Back in the Day by Muriel Spark

(1918-2006)

You’ve probably read at least one novel by Muriel Spark. She was a prolific writer and won a stack of honors for her work in fiction, poetry, and criticism. But I find her writing uneven and much prefer her early short acerbic novels to her later, more conventional ones. In these dark times, I particularly recommend Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), and The Girls of Slender Means (1963). The Bellingham Public Library has all three.

Memento Mori centers on a forgotten, elderly novelist, suffering from dementia, who is restored by her renewed fame when she’s rediscovered, much to her husband’s annoyance. Around them is a circle of equally elderly upper-middle-class friends and relatives, who begin receiving mysterious phone calls in which a voice tells them to remember they must die. Far from being grim, the story is full of wickedly funny observations of the characters in action. In fact, this may be one of the first novels to portray a full cast of elderly people as people, not objects of pity, gargoyles, or carriers of some plea for social reform. The origin of the phone calls is never explained…

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie might be Spark’s best-known novel. Miss Brodie is a charismatic and unconventional teacher in a Scottish school for girls, where she selects a few students to be her special entourage from middle-school on, until they graduate and she recruits a new group. The school’s principal would love to find a reason to dismiss her, and that reason is finally provided by one of Miss Brodie’s favorites, who “betrays” her. Miss Brodie is a fan of Mussolini (we’re in the late ‘thirties), and the book is a subtle investigation of autocratic control. But the betrayer’s motives are far from admirable, and horribly mixed. Again, the book is written with a wry, light hand (if a hand can be wry). The young girls carry on hilarious conversations and one of them writes stories in which she stars to ludicrous effect. Miss Brodie herself is inimitable. All this in 128 pages.

Spark based The Girls of Slender Means on her own experience of living in a respectable boarding house for single women in London. There’s a matron and rules, but the young office workers and college students are more interested in dating and having fun in a city just beginning to recover after the war. One of the girls has a fabulous designer gown that she lends to any one who has a special date. When an unexploded bomb in the garden suddenly goes off and burns down the residence, rescuing that gown becomes the moral crisis of the story.

Under the sparkling surface of these novels is a serious concern about ethical values, which appear as complicated motors of action. I recommend any one of them.