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Episode 14: "The Comforters" by Muriel Spark
109 Plays1 year ago
We kick off our season-long read of Muriel Spark's novels this week and what a start! The Comforters is Spark's debut, published in 1956, and is, quite simply, magnificent. Lori and Tom wax heavily on how impressive this novel is and how incredibly fun it is, too! It's going to be quite a great season judging by this title alone.
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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 Hosts and Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hey Lori, how's it going today? Hi Tom, I'm doing really well. How are things with you? Uh, they're good. Yeah, um, late.
00:00:28
Speaker
Late summer, early fall in Chicago is a very nice time of year, alternating between, you know, rain and cold, which I like because I like the fall and, um, 70, upper seventies, low 80 days. So it's, uh, it's quite the mix, but it's good. It's good. And the kids are back in school and kind of getting back into the rhythm of things. So yeah, kind of just, uh, just, just the fall in Chicago with three
New Series on Muriel Spark
00:00:53
Speaker
kids.
00:00:53
Speaker
Well, new season, new us, because we are starting our new series today. And I guess we, I don't know, have we revealed who our author is that we're going to be focused on?
00:01:09
Speaker
We did last in the first episode of the season, which I hope everyone dug into and enjoyed and has had a moment to re chronicle The Murdered House. Once again, Laurie, I'm very glad that you finally forced me to read a book that's been sitting on my shelf for years because it's so good. It's so campy and so
Reading All of Spark's Novels
00:01:27
Speaker
wonderful. But yeah, we mentioned it last episode that we will be reading
00:01:31
Speaker
Pretty much all of a Muriel spark. And wow, we are off to a good start. We're going to be going through her 22 novels chronologically. And so we are starting with the comforters today. And it's a great place to start. I'd only ever read the prime of Miss Jean Brody before, wanted to read more.
Biography of Muriel Spark
00:01:56
Speaker
And when we were thinking about
00:01:58
Speaker
What author to tackle next we knew we wanted to do a woman and we brainstormed a bit and came up with this and Wow, and this this is an incredible debut novel. Yeah, I had not read anything by Miro spark. So
00:02:15
Speaker
We were kind of rolling the dice a little bit with this commitment to 22 novels. And who knows, maybe I would absolutely hate the writing style or what have you. And to be frank, I wasn't that worried and I had no reason to be. This is an incredible book. I finished it and for the purposes of not
00:02:35
Speaker
not reading ahead as it were, I did not immediately launch into the next one, which I believe is Robinson. But I am so excited just to keep going with all of her books. This is one of the most fertile imaginations I've encountered in some time.
Discussion on The Comforters
00:02:53
Speaker
It's just such an incredible writing style. We've had very, very good luck with debuts, I think, in our recommendations so far. I mean, I think we just have
00:03:03
Speaker
You know, good antennae, very good taste. If I do say so for us myself, but this is, I don't know, uh, of the debuts we've been, we've done on this podcast. This might be my favorite, quite frankly. It's just such a shockingly, shockingly good, funny, deep, incredible book. But I think before we get going, Lori, you're going to give us a little bit of context, a little bit of a elevator bio on a Muriel Spark. Yeah.
00:03:33
Speaker
I thought it might be nice to do that. I really didn't know much about her life before we decided to undertake this deep dive into her work. The Comforters, her debut novel was published in
00:03:47
Speaker
1957, but let me go back to the beginning. Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918. She taught at a private school, later finding employment as a personal secretary. In 1937, she went to Southern Rhodesia to marry, returning to England in 1944 after her divorce.
00:04:13
Speaker
She then entered the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office and worked on various forms of subtle propaganda. Her first interest was in poetry, and after World War II, she became General Secretary of the Poetry Society and Editor of Poetry Review. Her own collected poems, One, was published in 1967.
00:04:35
Speaker
In 1951, she won a short story competition run by The Observer, and from then on she also wrote fiction.
00:04:44
Speaker
Spark traveled widely and lived in Italy until her death. She received several honorary degrees, some in Oxford and London, and many in Scotland, and was elected a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1993. She died on April 15, 2006.
00:05:13
Speaker
Our listeners can't see our faces, obviously, but when Laurie mentioned the work that Muriel went into for the British government at towards the end of World War II, she kind of glanced up from her page at me with a little bit of a smirk and a twinkle as we both think, think immediately back to your face tomorrow.
00:05:35
Speaker
to vow to all those things and I don't know the kind of marvelous serendipities that happen in a in a reading life I think I mean in life in general but there's something about there's something about books that things kind of come back around again when you're when you're rather at least expecting them yeah kind of neat I think
00:05:56
Speaker
Well, this short bio, and I'll credit the British Council, their literature pages for the summary that I just read, and I kind of paraphrase some of it, but I really want to read about her life now. I mean, this raises more questions than it answers. Move to Southern Rhodesia to marry, and then come back to London seven years later because you divorced.
00:06:25
Speaker
I mean, she converted Catholicism to get married, which puts her in this tradition of British writers who converted to Catholicism, and then that becomes an aspect of their private and public lives in very interesting ways, which also dovetails with some of the action and the comforters.
00:06:46
Speaker
There's there's a lot. I mean, it's a hell of a life. She charted a good chunk of the British Empire simply like in her, which it feels like a lot of people did in that time period. But there's so much about her time that she seems to have lived in and.
