Paul Bryant's Reviews > Memento Mori

The frustrated librarian within me sometimes categorises novels into categories such as Novels Which Are Really Memoirs*, Female Self-Loathing As An Art Form** or Isolated Miserable Women Spiralling Down Down Ever Downwards***. This one easily slotted into the category Old Farts At Play which already includes

House Mother Normal by BS Johnson
Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard
Greybeard by Brian Aldiss
A Five Year Sentence by Bernice Rubens
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia marquez
The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis
Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

Muriel Spark has gleeful gruesome fun with this cast of dodderers. Early on we are at a cremation. The former boyfriend of the crematee is there :

“Madam,” said Percy, baring his sparse green teeth in a smile, “the ashes of Lisa Brooke will always be sacred to me. I desire to see them, kiss them if they are cool enough.”

And we frequently visit a ward for (less well-heeled) elderly women at a local hospital where the inhabitants are divided into the semi-gaga and the totally-gaga :

The senile cases were grouped around the television and so were less noisy than usual, but still emitting, from time to time, a variety of dental and guttural sounds

Or, later,

Some of the geriatrics were still eating or doing various things with their slice of cake.

So as you see this is a black comedy. The posh old ladies that won’t be crammed into the geriatric ward but will eventually expire in a leafy nursing home in Surrey totter about the plot, conniving with or blackmailing each other. Much sad but true humour is derived from an ancient couple who are both petrified that their 40 year old affairs will be revealed when, in fact, each is well aware of the other’s indiscretions. I wonder how many couples just like that are in the real world.

There is a terrible MacGuffin in the plot, and this lost it a few points. An anonymous man (or men) phones up these old ladies and gentlemen and informs them “Remember that you will die”. They all slightly panic and try to get the police involved. I wish I would have been around in London in 1958 and told Muriel Spark to ditch that part, it’s tiresome. The real meat of this short novel is the cringemaking you-can’t-say-that slagging off of farty upper-middle-class old relics. She is merciless. Go, Muriel! I should add that there are a few glimmers of compassion here and there.

And she can produce some lovely zingers, too :

Her words depressed him. They were like spilt sugar; however much you swept it up, some grains would keep grinding under your feet.

*******

* A Question of Upbringing, The Wallcreeper, The Adventures of Augie March, The Naked and the Dead, Voyage in the Dark… the list could go on and on, too many to list

**Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
A Day Off by Storm Jameson
Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Dietland by Sarai Walker
All of Jean Rhys’ novels except Wide Sargasso Sea

***The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore
Skylark by Deszo Kosztolayni
The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark*
The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman