The Comforters (Virago Modern Classics)

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Caroline is converting to Roman Catholicism, feeling isolated in her belief and finding the other converts she meets either maddeningly sheeplike and unintelligent or, like Mrs Georgina Hogg, whose religious impulse is all material, repulsive. Meanwhile, there are hidden riches, it seems, in the everyday realist bread, and Laurence is piecing clues together to prove a most unlikely story, about his sweet grandmother running "a gang ... maybe Communist spies". But when Laurence asks too many questions of his grandmother's rather banal-seeming gentlemen callers, they worry, rather suspiciously, about him asking "who we are, what we're doing here". The central character is Caroline Rose, a novelist recently converted to Catholicism. On returning from a retreat, she starts hearing voices and the sound of a typewriter. The words she hears seem to coincide exactly with her own thoughts. Meanwhile her boyfriend Laurence, who has been staying with his grandmother in Sussex, discovers that the older woman is involved in smuggling, baking diamonds into loaves of bread. Muriel Spark, the author of our August Book of the Month, Loitering with Intent (1981), is one of the distinctive geniuses of English-language fiction in the 20th century.

The remaining additions in the Open to the Public collection are stylized and brief. Some plots turn on a single ironic twist as in “The Girl I Left Behind Me” when the narrator finds her own body “lying strangled on the floor.” Other stories feature the troubling imposition of the supernatural into the natural world. For example, in “The Pearly Shadow” a shady specter haunts the staff and patients in a medical clinic. The specter finally disappears when doctors begin dispensing sedatives to his “stressed-out” victims. “Going Up and Coming Down” is a poetic vignette about a man and woman who ride to work in the same elevator every day. Once the couple actually meet, their speculations about each other disappear in the face of “plain real facts.”Another Muriel Spark novel. I had read already some five books by her. And she is one of my favourite writers. I knew what I expected when I began the novel and I was not disappointed. Only that I was surprised to find out in the curse of reading The Comforters was Spark's debut. When I learned that fact, few things easily fell into places. For instance, the themes of conversion (She became a Catholic in 1954) and writing a novel (a character in the novel, who is also meditating to write a novel, is obsessed with a thought that she is part of a plot written by a disembodied spirit). urn:lcp:comforters0000spar_h6n6:epub:a3b2c7db-a0f4-4f99-96ce-626a7821a643 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier comforters0000spar_h6n6 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t8xb25x8m Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780753185513 During her editorship, Poetry Review got a slightly more modern-looking format but many of the old names and tired styles persisted – magazines need time to change and Spark was not given that. She did, however, insist that poets were paid, thus professionalising the Review, and her combative but thoughtful editorials – ‘Cannot we cease railing against the moderns?’; ‘The word “obscure” is a convenient one that a superficial or dishonest critic might apply to any poem he fails to understand’; ‘since when was it more than an incidental function of art to give pleasure?’ – have not lost their point. The experience also gave Spark one of her most famous bon mots, on Marie Stopes who made herself Spark’s enemy: ‘I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control’ (CV, 178). But what interested me most in the novel is the Catholic faith and discussions on the Marian devotion. Caroline begins to hear typing noises, and voices in her head reciting passages from a book; this book: the one we are reading. She tells her confessor, “‘It is as if a writer on another plane of existence was writing a story about us.’”

Thus The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie treats of the loss of innocence. It may well be the best written of these superbly written books; there is a fusion of tone and material. There is a characteristic Spark voice, slightly pedantic, produced in Scotland’s good schools. In The Comforters she can write that Father Jerome “had used to send the lay brother to her” – a usage probably not to be found in other living novelists. This faint pedantry suits Miss Brodie, and the book should ideally be read aloud by a lady who has preserved the Edinburgh accent in all its soft severity. The tone is now more important than the plot: ordinary expectations are flouted by skipping to and fro in time from the Thirties and the schoolgirls to the present time of their maturity. Throughout the poems the seriousness of Spark’s commitment to the mundane and the eternal is never in doubt, nor is her conviction that they are inextricably entwined and that heaven will never yield itself to the despiser of the commonplace. The speaker of ‘Against the Transcendentalists’ hopes that: Con el correr del tiempo me fui transformando en un adicto a las novelas que publica La Bestia Equilátera, una editorial distinta, fresca y por sobre todo, original. Such novels assume the reader’s sympathetic participation in muddle, they assume a reality unaware that it conceals patterns of truth. But when an imagination ( naturaliter christiana) makes fictions it imposes patterns, and the patterns are figures of the truth. The relations of time and eternity are asserted by juxtaposing poetry and mess, by solemn puns about poverty. None of it would matter to the pagan were it not for the admirable power with which all the elements are fused into shapes of self-evident truth – the power one looks for in poems. Mrs Spark, in her prime, is a poet-novelist of formidable power.You might have done worse,' said the shrewd old priest, and sounded as if he meant it. It was a humiliating thought, which in turn was good for the soul. Predomina un tonillo absurdo, raro, tanto en la trama como en las conversaciones, que hace que no sepas si estás leyendo una novela realista o una caricatura. Por ejemplo, el parentesco de Jimmie con Robinson, y que haya ido a parar por casualidad a la isla. He de reconocer que cuando comencé a leer el libro, no esperaba encontrarme con un estilo tan marcado y único como el de Muriel, pero justo eso, su forma de llevar la novela, las interacciones tan caóticas y surrealistas entre los personajes, y la relación de los mismos con los sucesos que ocurren en una historia en la que nada es lo que parece, es lo que hace de "Las voces" una novela de la que no te puedes despegar como lector, queriendo continuar leyendo a Muriel en sus próximas publicaciones para ver que nos depara.