00:07:03
Speaker
I'm trying to think of how exactly I'm phrasing it because it kind of cuts into a point I want to make about the novel
Spark's Style and Literary Traditions
00:07:08
Speaker
eventually. Or maybe I'll just start. I think in some ways this novel is her jamming together and bringing together so many elements of British writing tradition, so many different kinds of novels into one
00:07:23
Speaker
really beautiful streamlined masterpiece. And I feel like there are elements of her personal life that
00:07:33
Speaker
I don't know. Just hearing that, I would like to read more to know if this is accurate. If I'm putting too much into it, this is like the initial blush of being so excited by a writer. But there are elements of her personal life that seem to also chart and pick up a lot of the elements of being British. Born in Scotland, lived in Southern Rhodesia, settled basically in London until she eventually moved to Italy, if I remember correctly, from some other things I read. Her wife seems to pull together so many of those threads as well.
00:08:00
Speaker
That was a very rambly way of doing it. So I'm going to be quiet for a moment. Well, and won't it be fascinating, Tom? I'm excited because we'll get to see. She published novels over the course of 45 years. The Comforters was was published in 1957. And of course, that's the novel we'll be talking about today.
Prolific Output and Consistency
00:08:23
Speaker
Her final novel,
00:08:25
Speaker
called The Finishing School was published in 2004. And it's just gonna be really fascinating to just kind of watch what she does with these works over the course of 45 years. It's so cool. 22 novels over 45 years is a hell of a clip. I mean, that's basically novel every two years. So even more to your point, Lori,
00:08:55
Speaker
we're going to be getting almost a check-in every 24 months or so on where she's at, where her writing life is, all of those things. I mean, it's very cool. It's very neat. And it tracks the last half of the 20th century. That's a pretty
00:09:15
Speaker
phenomenal, impressive, interesting thing as well. Outside of the genre fiction, which I think I mentioned in the past, I hate that distinction, but it's useful for its purpose. Outside of the genre fiction writers, what literary novelists publish every two years that you can think of at this point?
00:09:37
Speaker
I guess Brian Washington is almost at that clip currently in terms of like the newer crop, but I would guess that he's about to slow down. Colson Whitehead maybe. Yeah. I feel like Colson is much more in like he publishes in rushes, right? Like it feels like he goes quiet for four-ish years and then there'll be like three novels in five years and then he goes quiet for a little bit.
00:10:02
Speaker
But it's totally one thing, I think, to publish five novels in 10 years at the clip of one novel every other year, but to sustain that for 45 years. To maintain that is, I mean, it's wild. It feels like madness. It feels like some kind of, like, lageria almost. But I don't know.
00:10:31
Speaker
if this first novel is anything to go by, and I think it is, this might be the most impressive divine form of lageria I've ever encountered, quite frankly. Yeah. Yeah. It's really awesome.
The Comforters: More Than a Crime Caper
00:10:44
Speaker
And as we embark on talking about the comforters, one of the words that I use to describe this novel is a crime caper.
00:10:57
Speaker
And it is that, but it's also so much more. So I wouldn't at all call The Comforters a genre novel. It's not a mystery by any stretch, but I don't know, Tom, do you agree with the term crime caper as one
00:11:18
Speaker
only one possible many ways to describe this novel. I mean, I think this is a multifaceted novel. I mean, I think Crime Caper is absolutely a way to describe it. It's also got elements of the ghost story to it. In the descriptions of some of the settings, there's almost a gothic quality at times. This is kind of what I was trying to get at earlier that she is pulling in so many different kinds of novels into this into this one
00:11:46
Speaker
book. And it is so dialogue heavy. It is so driven by the conversations and, but not just the conversations, the allusions of what people are saying, what they're withholding, but also what the writer, whoever that might be of this novel, is withholding. The first chapter sets it up as sort of a, I'm not even sure what, like a visit to the countryside. And then within the first
00:12:14
Speaker
Two pages of the second chapter, everything that took place in that first chapter is completely turned on its head. And suddenly you're dealing with a completely different understanding of what one of the characters was observing as he was interacting with all these other people who
00:12:30
Speaker
continue to appear and peel back like onions all their layers throughout the rest of the novel. I think Crime Caper works really, really well and maybe even locked box mystery. I think there's a lot of that going on there too. Well, maybe let's start at the beginning and talk about the opening scenes when Lawrence is visiting his grandmother Jap.
00:12:55
Speaker
It opens with Lawrence waking up to his grandmother chatting with a baker basically and asking for clearly making like a different order than she usually does and explaining because it's her grandson is there. And Lawrence Manders is visiting his grandmother Louisa Japp in the countryside.
00:13:13
Speaker
He seems to have a job on the radio, he is on holiday, and it's said immediately that he's very inquisitive and snoopy. He likes to get into other people's business. He likes to figure everything out about what's going on around him. Once again, we're dealing with people who like to read into other people's lives, as it were.
00:13:34
Speaker
And I thought at first, when they were talking about him kind of like snooping around the room before he goes downstairs for breakfast, that, you know, is this an 11, 12-year-old kid? Like, who is this? But Lawrence is, I don't know, 20, 23, something like that? I actually put a little, I almost feel later than that. I would say like 25 of the youngest. I mean, it just seems like there's enough
00:14:01
Speaker
And as it progresses, the history between Caroline are soon to be introduced, frankly, like lead character. I don't know. That's a hard thing to apply in this novel. But his history with Caroline suggests that they
00:14:19
Speaker
They have to be in their mid-20s at this point, at the very youngest. But yeah, he very much comes across as a precocious pre-teen, getting into everyone else's business, almost an encyclopedia brown type, it feels like at times. And it would be almost impossible to explain to our listeners who haven't read this book how unique of a character Louisa Japp is.
