85. Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark
OPD: 1981
format: 152-page Paperback
acquired: 2022 read: Dec 24-25 time reading: 5:44, 2.3 mpp
rating: 4½
genre/style: Novel theme: TBR (and Booker backlist)
locations: London, 1949-1950
about the author: 1918-2006, Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist, born in Edinburgh

I first read Spark in 2021. I’ve read one of her novels each year since. She’s witty and provocative using her oddball characters to present and also undermine their own wisdom. Her novels always seem to be, at minimum, fun. And they always linger in my thoughts.

I spent the time off work for Xmas reading Loitering with Intent (1981 Booker shortlist) - a novel as sassy as its title. At only 152 pages, I thought I might zoom through it. But she slowed me down. It’s full of lines that demand you follow carefully what’s going on - so you can enjoy them. Like when she describes a character as, “She was really like my lover’s awful wife.” - wait, what?

The novel is the story of a novelist looking back at the circumstances around her first novel, written in 1950, back “in modern times”. That gives it an autobiographical feel. The time period lives. There are many different types of affairs and powerplays quietly going on under the cover of polite society.

Our budding novelist needs to flesh out her villains, so she takes a job with an extremely snobbish gentleman who runs autobiographical club. Members write and share their own memoirs only amongst themselves. Then these memoirs are to be locked up for 70 years. The members are each strange, narcissistic, and insecure. They are sort of exposing their own deepest secrets to exactly the elements of society that might take advantage of them - except our novelist, in charge of editing them, rewrites them to make them more entertaining.

A real seriously gripping plot is spun out of the contents of these works. Fictional memoirs get somehow interwoven with the text of this novel, or is it vice versa. Who is stealing whose stories? How is this influencing what people do, sadly to themselves. What’s with the Dexedrine? Our novelist is clear on her own take, and if don’t believe her, you can ask the gentleman’s senile mother to confirm, or we could have in 1950.

Spark was witty. Don’t believe everything she says. But her absurd comments do have wonderful ring, if perhaps her a little higher strung than in other works of hers I've read. I do wonder if the fictional writer got the non-fictional writer a little extra wound up. It's good fun. And Spark is an author to discover and pursue.

——

Another quote:

“I shall pray for you,” said Dottie, “to Our Lady of Fatima.“

“Your Lady of Fatima,” I said. Because, although I was a believer, I felt very strongly that Dottie‘s concept of religion was of necessity different from mine, in the same way that, years later when she made dramatic announcements that she had lost her faith I was rather relieved since I had always uneasily felt that if her faith was true then mine was false.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/365030#8712386 ( )

I find Muriel Spark novellas the perfect reading choice when I’m exhausted, burned out, unhappy, or otherwise in a bad mood. They are always brilliantly written and centre upon women who respond to difficult situations and annoying people with incredible verve. The behaviour of Spark’s leading women isn’t necessarily something to aspire to in every case, but it’s always interesting, unconventional, and instructive. Thus they cheer me up. ‘Loitering with Intent’ is narrated by Fleur Talbot, an aspiring novelist with a peculiar secretarial job. She has a voice of magnificent asperity, at once artistic and deeply pragmatic. I loved her throughout this twisty, tense tale of her friends and lovers, employers and enemies, and the overlap between them. It’s set in 1949-50, for the most part in bleak postwar London. After taking the secretarial job, Fleur meets a collection of eccentrics and finds their behaviour oddly similar to her unpublished novel ‘Warrender Chase’. She makes friends with an elderly lady and writes on throughout strange happenings, showing admirable focus and good cheer in the face of great provocation. Spark’s writing displays its usual excellent sharpness and deadpan wit:

There was a phone in my room connected to a switchboard in the basement. I got no reply, which was not unusual, and I rattled to gain attention. The red-faced house-boy, underpaid and bad-tempered, who lived in with his wife and children in those regions, burst into the room shouting at me to stop rattling the phone. Apparently the switchboard was in process of repair and a man was working overtime on it. “The board’s asunder,” bellowed the boy. I liked the phrase and picked it out for myself from the wreckage of the moment, as was my wont.

[...]

“Father Egbert Delaney,” said this handsome girl, “believes that Satan is a woman. He told me as much and I think he ought to be made to resign. It’s an insult to women.”
“It does seem so,” I said. “Why don’t you tell him?”
“I think you, as secretary, Fleur, should take it up with him and report the matter to Sir Quentin.”
“But if I tell him Satan is a man he’ll think it an insult to men.”
She said, “Personally, I don’t believe in Satan.”
“Well, that’s all right then,” I said.
“What’s all right then?”
“If Satan doesn’t exist, why bother if it’s a man or woman we’re talking about?”

I would gladly quote all of the many conversations between Fleur and Dottie, every line a gem. The novella is pure joy from beginning to end. Reading Spark is a helpful reminder that art can spring from life’s most mundane idiocies. ( )

Fleur Talbot is an impecunious novelist who takes a job working for upper class pompous twit Sir Quentin Oliver, who founded the Autobiographical Association to encourage its members to record their memoirs. Fleur's job was to revise and spice up these otherwise dull recollections.

Life begins to imitate art as members of the association begin to act out events already recorded in Fleur's as yet unpublished manuscript Warrender Chase, and the skull-duggery and derring-do that fairly races through the pages is quite reminiscent of a '50's farce. In fact the 1950s are well-painted, as are the characters, from the deliciously loopy Lady Edwina, Quentin's mother, to the many and varied men in Fleur's life.

This is a crisply written book, with a plot that fairly zips along. It's something of a period piece, which I enjoyed, but was happy enough to finish and set aside in favour of some plainer fare. ( )

Oh my what fun! a stalwart heroine, nasty villains, intrigue, class structure, friendship and art all told with that extraordinary articulateness that gifted writers mastered in 20th century UK. Spark’s style and wonderful prose is related to that of Penelope Lively, and our heroine also, but the story and its twists are very different. Our narrator’s interesting and unique views on people and events is constantly amusing and intriguing. An example is horrible people. Fleur delights in them as their debilitations are simply wonderful for her to observe, they don’t bother her in the slightest and if anything she seeks them out. A wonderful read I couldn’t put down. ( )

Looking back on her life, Fleur Talbot informs us that it felt wonderful to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century. They were heady days for Fleur in 1949. She was busy living a somewhat chaotic life, penning her first novel, “Warrender Chase,” and taking on temporary employment as secretary to Sir Quentin Oliver and his Autobiographical Association. Life has a way of imitating art, or vice versa, and certainly in this case Fleur is quick to note similarities between her character, Warrender, and Sir Quentin. Indeed, more similarities emerge between lesser characters and those she encounters in her employment. It’s almost as though they were deliberately enacting her novel. Does it seem too fanciful? Fleur certainly thinks so, suspecting rather that Sir Quentin is up to something nefarious. It’s bound to end in either heartache or heart attack, but both would be, I’m sure she’d agree, grist for the mill of her future endeavours as a novelist.

Muriel Spark is clearly having the time of her life with Fleur’s autobiographical account of her younger life. But she’s also having great fun with the play between fiction and autobiography as well as the preposterous lives we imagine for our favourite novelists. Nothing is really as it seems here. How could it be? It would be absurd. On the other hand, life just might be absurd. And for a novelist as playful and subtle as Spark, it almost certainly must be.

Good fun and warmly recommended. ( )