Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Comforters

- Don’t I remember you said you were done with Muriel Spark? In fact, wait… I have the quote right here : "I’ve done with Muriel Sparks. She’s bonkers".

- I don’t deny it.

- So? Now you are reading her biography and you have read this one which is the 5th for you…. You will not win any awards for consistency here.

- Well, I guess it might be that some authors are like an itch you can’t scratch in the middle of your back.

- Or it may be that you can’t resist a big 700 page literary biography and then you get dragged into the whole just one more Pringle thing.

- Or that. Also there’s a religious thing. She started as a straightforward agnostic then converted to Catholicism in her late thirties. This is strange, she seems like a very brainy person. I wanted to know more about that.

- So what’s the deal with this one?

- First novel written age 38, very late to start novel writing, and she is writing a story featuring herself (“Caroline”) living her own exact life in which she hears strange unearthly voices preceded by the clatter of a typewriter, and the voices say out loud the description of what just happened, so she realises she is a character in a novel (The Comforters). The voice is that of Muriel the Author talking to Muriel the Character, both of them being versions of Muriel the Real Person.

- So metafiction then.

- Lightly applied metafiction, yes. On page 93 she complains loudly about to this Author. She’s just converted to a big religion but she doesn’t want her thoughts and actions controlled or influenced by “some unknown possibly sinister being”. She says “I intend to subject him to reason.” And without apparently any irony she adds “I happen to be a Christian”. Christians being people who never get influenced by an arbitrary unknowable absolute power.

- Enough of the snarky comments, decent law abiding Christians could be reading this review you know.

- Are you implying there might be indecent outlaw Christians somewhere?

- (Eyeroll). I think we should wrap this review up now, don’t you? Speaking personally, I’m not all that interested in Muriel Spark. I saw the movie, it was okay. I love Maggie Smith.

- Oh well, all right. As in other novels by this oddball author, she gets hold of a great idea and futzes around with it and doesn’t get all the fun out of the thing. I would have loved to have a great knock down drag out row between the character and the author, for instance. And some of the characters were silly. But I liked the graceful slightly boggling ending.

- Will there be another Pringle moment.

- It’s not possible to say no.