00:14:46
Speaker
First off, it's important, I think, to point out that Lawrence is quite a wealthy young man. His father is founder and CEO, I guess you would say, of Mander's
00:15:02
Speaker
figs in syrup, which apparently is a big thing, a big delicacy in England, and the families kind of made their name and fortune on that particular product. But Louisa Japp lives very modestly outside of London in the country, like you said, and really, although they fuss at her and they want to give her money and help support her, and they clearly have the means to do so,
00:15:31
Speaker
She rejects all that she seems very self-contained and very in control of her environment of I mean just of her life she does not seem to need any money from her daughter and son-in-law she just seems kind of
00:15:52
Speaker
And it's not like she's contented. It just seems like she's independent, which on top of how she speaks and conducts herself and a lot more of what we find out about her, she just comes across as the coolest 78 year old you're ever going to meet, you're ever going to encounter.
00:16:08
Speaker
A quick note on the Mander's family line of business. I actually picked up a Fig and Manchego croissant this morning to use as dessert tonight at a bakery across from my kids' school. And it didn't even freaking occur to me until this moment what I'd done and what I just read. So I'm amused by that too.
00:16:32
Speaker
That sounds delicious. Speaking of the figs and syrup, one of my favorite little anecdotes, and there's so many when it comes to Louisa Japp, is that she one day just sends her own homemade figs and syrup
00:16:49
Speaker
To the mandras family so that they can try her homemade recipe which kind of made me laugh and was seem like maybe you know. Sending your homemade ketchup to the heinz family or something if you're married into the heinz family right like i mean it's.
00:17:08
Speaker
It's very funny. You can view it however you want. It's a tongue-in-cheek shot, like, you know, just sort of gentle jibing. It's a shot across the bow. It's whatever the person wants to take it as. And I feel like Louisa Japp knows that, knows every register of the, of the meaning of that particular gift. Yeah, she's a fantastic, fantastic character.
00:17:32
Speaker
And this is maybe jumping the gun ever so slightly. This is a novel that deals with religion, Catholicism in particular, but also conversion.
Themes of Catholicism and Conversion
00:17:43
Speaker
And Lawrence has fallen away from the church. Louise is not part of the church. Her daughter Helena converted in order to marry Edwin Manders, their son Lawrence, as I just said, was raised in the church and seems to have fallen away from it. And then Caroline, who came up just a few moments ago,
00:18:01
Speaker
is a recent convert to the church, which has complicated her and Lawrence's personal relationship more than a bit. But again, I think I might be jumping the gun ever so slightly.
00:18:13
Speaker
So, Snoopy Lawrence is hanging out with grandma, kind of taking a break from London. And you get this sense that it's a little bit of a break from this kind of more recent pulling apart that his love interest Caroline has instigated because she's feeling that she wants to be closer to the church and maybe even become a nun or devote her life
00:18:38
Speaker
to religion. But Lawrence doesn't waste time while he's staying with his grandmother to kind of, I guess you could say, pick up some suspicions about what the heck his grandmother might be up to. And she's the least character that I would think that Lawrence might assume would be up to something devious. But nonetheless, it seems
00:19:07
Speaker
he's got his suspicions. Yeah, this bridge group that he comes across with his grandmother, Mr. Webster, the baker whom he heard earlier in the day, and a father and son, Mervyn and Andrew, it just seems weird to him this this grouping. And after he leaves the room, they have this very odd conversation about
00:19:30
Speaker
Well, your grandson being here is complicated. Should we postpone things and like almost like skull and dagger and like, you know, like, but what could they possibly be getting up to? And so Lawrence is snooping and his suspicions seem to have some founding. But what precisely it is, isn't revealed until he sends a letter to Caroline as to what exactly he thinks is
00:19:58
Speaker
is going on. Oh, and just as another callback to our previous season, there are a lot of missed letters and not misaddressed, but folks reading letters that they shouldn't read, letters that don't quite make it to the person they're supposed to leading to catastrophic results. I don't know. It's almost a shame that in this day and age of email and text message and the like,
00:20:24
Speaker
the potential for a missive gone awry has been reduced rather substantially. Well, and there's no reason for the reader to kind of think it at the time, but two of the bridge party, Mervyn and Andrew Hoagland, and their last name is significant here. Mervyn, it seems, is a single father, and Andrew is his crippled adult son.
00:20:52
Speaker
I think particularly raise Lawrence's radar. These two just seem weird and how does my grandmother know them and why are they talking while I'm present here in this rather cryptic way?
00:21:11
Speaker
So I suppose my initial statement of it is snooping that eventually it comes true that there's something going on there that it seemed a little bit out of nowhere. I don't know. I think when I was initially reading that first chapter, I was still getting my bearings as to what was going on. I think this is a good moment to talk about, at least her style in this novel. Spark has an incredibly light touch. There's a way in which this novel just tumbles along.
00:21:37
Speaker
leaving you to realize what you've read maybe a few paragraphs later.
Celebration of Spark's Writing
00:21:42
Speaker
And I think that's just a function of how tightly structured and its construction is so, so good. But there are definitely moments in reading this novel where I felt like I got multiple pages and then suddenly realized that a sentence I'd read four pages previous was
00:22:00
Speaker
turning the key on an element of the story that we hadn't even known was there yet. This is just a brilliantly put together work. It's something incredibly special in that regard. So we switched to Caroline and Caroline is hanging out in a Benedictine
00:22:19
Speaker
Priory you know kind of I guess wearing her hair shirt for a lack of a better term She's she's you know sleeping in a in a cold room You know being served gruel with these kind of depressing and
00:22:36
Speaker
cast of characters, one of whom she knows from being involved with Lawrence. And this is a woman named Georgiana Hogg. And I would say, from my perspective, these characters are almost universally appealing to me. They're so quirky and have such interesting personalities. There's not much to like, though, about Georgiana Hogg. No, not at all.
00:23:05
Speaker
Caroline's immediate reaction to Georgina is, I don't even think revulsion is quite right. I mean, it's immediate distrust and distaste. And it's not entirely because of her physical presence, though that's suggested to be not exactly
00:23:24
Speaker
the greatest, it's much more that there's a meanness of spirit, a bullying nature that is immediately evident in how Hogg interacts with everyone else around her, how she tries to control or insinuate control over Caroline very, very quickly, very early in their interactions.
