Odd Jobs (84 page)

The thinker is an English clergyman-turned-actor, Edward Jansen; he is going to visit his brother-in-law, Harvey Gotham, a very rich Canadian who has left his elegant wife, Effie, in order to live in a shabby stone cottage in France and compose a monograph upon the Book of Job and the problem of suffering:

Mrs. Spark, she has confided to interviewers, composes her novels in small lined notebooks that she orders from Edinburgh, where she was once a schoolgirl. A scholastic mood of nicety and stricture controls her sentences; notice, for instance, in the long sentence above, how the second half manages to parse, “he was at a loss how to square” picking up the earlier “that God did permit.” Unlike all but a few modern writers, Mrs. Spark uses the verb “comprise” correctly, as synonymous with “comprehend” rather than, as often supposed, with “constitute”—“Love comprises among other things a desire for the well-being and spiritual freedom of the one who is loved.” Sentiments so firmly phrased issue steadily from the mouths of her characters, who yet never sound pedantic—merely concerned with main things, and efficient in expressing this concern. It is Harvey who tells Edward about love: “If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s a love-hate relationship.… The element of love in such a relation simply isn’t worthy of the name. It boils down to hatred pure and simple in the end. Love comprises …” etc. The author herself can put a moral paradox in a nutshell of an image. A flashback recalls the critical moment, a year before the opening events of
The Only Problem
, when Effie offended Harvey
by stealing two chocolate bars from a snack-bar on an Italian autostrada:

The problem, perhaps the only problem, with Mrs. Spark’s novel is that her habit of pithiness squeezes all softness of feeling from her story, and leaves us with a skeleton of plot that dances to little but comic effect. Harvey Gotham is meant to be a modern Job, but he doesn’t seem to suffer. He has no boils; his wealth never departs; and his feelings toward Effie, though indicated as belatedly fond (“Are you still in love with Effie?” “Yes.” “Then you’re an unhappy man. Why did you leave her?” “I couldn’t stand her sociological clap-trap”), do not affect the rather sulky waiting game he plays. While ensconced in his cottage with his research materials on Job, he is visited by a number of comforters, beginning with Edward Jansen in April, and including by August Edward’s estranged wife, Ruth, and an infant, called Clara, whom Effie, while away from Harvey, conceived with a lover named Ernie Howe, “an electronics expert.” Ruth persuades Harvey to buy the château on whose property the cottage sits, and by Christmas they are visited there by Nathan Fox, a young, educated, and unemployed man previously attached to the Jansens. As Effie’s offstage activities heat up, policemen and a policewoman join the throng, not to mention Harvey’s London lawyer and his Auntie Pet, all the way from Canada.

Yet, somehow, nothing builds. For instance, Nathan Fox is carefully described at the outset (“He was a good-looking boy, tall, with an oval face, very smooth and rather silvery-green in color—really olive.… He had a mouth like a Michelangelo angel and teeth so good, clear, strong and shapely it seemed to Edward, secretly, that they were the sexiest thing about him”), and one expects he will blossom into one of this author’s great leeches, along the lines of Hubert Mallindaine in
The Takeover
and Patrick Seton in
The Bachelors;
but Nathan manifests few machinations and little presence, and quickly becomes, with Effie, an offstage character. Again, Harvey is said to have developed a fondness for the baby Clara, but she is never shown as anything other than a background
squalling, a tiny bundle of greed and noise. Most of Mrs. Spark’s characters tend to be such bundles, in varying sizes, and perhaps her overriding message is—to quote Harvey—“the futility of friendship in times of trouble.” Her comforters do not comfort, her lovers do not love. And her actors, though she suggests that much of life is “putting on an act,” do not, in this book, often act. A number of characters are intently described only to drop utterly from sight: “a lean-faced man with a dark skin gone to muddy grey, bright small eyes and fine features” in “a black suit, shiny with wear; a very white shirt open at the neck; brown, very pointed shoes” is studied by Harvey in a police station, but “Who he was, where he came from and why, Harvey was never to know.” On the other hand, many pages are consumed by stark and repetitive police grilling. So gappy a narrative fabric allows Mrs. Spark’s supernatural to peek through; a reality so diminished proves the existence of a great Diminisher. Modern Catholic novelists—Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, Evelyn Waugh, François Mauriac—commonly present human interplay as unrewarding: as arid, desultory, futile, and frequently farcical. One answer to “the only problem” which lurks unstated in Mrs. Spark’s novel of ideas is that we human reeds are such flimsy, dirty bits of straw we deserve all the suffering we get.

Another answer is offered by Harvey, when he asks himself, “Is it only by recognizing how flat would be the world without the sufferings of others that we know how desperately becalmed our own lives would be without suffering? Do I suffer on Effie’s account? Yes, and perhaps I can live by that experience. We all need something to suffer about.” This insight comes late in the novel, and presumably represents an advance over his earlier proposal that “the only logical answer to the problem of suffering is that the individual soul has made a pact with God before he is born, that he will suffer during his lifetime. We are born forgetful of this pact, of course; but we have made it. Sufferers would, in this hypothesis, be pre-conscious volunteers.” Harvey jeers at the solution to the problem apparently advanced by the Book of Job: “God as a character comes out badly, very badly. Thunder and bluster and I’m Me, who are you? Putting on an act.” Harvey ignores what seems to me God’s crucial challenge, presented in verse 40:8: “wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?” That is, God, the creator of Leviathan and Behemoth, Who laid the foundations of the earth and each day shows the dawn its place, will not accept moral subordination to Man; He declines to take instruction from His creature and to be graded by him (A+
for sunsets and flowers, C– for insects and deserts, F for plagues and earthquakes). Expressed non-theologically: existence, including our own, is a mystery, and a critical attitude toward it is not fruitful. The immense notion of Atonement, foreshadowed in Isaiah and enacted in the New Testament, whereby the Creator involves Himself in suffering, does not intrude upon the speculations in
The Only Problem
, nor does the possibility that an afterlife rights all earthly imbalances. The world, for Mrs. Spark as for the whirlwind God of Job, is somewhat bigger than hypothetical balances of justice. Harvey and Ruth have this exchange:

And Effie is specifically linked—by way of a painting by Georges de La Tour,
Job visité par sa femme
, which Harvey studies in the museum at Épinal—to Job’s wife; Effie strikingly resembles de La Tour’s representation of the Biblical woman, who advised her husband, “Curse God, and die.”
^†
Social protest, whose extreme form is terrorism, is equated thus with cursing God. The opposite, the holier alternative, is acceptance, even when affluence—the curious state of being rich, more central to Mrs. Spark’s later novels than the state of grace—is what must be accepted. Harvey might be speaking of himself when he says of Job, “His tragedy was that of the happy ending.”

A good and profound novel lies scattered among the inklings of
The Only Problem
, but the author seems distracted and abrupt and to be gazing, often, at other problems. Her first novel,
The Comforters
, alluded to Job in its title and was about distraction and the need to write. The heroine heard a typewriter clacking in her head; so does this novel’s closest approach to a heroine, Ruth. “Ruth’s mother was a free-lance typist
and always had some work in hand.… Ruth used to go to sleep on a summer night hearing the tap-tapping of the typewriter below, and wake to the almost identical sound of the woodpecker in the tree outside her window. Ruth supposed this was Effie’s experience too, but when she reminded her sister of it many years later Effie couldn’t recall any sound effects.” Such differences in hearing make the difference between a terrorist and an artist. Mrs. Spark’s last novel,
Loitering with Intent
, focused on the heroine’s literary vocation; the religious issue of vocation underlies much of her fiction, more so than the problems of suffering and belief. Suffering and belief are settled matters; vocation requires an active search. Ruth seduces Harvey into buying the château because a woodpecker outside a bedroom window reminds her of a typewriter. To its happy sound she wakes every morning. We are never out of touch, in a Spark novel, with the happiness of creation; the sudden willful largesse of image and epigram, the cunning tautness of suspense, the beautifully firm modulations from passage to passage, the blunt yet dignified dialogues all remind us of the author, the superintending intelligent mind. Though her characters are often odious, and given so parsimonious a portion of sympathy as to barely exist, the web they are caught in is invariably tense and alive.

A F
AR
C
RY
F
ROM
K
ENSINGTON
, by Muriel Spark. 189 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

In her eighteenth chiselled and quizzical novel, Mrs. Spark returns to that drab, homey, and somewhat spooky postwar London that figured in such early tales as
The Comforters, The Bachelors, Memento Mori
, and
The Girls of Slender Means
, and that she nostalgically revisited in her recent
Loitering with Intent
. The nostalgia, however, seems less warm this time, and the spookiness perhaps a bit threadbare. Her narrator, Nancy (a.k.a. Agnes) Hawkins—desultorily involved in publishing, on the verge of conversion to Roman Catholicism, and given to an aphoristic certainty of pronouncement—is a heroine from the Sparkian mold, but the eccentric
and weakly creative spirits among whom she so decisively moves seem perfunctorily limned. Her lover, William, is a brilliant young medical student raised in such dire poverty that he never learned any nursery rhymes, and her enemy, Hector Bartlett, a grubby literary operator whom she scornfully dismisses as a “
pisseur de copie
.” One thing leads to another with the usual snap and aplomb, and Mrs. Spark’s prose is as always intensely composed, but it all seems a bit cut and dried. Mrs. Hawkins complacently states, “It is enough for me to discriminate mentally and leave the rest to God”; one wishes that Mrs. Spark, as a novelist, might leave a little less to God and be a bit more indiscriminate in what she chooses to animate. However, she remains
sui generis
, with an aloof, factual rigor that anticipates the Last Judgment.

T
HE
H
ANDYMAN
, by Penelope Mortimer. 199 pp. St. Martin’s Press, 1985.

N
OTHING
H
APPENS
I
N
C
ARMINCROSS
, by Benedict Kiely. 279 pp. Godine, 1985.

Penelope Mortimer’s new novel is, to make no bones about it, a superb book—fierce in its disillusion, poetic and carefree in its language, comic and horrifying and deeply familiar all at once. Concerning three years of widowhood as experienced by sixtyish, conventional Phyllis Muspratt, who must cope with two grown children, two grandchildren, an oddly bouncy handyman, and a handful of churlish neighbors in the sinister village of Cryck, the novel shows the deft social weave at which English fiction excels, but presents its events with a terse fury the opposite of sociable complacence. An undercurrent of desperation presses against every harsh, droll detail. Phyllis’s husband dies in the first paragraph with a stunning lack of fuss: “Gerald Muspratt gave no indication of what he was about to do. He walked over to the french windows in the dining room to inspect the weather and, without even turning round, died.” Saki or Evelyn Waugh might have begun with such icy inconsequence;
but neither could have so impressionistically given us, a few sentences on, the churn of a distraught woman:

At this height of distress and dishevelment, the cleaning lady arrives, and impartially tidies up. “Mrs. Rodburn took over. By lunchtime Gerald had been removed, the table cleared, the breakfast things washed up and put away.” Life goes on, in an atmosphere of harrowing triviality.