want to marry her. And while if you're in England and you want to get rid of someone or excise someone from your life,
00:44:19
Speaker
you go to London and get lost in London because it's so big. But he makes the distinction that if you are already in London and you meet that person in London, there's no way that you can get rid of them. And so then he kind of concocts a very sinister little plan with the doctor that he's blackmailing.
00:44:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's funny that it's such a it's true. It is a great way to get losses to move to a city. But then in this novel, we're seeing so many people who have no relation to each other all all.
00:44:59
Speaker
spiraling around each other, all orbiting each other in celestial bodies. It's neat.
Patrick Seton's Criminal Nature
00:45:05
Speaker
Yeah, so Alice is on top of being pregnant diabetic and has to take insulin injections. And Patrick is deceitful with the doctor as to how regular Alice is with her injections.
00:45:22
Speaker
And starts asking for information about, well, what happens if she takes too much? What happens if she doesn't take enough? What about this? What about that? And kind of gained the full scope of what insulin or its lack thereof could do to her. And then is inquiring from the doctor or demanding from the doctor access to the doctor's Swiss chalet or Austrian chalet. And that after the trial, once he's acquitted, they'll go there for their honeymoon or for a holiday.
00:45:56
Speaker
there's a good chance that Patrick is gonna try and use the insulin to kill her. And then as the novel progresses, and especially during the trial, Patrick is fantasizing about murdering Alice, about freeing her spirit from her body, this idea of moving her into the air, into the spiritual, and how much better and cleaner that would be. But like, his mind takes this really sinister,
00:46:18
Speaker
And the doctor is not dumb and is figuring out that
00:46:24
Speaker
very, very dangerous turn. It occurred to me, as you were saying, that thought I'd had as I was reading and, you know, first, you were first kind of digging into Patrick. He kind of reminds me of as a version of another literary character from a novel that was published just five years previously. He has a little bit of Tom Ripley to him. There's a bit of that physical description. There's the manipulation, the blackmail, the ability to kind of
00:46:54
Speaker
really see into somebody and take advantage of what you know about them or what kind of a reading you're getting. I don't know, I was wondering what you think about. I mean, it would not be, I don't think it would be beyond Spark to have read Talented Mr. Ripley and be like, ooh, I can have fun with that character as well and take a pass at it.
00:47:18
Speaker
Well, I definitely think that Patrick does not have the physicality and attractiveness that Tom Ripley does, at least as portrayed in the movie. In the novel?
00:47:36
Speaker
he's unremarkable. Oh, really? He's, he's not terribly, he's not bad looking. He's not especially good looking. He's the kind of person that can fade in and out. He is very good at working his way into people's lives. But really the people that kind of want something like that.
00:47:54
Speaker
someone like him around. There's not the same magnetic. He has a charm, but I don't know that story I would describe as charisma. And certainly the Matt Damon Ripley has his share of charisma in that film.
00:48:11
Speaker
I found the most fascinating thing about Patrick's plan to murder Alice is how he justifies it in his own head. And the way that he does that is he says that unlike the other women that I've been involved with,
00:48:32
Speaker
I never took any money from Alice. In fact, I've provided for Alice. I've given her things.
00:48:43
Speaker
So she's mine for lack of a better chairman. I think you might even say this directly. Like I own her. I possess her. And I know that she kind of wants me to kill her. So that's why it's okay that I'm going to kill her. It's just an interesting dynamic that he feels
00:49:09
Speaker
Although apparently he doesn't feel owned by all the women who he stole off of or who have been supporting him financially. He feels that once he does that for the first time with a woman, that he has that kind of control over her life or death.
00:49:30
Speaker
This was an acute throb of anticipatory pleasure at the mental vision of Alice crumpled up on the mountainside in Austria. She is mine. I haven't taken a penny from this one. I have given to this one. I can do what pleases me. I love this one. She has agreed to trust. Crumpled up on that mountainside in Austria, Alice, overloaded with insulin, far from help, beyond the reach of a doctor, beyond help.
00:49:50
Speaker
She has agreed to it, not in so many words. But up to this point, I feel like Patrick very much came across as a fraud, a swindler, perhaps a medium, but also someone who's employing other means to get his way.
00:50:07
Speaker
a manipulator but and this happens in the last about 50 pages of the novel that we get sort of this portrait of Patrick's mind Patrick's life. He is a dangerous person. He is very clearly a very dangerous being operating in the world.