00:23:46
Speaker
leading frankly to Caroline just leaving like seeing that there's whatever she is there to get out of this experience is not going to happen in no small part because of Georgina Hogg's presence.
00:24:01
Speaker
Yeah, Georgina Hogg, I guess, I couldn't quite tell. I believe that she's just volunteering at the monastery, but perhaps she has a real job. I don't know, but she's around all the time. And she's very judgy. And in particular with Caroline, she's very judgy about her relationship with Lawrence and the romantic relationship
00:24:25
Speaker
that they had and how that's not really wholesome and godly in Georgiana's viewpoint.
00:24:41
Speaker
I couldn't point to the exact passage, but there's almost a suggestion that Caroline doesn't quite understand things as well as she would if she weren't a convert the way that Georgina kind of gets it. Again, this is the bullying, the controlling nature, the assumption that because Georgina has been in the faith either since the start or for a much longer time that she knows better than
00:25:07
Speaker
than Caroline. And as we learn more about Georgina Hogg and how she has lived her life and
00:25:13
Speaker
kind of who and what she is, that becomes even more apparent that like she's someone who has been trying to control the people around her for a very long time and in some ways hides behind other people's charity, other people's kindness while really offering none of that to any. I mean, like you said, she's not at all a pleasant or attractive character.
00:25:40
Speaker
although a brilliantly constructed one in how an attractive she actually is. Well, and you, Tom, talked about how vibrant the dialogue is in this book, but Spark has a really interesting eye for detail. And if you don't mind, I'm just going to read a short passage here.
00:26:02
Speaker
This is from the point of view of Caroline. The little parlor in the Benedictine Priory smelt strongly of polish. The four chairs, the table, the floors, the window frame gleamed in repose of the polish, as if these wooden things themselves had done some hard industry that day before dawn.
00:26:23
Speaker
Outside, the late October sun lit up the front garden strip, and Caroline, while she waited in the parlor, could hear the familiar incidents of birds and footsteps from the suburban street. She knew this parlor well with its polish. She had come here weekly for three months to receive her instruction for the church.
00:26:43
Speaker
She washed a fly a light on the table for a moment. It seemed Caroline to be in a highly dangerous predicament, as if it might break through the glossy surface on which it skated, but it made off quite easily. It's just
00:26:59
Speaker
the writing is just so great. It's stunning, right? I mean, it gives you insight almost into Caroline, like what she notices, what she takes in. It grounds the scene so thoroughly that the conversation that's to take place, you can see it, you can feel it. It's, I mean, a debut novel, really, like this is
00:27:22
Speaker
This is an old hands work. This is someone who knows their craft incredibly well. Yeah, it's phenomenal. It's fantastic. Maybe all authors should spend some time in southern Rhodesia in their youth to kind of become a great writer. I mean, living broadly, living a lot probably helps quite a bit, I suppose.
00:27:47
Speaker
To be fair, she wasn't a kid when this novel was written. I mean, she was born in 1918 and this was published in 1957, so she had some lived experience. But yeah, for a first novel, the writing is really exceptional.
00:28:05
Speaker
And obviously, being the journal secretary of the Poetry Society and editing the Poetry Review, she more than had her chops, right? But it's still something for a debut to have worked out so many of the kinks. I mean, this would be, if you told me this was her fifth novel, I wouldn't bat an eye. It feels
00:28:29
Speaker
It feels expert, and that's not something that you often come across with debuts. Usually there's a rough edge or two, a moment or two that you kind of wonder about a storyline that doesn't seem entirely necessary. All this is a very, it's very tightly written. And what's funny is that in a way we are talking about it as if it, in some ways, is a
00:28:54
Speaker
more in the realist tradition. And like, I mean, we're talking so much about the structure and how tight it is and all these things. But very quickly, Spark throws a lot of curveballs at us right down to the very, a character questioning and bringing this to other characters,
Caroline's Meta Experience and Voices
00:29:16
Speaker
their existence as an actual person and not just a character and a work of fiction.
00:29:24
Speaker
Yeah, so in addition to kind of trying to be a devout Catholic, Caroline is also writing a book, and she's writing a non-fiction book on the form of the novel.
00:29:39
Speaker
She's been writing this for some time. She's lately kind of gotten a bit frustrated and hasn't been able to focus on it as much as she might like. But when she leaves the Priory, mostly, as you said, because she doesn't want to hang out with Georgina Hogg anymore and Miss Hogg is like, you know, camped out at the Priory because of the work that she's doing there, she goes home
00:30:06
Speaker
And she starts hearing voices while she's trying to sleep. And these voices are so disturbing to her that she leaves the house in the middle of the night and she goes to visit her very interesting friend, and Lawrence's friend too, a guy named The Baron. So I don't know, where do you want to tackle first here, Tom? The voices in Caroline's head or The Baron?
00:30:34
Speaker
Well, I think let's start with the voices. Because it's not just voices. She's also hearing a typewriter. And she hears the click. It almost seems to introduce itself with a click clack. And then the typewriter, she can hear, she feels like she's hearing one voice in different registers. So just this sort of cacophony, but she feels it's one person speaking, just trying out different tones and whatnot.
00:31:02
Speaker
But what the voice is doing is narrating her actions, the actions around her. And for our purposes as the reader, the voice is repeating what we've already read or what we're about to read. And she hears it outside. It sounds like it's just outside a room. She can't figure out what's going on.
