Auberon Waugh on new novels
Not to Disturb Muriel Spark (Macmillan £1.75)
A Dark Corner Celia Dale (Macmillian £1.75) A writer who has given as much enjoyment as Muriel Spark builds up an enormous fund of gratitude and affection in her readers which no amount of less enjoyable work can ever quite dispel. At the same time, one approaches each new novel with lively expectations, and must be on one's guard against exaggerated feelings of disappointment if they are not quite fulfilled. Nothing she writes can ever be very bad, although she might have had a shot in that direction once or twice during
The Mandelbaum Gate, and any criticism one dares to offer is only within the context of an impertinent assumption that Mrs Spark could do even better if she tried. But when all the proper noises have been made, I have to admit that I could not make head or tail of her latest novel. A group of servants sits around in the servants' hall of a Swiss millionaire's house, waiting for the millionaire called Baron Klopstock to shoot his wife, her lover and then himself, so that they can sell their stories to the newspapers. Up stairs • lives the millionaire's lunatic brother, with a female keeper. One of the maidservants is pregnant, nobody knows by whom, and the suggestion is made that the lunatic brother is responsible. After the shooting, she marries the lunatic, who is revealed as the millionaire's heir. The narrative is told in the present tense, which I usually think a mistake, but this is a free country and there is no reason why a writer of Mrs Spark's eminence should not write in the present tense if she wishes to. My criticism is not that the book is bad, or obscure, or unendurably boring — it is none of these things, and one can pass a reasonably pleasant two and a half hours reading it — so much as that it seems totally pointless.
Perhaps it was conceived as a sermon on the subject of pre-destination, although it is never clear why we should suppose that Lister, the millionaire's butler who plays the most important part, should be confused with God. Equally, it might have been intended as a fable illustrating the extreme meanness of the average man's response to a human tragedy, average manhood here being represented by the servant classes. But Mrs Spark's servants are so untypical of anything except literary fantasy that nobody could possibly understand her to be saying any such thing.
No, I am afraid that Mrs Spark had no serious purpose in writing Not to Disturb
— not even the purpose of diverting or amusing her readers — beyond the com pulsive desire to write something. She reveals the utter frivolity of her approach by killing two minor characters, whom she has introduced as 'extras ' with lightning and also in an appalling joke at the end about " Klopstock and barrel," when the
corpses are carried out. She has indulged herself in a little lonely literary fantasy of her own, a sort of Spectator competition in which there are no other competitors, no judges and no rules. At least, in common gratitude, I feel I should award her the first prize, but even this might be considered an impertinence. Mrs Spark has retired into the privacy of her own thoughts and reflections and the sign on the door is quite unmistakable: Not to Disturb.
At any rate, this slim volume is Muriel Spark's tenth novel. Eight of those have been corkers, and we should be grateful for that. A Dark Corner is also Miss Celia Dale's tenth novel, and I am ashamed to say that I have never discovered her work before. It is an extremely competent horror story about a young Negro taken in by a retired white couple in London as a lodger; he becomes a member of the family and slowly discovers that the husband is a sex maniac who picks up young women tramps and drugs them before assaulting them. If they die, as two of them do, he puts their bodies in an Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden.
The husband is also involved in a crazy project to prove that people with the initial letter 'A' — his own name is Arthur — have had a profound effect on world history and, more particularly where the British Royal Family is concerned, have been prevented from altering the entire course of British history only by their untimely deaths. It is this bizarre touch which lifts Miss Dale's book from straight Hammer film into Alfred Hitchcock or John Fowles.
The technique of horror suspense is not to be despised so long as it does not rely on sudden confrontations and screams, which only work on the cinema. Although Miss Dale's book is short, I think it would improve with cutting. She takes seventysix pages to reach Mr Didcot's project and ninety-one before there is any reason to suppose that he is a sex maniac. Building up atmosphere is all very well, but unless one has happened to read the blurb on the dustcover one has no idea what the book is going to be about until page 76, and not the slightest preparation for being frightened until page 105.
Miss Dale also lapses into the present tense on three occasions. Perhaps she feels that this creates an effect of greater immediacy, but horror writers above all should realise how the present tense has exactly the opposite effect: the past historic is much more immediate and much more vivid. The present tense can sometimes be used to create a humorous effect in the telling of a funny story — I think this derives from the funny way uneducated people talk — but it has very little other use in the novel. On the other hand, of course, dreams are quite permissible in a horror story, although in anything else they are disastrous. Her satirical working-class dialogue is quite good, too, although I sometimes suspected that it might be derived as much from other people's observations as from her own.
None of which should be taken as seriously detracting from Miss Dale's novel, which is highly recommended for its originality, its humour and the delectable frissons of horror she administers with such skill. It is quite rare to find a lady prepared to horrify one nowadays and I recommend the experience as being every bit as enjoyable as a Finnish massage and scarcely more , expensive. I.
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