Muriel Spark: Scottish magical realism?

After a month luxuriating in the 900 pages of Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset it was a delight to sprint through Muriel Sparks Symposium in three days. I fear, however, that it may be one of those books that within a year I will have forgotten completely.

Spark’s obituary in the Guardian describes her “special narrative voice. In its waspishness, its spirit, its curiously posh-Scottish camp, it is one of the great creations of postwar British writing.” https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/apr/17/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries It certainly is waspish–indeed, almost cruel—but it’s also funny, blunt, oblique, light, and shot through with strangeness: “Mother weakly trying to cope with her horse-racing debts and her menopause.”

As I read the book I thought of both magical realism and surrealism. A mad Scottish uncle is the main source of advice to his respectable family. A “four-letter nun” is both a nun and a master plumber and impossibly rude to a bishop. A young woman encounters death and disappearance wherever she goes, suffering perhaps from the “evil eye,”  but decides to resort to “healthy criminality.” “She was so carried away by the famous Assumption in the Frari that it was on the tip of William’s tongue to beg her not to levitate.”

On the surface—as at the dinner party of the title—all is nice, respectable, but underneath all is sinister. Death, religion, and criminality are everywhere in Spark’s books; and there are many throwaway references to the strangeness of Scotland and the Scots (a vengeance on her Edinburgh unbringing): “Here in Scotland people are more capable of perpetrating good or evil than elsewhere.” “Margaret is a Murchie, Covenanting stock who refuse to accept the rule of bishops…. The Murchies of old were great-cursers, oath-takers and foul-mouthers; it was known of them on both sides of the Border.” (I know that Murchies is an Edinburgh dairy, not, I think, a coincidence.) Spark quotes Border Ballads:

Awa’, awa., y ugly witch,

    Haud far awa’ an’ let me be!

For I wouldna once kiss your ugly mouth

    For a’ the gifts that yet could gie.

Although it may be sinister, everything is light in Spark’s writing. She briefly drops in references to great works of the past, but has an eye for the ridiculous. Twice in Symposium I thought that he must have mockingly invented religious paraphernalia. I read: “Proverbs 26:17, He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears.” That can’t, I thought, be a quote from the Bible, but it is.

Then I read about “St Uncumber: A medieval saint to whom people, especially women, used to pray to relieve them of their spouses. She was a Portuguese princess who didn’t want to get married. Her father found her a husband. She prayed to become unattractive and her prayer was answered. She grew a beard, which naturally put off the suitor. Her father had her crucified as a result. She’s depicted in King Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, with long hair and a full beard.”

St Uncumber, too ridiculous, but she exists (as much as any of these ancient saints exist) and does feature in King Henry VII’s chapel.

This would be a perfect book for a Transatlantic flight.

I took some other quotes from the book:

He’s very good at dinner. You can put him next to a tree and he’ll talk to it.

Four-letter words re the lifeblood of the market-place, the People’s parlance and aphrodisiac, the dynamic and inalienable prerogative of the proletariat. Sister Marrow [nun and master-plumber known as the four-letter nun] added a PS. Fuck your balls Bishop, you are a fart, a shit.

We don’t know a thing about what Margaret does with her life at night. I don’t, myself, see Margaret getting into bed by 10.

Wearing her veil but with a plumber’s overalls, [she] explained in her television-worthy North Country accent.