00:31:27
Speaker
She flees to the Baron because she knows Lawrence is off with his grandmother. And the Baron keeps very odd hours, so she assumes that he'll be awake. But these voices don't stop. And they bother her once she's able to start figuring out exactly what she's hearing and how it functions and how it's describing her. Because it starts to make her question, what is happening here? What am I?
00:31:54
Speaker
Why is this voice suggesting that I am somehow part of a narrative of a fiction? And for everyone else around her, they all take different views on what's happening to her, mostly fairly benign, actually. Allow the reaction, the Baron's reaction for the most part is, eh,
00:32:15
Speaker
We're all a little mad. This is just your way of expressing your madness, so be it. Eventually, she begins to call it the typing ghost. After a pretty significant event in the midway point of the book, she seemingly comes to peace with it, or at least she's attempting to work.
00:32:33
Speaker
around and with and through it and take advantage of it and doesn't really bring it up to anyone other than Baron after that point. It's presented in such a way that in other novels, it would very much come across as the first sign that this person is having some kind of a break. And certainly to some characters in the novel, it is the suggestion of a break of some kind, right? But it is so clever and what
00:33:03
Speaker
what the voice repeats to Caroline is so specific that it is subverting the very novel that it is a part of. It is altering the course of the novel by its presence, which is so, so, so cool, such a cool, like,
00:33:23
Speaker
neat trick. I don't know, Laurie, like we both read a lot and we read some really great stuff and we read some not so great stuff. And I had a childlike glee reading this novel and just letting Spark take me through the paces of what she wanted to do and what she wanted to have fun with.
00:33:46
Speaker
It feels like a novel that was fun to write, that she was having fun with. And with the purpose of it, was fun and was joy. Which, I don't know, in the context of like writing in Britain at the time, I mean, this is the period of the angry young men, John Osborne, Alan Silatose.
00:34:05
Speaker
collection is I think gets published two years later or something like that that features the loneliness of the long distance runner. You've got that going on. And then you have this thing drop in. And it's it's such a wildly different, different kind of work of fiction. Yeah. And as you brought up Tom in kind of our back and forth, as we were preparing for this episode,
00:34:30
Speaker
The meta elements of this book are just so fun because, of course, Caroline is trying to write this book about the form of the novel. So that's in her head. And then she's got this kind of voice with an accompanying typewriter sound that's kind of telling her
00:34:53
Speaker
What is happening in her own life as if her life were were like a novel or were a novel and The things that it it kind of reports to her are things that really explore These various aspects of the form of the novel. It's just
00:35:13
Speaker
It's just really damn smart. So Caroline goes to see the Baron and they had this conversation. The Baron is presented as a
00:35:24
Speaker
Yeah, another not quite English Englishman. He is from the Belgian Congo, I think they establish he loves seems to love all things English because of their eccentricity and he goes becomes even and he's especially eccentric. He had been living with a woman named Eleanor Hogarth, which is your first
00:35:45
Speaker
kind of clue as a reader that things are about to start intersecting in very strange ways. But, I mean, his presence in the novel, because he appears to be, and it eventually comes out that part of the reason Eleanor left him was because she's convinced that he is a, they keep calling it a diabolist, but what we would probably in the States just call a straight up Satanist, that he is playing
00:36:07
Speaker
the organet Black Masses for Satanist rituals. And eventually it comes out that he's just interested in the psychology of it or so he claims. But this is one of the first points of contact or really the primary point of contact we get with Lawrence and Caroline's life before her conversion.
Lawrence and Caroline's Past Relationship
00:36:27
Speaker
They were living together, Helena, Lawrence's mother who plays a very large role in this novel. And this is
00:36:34
Speaker
And I think this is something that I just want to get out there. We are not going to be able to cover even a portion of what happens in this. This is 214 pages. And it feels like, as I'm thinking about how much we would have to cover, it feels like some people's 500 page masterwork. There's just so much here and so many characters and so much life. I mean, she makes these people real in some really significant and interesting ways.
00:37:02
Speaker
So there's a lot we're going to skip. Read it. Read it, listen to this, read it, come back and listen to it again. There's so much happening in this novel.
00:37:16
Speaker
So Lawrence and Caroline were together. His mother kind of made peace with it. They actually described her Catholicism as the kind that sort of fits everything into place so that she doesn't have cause to really be offended by anything. She may not like something, but she just sort of accepts it and moves on.
00:37:35
Speaker
which clearly has rubbed off on Lawrence and his way of moving through the world. But the Baron was part of this bougie, hipstery, intelligentsia set that Lawrence and Caroline were a part of. And he seems to be the one that they are both most comfortable with and still really in contact with. He owns a bookstore, which makes him by default cool, I would say.
00:37:59
Speaker
You think that if Lawrence were in town, she would have run to Lawrence's when she got freaked out about hearing these voices in the middle of the night. She does go to the Baron and she's in the midst of this possibly devoting her life to the Catholic church and trying to be more
00:38:21
Speaker
devout and then you've got the Baron who she goes to for succor and comfort and he is an occultist who is obsessed with black magic. And you're right that he says that it's just an academic thing with him. He just finds it fascinating. He doesn't really participate in the rituals for the sake of any kind of belief system that he has.
00:38:48
Speaker
The contrast is interesting and also the fact that they can still very much maintain a friendship, even though they seem to be on opposite ends of this spiritual arc. And Lawrence and she also, they're friends with benefits at this point, I guess you would say, since they're not living together anymore. But the whole issue of religion and Lawrence's father
00:39:17
Speaker
is also a very devout guy that goes and takes these retreats from time to time and just like leaves, the family leaves the city and goes to a monastery and hangs out for weeks at a time. It's kind of this thing that everyone's used to him doing, I think at least once a year.