00:50:27
Speaker
The other interesting thing about the secret life of Patrick is that not only is he blackmailing people that have secrets, but he's also a police informant. There's a detective named Ferguson.
00:50:43
Speaker
who is one of the people investigating this forgery case against him. And we learned that they have a history these two because Patrick has been accused and convicted of other crimes and he's gotten out of some sticky situations
00:51:08
Speaker
by offering to provide information to Ferguson. And in fact, there's some discussion between Patrick and Ferguson that Ferguson would really like to get the
00:51:23
Speaker
the goods on father's socket, and maybe Patrick can exchange that information for not being tried for this forgery of fred of flower.
00:51:39
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, I think that goes to strengthen the idea that Patrick is employing some other means to learn about people to make sure he has the information he needs to get the reaction that he that he wants when he does go into his his trans states or at least to influence whatever is whatever it is that is that is happening in that state. I was just thinking that it would be a lot of work, but it would be interesting to create a little
00:52:09
Speaker
little web of social interactions and see if we ever see if we ever get some crossover like we began to get with Maria's with some of the characters showing up in other novels. But are we going to see Ferguson in the background of one of the other
00:52:27
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't noticed it yet. I haven't noticed a name crossover or or even like a a social situation where someone else could be. But I know the London sparks. London is pretty incestuous in terms of the characters and and who's who's hanging out with whom. So it would not be.
00:52:47
Speaker
not be beyond her at all. You be on the lookout for Ferguson.
Spark's Mastery in Storytelling and Next Reads
00:52:52
Speaker
I'm going to be on the lookout for Matthew, the onion eater. Matthew is one of the bachelors and in order to thwart his own sexual impulses, self-sabotages by eating raw onions before he meets up with women.
00:53:11
Speaker
And so the women that he meets up with, and in this case, Elsie, she tells him that, or asks him, have you been eating onions? Yeah, I can tell, but I don't mind. So that's kind of a pretty interesting personality quirk that I'm sure we'll spot if we come across it in some of the other novels.
00:53:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think we did a nice job in this episode. We should keep chatting as things occur to us, but I think we did a good job with what is a Herculean task of trying to encapsulate or really go into this novel. The number of characters, the number of interactions among those characters,
00:54:00
Speaker
those interactions later revealed to mean. So in Elsie's case, the smell of the onions actually reminded her of her uncle, who she was clearly having sex with while underage. So it made her feel very strange and not very fond of Matthew after the fact.
00:54:19
Speaker
But in the moment, it made her feel comfortable. And it just like, this is what Smart does. She's so good at not wasting a sentence or a moment to then build upon a character and build more and build more. And when she feels like she needs to interject something narratively, when it isn't driven purely by the dialogue, she detonates
00:54:46
Speaker
so much of the dialogue that has taken place and what you think a character is or isn't or what things meant or didn't mean to that person. It's just it's really masterful and it's really, really quite something. Yeah. Maybe we're patting ourselves on the back, talking about what a good job we've done. I think it's fine. You can always pat yourself on the back.
00:55:11
Speaker
Oh, what a good job we've done talking about this novel. But it's fun to talk about. It's a fun novel to read. Just like all the others that we've read so far. You know, it's a tiny little novel that you're thinking, wow, how is the
00:55:31
Speaker
effect of this novel so big and so few pages and seemingly effortlessly. I never feel like Spark is trying. I never see the effort. I don't see the scaffolding of the work.
00:55:51
Speaker
It's like it's just rolling out of her in the most effortless type of way. I'm guessing that's probably not the case, but the ease with which you feel that these stories are being narrated and the characters being
00:56:17
Speaker
identified and developed and and given these unique personalities, it's just it's pretty remarkable. Yeah, it's it's a very fun to spend this much time. I mean, we did in season one with Maria's, but this is a very different kind of writing. And it's this is just such so much fun to spend time with someone so good at their craft. And I'm
00:56:46
Speaker
very, very excited that next up we have The Prime, that we finally get to her most famous work, the only one that either of us had read previously, and I have not yet read it, so I'm looking forward to digging into that one. I don't recall any bachelors in that one, but I might be wrong. Well, we'll have to find out. All right. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Lori.
00:57:14
Speaker
you