Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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The Ballad Of Peckham Rye and The Girls Of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
So far, I’m nonplussed by Muriel Spark. These two novels are from early in her career, around the same period when she wrote The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, and they are of similar cloth. They’re short and sharp and technically brilliant, and for some reason they left me feeling indifferent and unsatisfied, but not completely disinclined towards reading more of her.
Whilst I didn’t entirely get on with either book, out of the two I preferred The Girls Of Slender Means. It’s something in her treatment of the people she writes. In The Ballad Of Peckham Rye Spark just seems cold and cruel, using Dougal Douglas as a sort of bludgeon to punish her feckless creations, whereas in Slender Means she seems more sympathetic towards the girls, although she’s not above putting a few of them through interesting agonies, and, later on, to inevitable accidental deaths.I also find her prose difficult; not difficult to read, Spark is always comprehensible and clear, and her sentences are never less than perfectly turned; but difficult to like. It feels brittle and clipped to me, too concise, cold, and uncomfortable. It has the effect of distancing the events on the page, making me feel like I’m outside, looking in on the story through a window. I can see how that might be something that other readers might appreciate, but it’s not something I have found myself able to enjoy.
Perhaps it is because of the light Slender Means sheds on Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment In Love that I was able to find my way into that book more easily. The main reason I started reading Spark is because of her influence on Mantel, and the debt in her work is clear, but I have to say that I prefer the latter author, so far.
I’m not about to give up yet, though. I shall track down some of her later work and see if I find that any easier to befriend, and if that doesn’t work I’ll go back and read the famous ones again, to see if the repeat visit brings out something more congenial.
(Check out her specs, though. Aren’t they brilliant? Where did she get them from? Surely they stopped making things like that at about the same time they started printing her early novels?)