00:39:39
Speaker
By the time Edwin Manders is himself a character, not just someone spoken about, it's towards the end of the novel. And I think it's much more than once a year at this point. It seems like he is almost monthly taking off. I mean, he has stepped back as the day-to-day manager of the family company, still the owner, founder, what have you.
00:40:02
Speaker
but he is not the CEO at this point because he's never there. He's always, and he reflects that he would not have made it as a religious, that there are so many elements of religious life that don't sit with him, but this idea of almost vacationing. He vacations to monasteries, to retreats, to pilgrimages. As you're saying, there's so many different reflections of
00:40:27
Speaker
religious life and the expressions thereof. A lot of the actual, what would count, I think, as religious conversation occurs between Caroline and the Baron. And it's really built around the Baron being convinced that he is seeing magical acts performed directly in front of him, specifically around Mervyn Hogarth.
00:40:53
Speaker
Given how much time we spend with Mervyn, the idea that he is some sort of magus in a satanic temple is
00:41:02
Speaker
very amusing, but for the Baron, it's dead serious. But the Baron feels that he sees these things happen in front of him. And frankly, he gets a little tweaked at a couple points and suggests that what he believes is taking place is much more real than what Caroline believes is taking place because that's something that only she is experiencing. And her retort is very much one of, I don't need anyone else.
00:41:29
Speaker
to know that this is happening. I believe it. Therefore, that is sufficient for me, which frankly is quite a conversation around religious faith, especially Christian religious faith, and especially moving between different denominations and dealing with Catholicism in particular. So there's a lot happening in this novel that's
00:41:58
Speaker
only sort of
00:42:00
Speaker
suggested by the dialogue and by the actions of the characters. And really enhanced, I think, by the introduction of the typing ghost who may or may not be a figment of Caroline's mind or may actually be someone, a character, because it's on the page, a character tipping off Caroline that she herself is just a character.
00:42:29
Speaker
So while we have Lawrence getting suspicious, we have Caroline having this long sleepless night talking to the Baron and she grows suspicious about something independently that the Baron says. And it kind of has to do with the Baron's fondness
00:42:50
Speaker
for Mrs. Jap, Lawrence's grandmother. He describes to her this hat that Mrs. Jap was wearing two years ago, the last time he saw her. Caroline is immediately suspicious because
00:43:11
Speaker
She knows that Mrs.
Suspicion and Smuggling Operation
00:43:14
Speaker
Japp just recently bought this very unusual descriptive hat because she was with her when she bought it, and she bought it much more recently than two years ago, indicating that the Baron is not quite being truthful about the last time he saw Grandma Japp.
00:43:33
Speaker
Caroline sends a telegram to Lawrence asking him to get in touch because something very mysterious is taking place, which is precisely the telegram that he sent to her. And he immediately thinks that there's some sort of confusion at the post because
00:43:50
Speaker
he got back the same telegram he sent to her and so on. So just weird things happening and coincidences and whatnot. So he comes back to see her, to check in, to see what's going on, and they go out one evening and run into, and this chapter, this portion portrays a London nightlife that sounds fantastic.
00:44:18
Speaker
They're bouncing around from place to place, running into friends, wearing people they don't want to see, people they do want to see. It's very lively. It's this burst of vibrancy and color. It feels like a London that is available to the upper middle class to wealthy and folks who are striving or in some ways connected to it. There's just, I don't know, there's a,
00:44:42
Speaker
There's a liveliness to it that is really just intoxicating, I thought, as I was reading it. But while they're out, they run into Lawrence's Uncle Ernest and Eleanor Hogarth, formerly partner to the Baron. And Ernest and Eleanor are basically like running a dance school of sorts together.
00:45:07
Speaker
Eleanor was Caroline's roommate in college. Ernest is gay. And the family largely ignored him for most of his life up until he essentially indicated that he was no longer having relationships with men. So whatever else he is, he's not committing the physical act that they find to be immoral at that point.
00:45:34
Speaker
But in the course of the conversation, Eleanor has her lighter out, and Lawrence kind of fixates on it because he feels that the crest looks exactly like something he saw on Mervinhugarth. And he's wondering if there's some sort of connection. And there are all sorts of connections, all sorts of things like kind of spiral out in every possible direction.
00:45:54
Speaker
But for the purposes of what we're talking about right now, when he brings this up to Caroline, she gets really hostile because she feels that this is
00:46:06
Speaker
If there is someone writing them as characters that this sucks, that this is entirely too pat, too neat, too cute, why are all these hints being dropped in all these different places for us to tie the mystery together in a neat little bow, write down to the fact that she even says, the Baron says something about your grandmother that would completely contribute to what you're saying, but I refuse to tell you what it is.
00:46:32
Speaker
because no, I'm going to push. She's pushing back on the idea of being a character. This is not the form of a novel that would be any kind of novel she would want to read.
00:46:42
Speaker
No, she finds it. She decries the style, the construction. She basically insults the writer, who then, the ghost typist, reflects on the fact of how hurt their feelings are that Caroline doesn't like how they write. I mean, are you all familiar with the Spanish philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno? No.
00:47:06
Speaker
He was a Basque. This was one of the things that happened when I got a little too into Javier Marías as I asked some friends who were specializing in Spanish literature about him, and they put me onto Unamuno. He was Basque. A philosopher wrote a bunch of novels and fictions, but he has one in particular where
00:47:25
Speaker
he's writing this story, and the character is very upset with how things are going and walks up to a house and knocks on the door. And the person that answers is Unamuno. And the character then proceeds for the next chapter to basically winch at Unamuno about like, I wouldn't do these things. Why are you making me do this stuff? Like what is happening here? And Unamuno's response is, dude, you're my character. You will do what I say you are to do. Just
00:47:52
Speaker
throwing that in there as like, when this stuff started to happen, my mind immediately raced back to to another Spaniard. Man, would he be angry if you wonder if he would actually be angry if he was called a Spaniard being like such a fervent boss, but that's a different question. And what years was he writing in?
