Memory, speak but do not condemn
Anita Brookner
A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON by Muriel Spark
Constable, f9.95
Actually, it is a far cry from South Kensington, where Mrs Hawkins has fur- nished rooms in a house in Church End Villas, a house owned by resourceful Milly on the ground floor and peopled by a variety of other lodgers, including a Polish dressmaker, a medical student, a debby secretary, and a very quiet married couple of whom, this being a novel by Muriel Spark, one might expect unpleasant or supernatural emanations. It is not to be. Mrs Hawkins, fat, sensible, and utterly reliable, works in a collapsing publishing house in St James's, where her role is to go through the slush pile, correct proofs, and edit copy. It is 1954, a year, apparently, of copious rented accommodation and full employment, whatever else might have been wrong with it. London had not yet been hideously rebuilt, and wild grasses still flourished in the bombed gaps between Victorian houses.
Mrs Hawkins fits comfortably into these surroundings and asks very little of life other than that people should not write bad books on subjects they do not fully under- stand. Then she meets Hector Bartlett, who is just such a would-be writer. He is the lover of a famous novelist, Emma Loy, who recommends him time and time again to various publishing houses in the hope that they will get him into print and incidentally off her back. To Mrs Hawkins, however, he is a pisseur de copie and she misses no opportunity to tell him so. In the course of this truth-telling, undoubtedly estimable in itself (Mrs Hawkins is a Catholic, with strong principles) she loses a couple of jobs, also on the famous novel- ist's recommendation. What ensues is Hec- tor Bartlett's cranky revenge, part and parcel of the man's over-reaching amateurishness. More will not be revealed here. Motive is clearly present, means and opportunity slide into place under Mrs Spark's deft hand and in her effortless prose, although the sense of evil so famously present in her other work is replaced here by a less mysterious and less threatening agency. The outcome is a tragedy of sorts, but even this is fairly casual and does not leave the reader with the sense of unease and melancholy that Mrs Spark usually deals out. Indeed what is remarkable about this novel is its lightheartedness, even its banal- ity. Its charm resides in the character of Mrs Hawkins herself, with her black lace evening dress, her recreational bus-rides, and her small meals in tea-shops and pubs. Clearly this is all based on personal re- miniscence and may even constitute a true story, or rather reconstitute it. Characters other than Mrs Hawkins are thin, even the `characters' in various publishing houses who may be recognisable to those in the trade: they seem impossibly vague and inept to anyone who knows publishing houses today. Perhaps characters taken from real life are thinner than those conjured out of imagination; in this case, Mrs Hawkins herself, although the au- thor's mouthpiece, is arguably more of a fictional character than those with whom she interacts.
What is so pleasing about Mrs Hawkins, who is, after all, only 28, is her self- sufficiency. Her air of competence is not misleading. She is the novel's victim; she is also its heroine. When Mrs Hawkins offers advice it is as well to take it. Thus, to those about to get married: behave rather badly i in the initial negotiations, so that your j deportment thereafter should come as a pleasant surprise. Not really bad be- I haviour, you understand: simple intran- sigeance is all that is called for. And for those on a diet (and who isn't?) order the same food as you would normally and leave exactly half on your plate. If you suffer from rheumatism, eat a banana every day. When writing a novel, keep it simple and intimate, as if you were writing a letter to a friend. Refuse to leave the gentlemen to their port. If you are looking for a job, tell the postman, the milkman and the window-cleaner, for their range of acquaintance is vast. Cultivate insomnia: it is the friend of memory. It may even be the novelist's standby.
Needless to say, none of this wisdom is available to Hector Bartlett, whose life is ruined by Mrs Hawkins' epithet, and whose revenge haphazardly and insanely involves someone who is entirely innocent. The life's work of such people is not to write but to be a burden to everyone who does. He does not, of course, come to justice, but then justice is a very hit-or-miss commodity in Mrs Spark's world. It is perhaps enough that she herself judges, although she is never so crude as to take sides. This is her strength; she does not condemn, she merely observes. She has observed more bizarre happenings than are chronicled in A Far Cry from Kensington, and evoked more terrible fates. She does all this calmly, as if life contained nothing more that could surprise her, and as if she bowed her head in acceptance only to fatality.
Here she is in lenitive mood, and it is almost uncharacteristic. Perhaps the eye of memory is normally indulgent, especially when there are such innocent and peaceful scenes to be called to mind. For it is the lost London of the 1950s, when the A-line was just coming in and the Brompton Road ABC was still functioning, that Mrs Spark remembers from her present Italian re- treat. And there is a happy ending, one that belongs in spirit to the 1950s rather than to the 1980s, in which Mrs Hawkins, with her new husband, glimpses Hector Bartlett in a Florentine restaurant and merely notes that his hair is now quite white.
I will now emulate Mrs Hawkins. For anyone wishing to find out how to write a novel, study the construction of this book, its limpid sentences and its tactful length. But for anyone wishing to know how to write a spectacularly and uniquely good novel, study The Driver's Seat, The Hot- house by the East River, or The Only Problem. These are novels to be read and re-read, and their flavour does not dis- appear. A Far Cry from Kensington is an incidental pleasure, one that will keep us going contentedly until the next instalment of Muriel Spark's true genius is vouch- safed to us.
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