Observations of outsiders
The spirit of Muriel Spark has woven herself in and through many events at this year’s Book Festival, and those that have focused on her directly have reminded us, again and again, why we should read her, and how fiercely relevant she is in today’s world. None has made that case more passionately than Ali Smith’s inspiring lecture, entitled In the Spirit of Spark, first delivered at the Muriel Spark Society in November, and repeated here yesterday to a sell-out crowd.
In it, Smith described Spark as a “necessary angel” for our current political situation. Reading Spark’s novel, The Mandelbaum Gate, on the London Underground, on the day newspapers broke the story of Priti Patel’s secret talks with the Israeli government, she realised: “There is nothing in the book that’s not relevant now … The times we are in, in the world, are asking such challenging questions about truth and fiction, I found I have the need of Spark as never before.”
She said Spark, who worked on propaganda for the Foreign Office during the Second World War – “tailor-made fake news” – is the ideal person to help us navigate the current era, never failing to spot fictions in public discourse, or nail the ghost in any given machine. “She has the key to demystifying things that we need in an age of Trump and Putin, when powerful fictions are internationally foisted upon us. “I long for Spark in an era of Trump. I wish I could read a trumping of Trump by Muriel Spark.”
She went on to suggest, instead, that we read The Abbess of Crewe, Spark’s novel of power struggles in a convent, a satire on the Watergate scandal, and published while the Watergate headlines still raged in the press.
Her lecture was so rich, lively and multifarious that it needs to be pored over in print to be appreciated fully (it is published in book form by Polygon). However, she took time to praise Spark’s “formidable blitheness” in the face of whatever darkness assailed her (a quality which chair Val Mcdermid rightly pointed out could apply equally well to Smith herself ). A line from Spark’s short story The Fortune Teller sums it up: “You must not think, because I take my gifts seriously, I take them solemnly.”
Earlier, leading American novelist Richard Powers had also made a case for the role of the novel in troubling times. His latest novel, The Overstory, is set during the “timber wars” of the late 1990s, when protesters tried to stop the logging of the last surviving 2 per cent of America’s ancient forests. But the book – ambitiously structured like a tree, with roots, trunk, crown and seeds – is
0 Muriel Spark is perhaps more relevant than ever in these troubled, Trumpian times also alive to current situation in which the Trump administration is overturning legislation and opening up conservation areas to drilling, logging and mining, in the name of wealth creation. He said:
“These are men who believe there is a natural hierarchy to the world, with white men at the top, and humans above all other living things. My story is about the possibility of thinking about things in a different way.”
Distinguished academic and literary biographer Lyndall Gordon has studied the lives of women who have turned convention on its head, resulting in her new book, Outsiders, a “group biography” of five women writers: Virginia Woolf, Mary
Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot and South African writer Olive Schreiner.
All five women transgressed the norms, spending time on the “outside” of their society because they took up the “unfeminine” profession of writing. But the outsider view was also an advantage, one which made them powerful observers of their world and women’s place in it, a sentiment with which the spirit of Muriel Spark would have been happily in agreement. SUSAN MANSFIELD