00:48:11
Speaker
Oh, he was the early part of the 20th century. I believe he gave a speech at a university right before the Civil War and he quickly figured out that the folks there were on the part of the phalanges and then he changed his speech and decried what they were doing. I don't
00:48:36
Speaker
I don't think he lived past the 40s. I think he was already in his 60s. I think he was born late 19th century. That's okay. You've already established the point that I wanted to make and not that two data points are proof, but when I'm reading all these meta elements of this book, I'm thinking
00:48:57
Speaker
Dang, why can't writers today who are trying to do the meta thing do it this well? And I think it's because it's all kind of so self-serious or so often is today when people are trying to play with meta kind of stuff. And I would not call this book silly.
00:49:23
Speaker
But she's having just like such a bloody blast with it. I mean, it's I mean, it's fun. Like it is fun. She is having fun. We are having fun. A lot of the characters are having a lot of fun. There is something like.
00:49:41
Speaker
joyous about the experience of this novel. And I mean that like on every possible register, like she is the writer, I guess that the writers having fun, the characters were having fun. And yeah, I mean, I think there there is a way that you could pull a lot of what she is playing with. And this idea of how reality actually functions that were holograms, and that it's that you can view time as a stack of pictures. And I talked to my
00:50:07
Speaker
Bizarrely, I talk to my kids. That's the analogy I use for my kids because they keep asking me about quantum reality and whatever because that's just how the internet makes their brains these days, I guess. And that can all be very serious and scary.
00:50:21
Speaker
But why does it have to be? Like, why can't it just be a really good time? Why can't we have some tongue-in-cheek fun with it? I mean, and initially, Caroline takes it very seriously and is very unhappy with it. I think by the end, she's much more like, no, this is actually okay.
00:50:40
Speaker
almost like I can work with this if this is what it is and it doesn't have to be this. But she initially takes it so seriously and is so frustrated by it that she refuses to tell Lawrence what she knows that way it can with further Lawrence's theory that his grandmother is the ringleader of a gang of smugglers, which seems wild, but proves to be true. He sees evidence in the bread. He found diamonds in a loaf of bread, which, again,
00:51:10
Speaker
is really fun and really weird and totally Louisa Jap. Only she would think to hide the diamonds in a loaf of bread. She actually expresses a comment at one point about the police that really just sort of sums up her character, where towards the end of the novel, she's actually like telling
00:51:31
Speaker
everything that she did, the entire shape of it. She actually says to him like, I'm so sorry, you were so close to figuring us out. Like clearly she loves her grandson in no small part because he is like her and he wants to like figure these things out. But
00:51:47
Speaker
Um, once everything, once the diamonds were smuggled back into the country via various means, uh, she took even greater pains inside of the, uh, of England to make sure that what they were doing wasn't visible. And Lawrence was like, but even though you're here and her response was, Oh, well, you know, the Kosovo is a really nice guy, but all cops stick together at the end. And I'm like, okay, Ms. Jap. And I think the very next line is, and, and Louisa is, I think today's scriber is half gypsy.
00:52:16
Speaker
which can be any number of things at that time. I mean, could be she's traveling, Roma, any number, but a basic distrust of the police, which, I don't know, in some ways that might make this novel even more modern now than it was then. Right. But I don't know.
00:52:36
Speaker
I am doing the thing that Maria's decries. I've lost my precise starting point and failing to circle back to it. Well, we've kind of gotten all over the place with the meta and it doesn't have to be serious. It can be fun.
00:52:54
Speaker
And then we got into, you know, oh, go ahead. Did you remember? I remembered it. This is the point of refusing to make things all tidy and bring them back, bring it all back together. Lawrence suggests that Caroline returned with him to his grandmother's house, both to help him figure out what's going on, but also to give her a little bit of a break. I mean, he's concerned that she's hearing things.
00:53:20
Speaker
And the typing ghost chimes in with, they left by train that evening and did it as a and she Caroline becomes furious. They will not travel the way that they've been prescribed to travel. And then all sorts of happenstance continues to kick in, preventing them from doing anything other than what was suggested, all leading to them leaving much later in the day than they ever planned.
00:53:49
Speaker
and ending up in a really bad traffic accident. Badly breaks her leg, lands her in the hospital for a week, breaks his ribs, and it almost feels like, at that moment, a punishment from the writer for the character going against what they'd already laid out. The character just wouldn't behave, wouldn't do what she was supposed to do.
00:54:15
Speaker
which is just so very, very clever and very smart. And I probably have exhausted my list of superlatives for what NiroSpark is doing here.
00:54:29
Speaker
Well, I know we don't want to spoil the story or give all of the plot points away to the listeners, but what other things do we need to say, Tom, do you think about this really exceptional book?
00:54:48
Speaker
something that recommends it is, I mean, we've talked a lot about how interesting the characters are. Spark creates such fascinating and complete female characters, each one of them very distinct from one another, very different motivations. I mean, they are
00:55:09
Speaker
they are in some ways fuller and more complete characters than a lot of the men. And I, I don't know, I thought that was really quite remarkable. This book does not fail the Bechdel test by any stretch of the imagination. I don't know, I think, I mean,
00:55:31
Speaker
We could continue on with kind of what we've done in the past of going kind of through the book a bit. We've already resolved between ourselves that we're not going to give away the entirety of novels this season. We want to make sure that if you're just
00:55:48
Speaker
If you're just listening to listen to us, that's fantastic. But you really do need to go read the books too. I think in many respects, we've pretty much brought the novel up to the midway point. And from there, it unspools in some
00:56:03
Speaker
really interesting, fascinating ways. A lot of the characters recede into the background only to emerge or reemerge in unexpected, in the case of Georgina Hogg, incredibly uncomfortable ways. I think maybe I think I would like to just sort of chat about or reflect on is I think the character that was most in control throughout this entire novel and possibly in control of the movement of the entire novel was Louisa Japp.
