Muriel Spark – Award Winning Scottish Novelist
Some Less Well-Known Works Including Memento Mori & Portobello Road
Aug 25, 2009
Muriel Spark, who began writing fiction in 1957, is best known for her sixth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). A number of her other works are, however, well worth reading. Her work creates careful, precise, and detached analyses of her characters, particularly as they behave badly. Her short stories are an excellent starting place, as are three of her less well-known novels, Memento Mori and The Girls of Slender Means.
Muriel Spark's Short Stories
Spark's complete short stories are available under the title All of the Stories of Muriel Spark (New Directions, 1985). These stories are an excellent quick way into Spark's way with characters who are odd, and even sometimes cruel. For example, "You Should Have Seen the Mess" is a short but vivid portrait of a young woman whose obsession with cleanliness prevents her from fully engaging with life, rendering her both ridiculous and sympathetic.
Particularly good is the story "Portobello Road", a first person account of a young woman who suffers from a unique condition as she seeks out some people from her past. (Readers are warned that they should read this piece before examining the blurbs on the back of the book, lest the surprise of the story is ruined for them).
Memento Mori
Memento Mori (1959) tells the story of a group of older adults, all of whose long lives have intersected, and who are now all receiving phone calls from a mysterious, anonymous caller telling them to remember that they must die. In their varied reactions to this caller, as well as their relationships to one another, we see a wide variety of human temperaments and weaknesses thrown into relief as they confront approaching death.
While some accept their situations tranquilly, other characters react with panic, suspicion, paranoia, or fear, interpreting the calls as threatening. Even the most detached of the characters -- a scholar who keep elaborate notes concerning his friends as part of a study of geriatrics -- is confronted with a disaster which he is unable to catalog and analyze. Other characters show that some people are never too old for sexual weakness, adultery, blackmail, and pettiness.
The Girls of Slender Means
Like Memento Mori, the Girls of Slender Means (1963) is a portrait of a group of people living with each other and how their personalities and relationships react under duress. The people in question are young women living together in the May of Teck Club, a hostel for "Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years" just after World War II. The girls rivalries and tensions at close quarters are highlighted by devices such as an often-borrowed Schiaparelli dress, competition over who is thin enough to fit through the small window onto the roof, and, eventually, the stress of leftover live ammunition in the back garden. Even though they live so close together, the girls fundamentally remain separate from one another, alone in their problems and their successes.