Louisa Japp's Control and Awareness
00:56:33
Speaker
After the accident, part two of the novel begins, and it begins with Georgina Hogg visiting Louisa Japp. And Louisa handles Georgina, tells her so much about
00:56:48
Speaker
what Georgina is there to inquire upon and to potentially blackmail Louisa over, tells her so much. And then with a simple statement, completely removes Hogg's power, her ability to do anything about it. And she knew right from the start where this conversation was going to go and where it was going to end.
00:57:10
Speaker
I don't think there's any other character in the novel that is so fully themselves, so fully aware of who they are and their circumstances as Louisa.
00:57:22
Speaker
Yeah, Louisa Jap does not suffer fools, and she's not your stereotypical little granny. She has, I think, an interesting relationship with her daughter, Helena. Helena is always kind of worrying about her mom and, you know, does she have enough money? Why won't she let us, you know, buy the mortgage on her house? I don't want to see her having to continue to worry about money.
00:57:51
Speaker
Louisa Japp is just a very independent and kind of free-spirited woman and she doesn't, like I said, truck in kind of the sentimental and emotional kind of things.
00:58:06
Speaker
she does have she does have her own interior life and maybe that's one of the plot points that i will. Talk about in terms of what what happens to her later in in the book but yeah she she is really interesting and.
00:58:26
Speaker
This novel itself just feels so original to me.
The Comforters: Originality and Unique Elements
00:58:31
Speaker
I noted that I'd read The Prime of Miss Jean Brody before, and I love it, and it's apparently the novel even in England that Muriel Spark is most known for.
00:58:44
Speaker
But that novel, as excellent as it is, it's not as original in my mind as this novel. It's a boarding school novel. And so you go into it with kind of those expectations. And although it's a little crueler and a little more
00:59:05
Speaker
surprising at times than a normal boarding school novel. It doesn't have the originality of the elements that come together with this novel. And some of the most original are the characters, like Louisa Japp, I think. Just like a really wonderfully drawn, quirky, weird, and very likeable and fun character.
00:59:31
Speaker
I'm trying to think of characters similar to Louisa that I encountered, like, written prior to this. And I'm really, I mean, in some respects, I'm drawing a blank. And the way you're describing her, in some ways, she almost feels less like a grandmother and more like the independent spinster aunt, you know? Someone who's made their own way in the world and is perfectly happy and content with all that.
00:59:59
Speaker
but also she feels in some respects like the mastermind behind a criminal conspiracy.
01:00:04
Speaker
Well, she feels like the typing ghost. She feels like she's written everything that's going to happen. Like everything happens in a way that, frankly, works out in Louisa Japp's favor. And she mostly describes it as being like a way to pass the time as much as anything else. I mean, this is a remarkable, remarkable woman. Yeah, completely in control of her circumstances, even much more so in a way.
01:00:30
Speaker
than her daughter who is fabulously wealthy. But she's also the perfect foil too because who's going to suspect this little old granny living in this, you know, in this little village
01:00:46
Speaker
outside of London whose family is not in want of money or any of the things that would typically motivate this type of theft and conspiratorial crime.
01:01:03
Speaker
which is the thing that she acknowledges in the novel. Like she outright says who's basically says like who's going to suspect me and if they suspect me of anything they're not going to think that I'm the one in charge. Like she knows that she is the perfect front and that makes her perfectly placed to run the whole thing. This lady has figured out every possible angle and this is where
01:01:27
Speaker
And this is where this novel could have been so many different things. It could have been a crime caper. It could have been a drawing room mystery. It could have been exploration of a woman's descent into madness. It could have been a, I don't know, a religious conversion novel. Exactly. That's what we're about to say next. It could have been a religious conversion novel. It could have been more about Lawrence and falling away from the faith. And it's somehow
01:01:55
Speaker
all of those things and none of those things and something incredibly distinct and in my reading life something very very very new. I would love to have been there when this book like hit hit the scene and just watch it go off like a bomb and just it seems like the praise at the time was oh my what do we have here? I'm also sure there are a lot of people who
01:02:22
Speaker
hated it and not just because it went against their sensibilities, but also because they couldn't deny how good it was. Well, there's a quote on the back of my book and I've got the New Directions edition and it's a quote by Evelyn Waugh who acclaimed it as brilliantly original and fascinating. And yeah, it's that. Yeah. And that's someone who knows from a lot of things.
01:02:52
Speaker
I don't know. Does that feel like a good place to leave it, do you think? I do. Cool. So we will have up on the substack the episode list of what's coming up. Also, just to tease this a little bit, on the mural spark episodes, it will be Lori and me, but for a lot of the backlist episodes moving forward, we are going to have guests
01:03:17
Speaker
We're inviting in some of our bookseller friends, a publisher friend or two, a writer or two, who are going to throw their hat in the ring for backlist titles for us to check out and discuss. So the ones that are confirmed will also be included on that list, along with their social handles if they have them. One of them, Robin McLean, a favorite writer and friend of both of ours.
01:03:46
Speaker
has no social media handles, which is one of the reasons we love her. And one of the reasons why she's such a kick-ass author, I'm sure. She doesn't have to worry about that stuff. She's a badass. But yeah, we will have that up on the substack. And yeah, we're reading all
01:04:08
Speaker
We were reading all 22 novels of Muriel Spark, so this is gonna be a hell of a season, and I am very much looking forward to it. Buckle in.