Abbess of Crewe [Mass Market Paperback]

Muriel Spark (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1984

An election is held at the abbey of Crewe and the new lady abbess takes up her high office with implacable serenity. This is a satirical fantasy about ecclesiastical and other kinds of politics. The author has also written "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" and "Girls of Slender Means".

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Published in 1974 and inspired by Watergate, Muriel Spark's Abbess of Crewe is much more amusing and infinitely drier. It transpires that Alexandra, the title character, has bugged and videotaped the Abbey--except for the confessionals and chapel--with electronic "devices fearfully and wonderfully beyond the reach of a humane vocabulary." After her only rival decamps for London and the arms of a Jesuit, police and newspapers swoop in. All the while, the Abbess (an adherent of Machiavelli, The Art of War, and the Modernist poets) keeps her cool, sacrificing her confederates as necessary and trying to assure herself of helicopter-hopping Gertrude's loyalty. (Gertrude is off curing cannibals of their customs and calls in occasionally from places whose unpronounceable names will soon be replaced by other equally unpronounceable names.) Spark's nuns on the run are more than stand-ins for the sweaty American President and his operatives; the satire extends to Anglo-snobbism and -Catholicism. The Abbess explains to the Pope that "electronic surveillance (even if a convent were one day to practise it) does not differ from any other type of watchfulness, the which is a necessity of a Religious Community; we are told in the Scriptures 'to watch and to pray,' which is itself a paradox." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

"An odd book, not at all what it seems at first near certainly to be?and a wickedly stimulating one," said LJ's reviewer (LJ 11/1/74) of what many believed to be a parody of the Watergate scandal, with the White House replaced by an abbey and Nixon by the title character.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 116 pages
• Publisher: Perigee Trade (February 1, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399509526
• ISBN-13: 978-0399509520
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,626,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 'That woman has a bad mind', July 27, 2003

By 

DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Abbess of Crewe (Paperback)

-- unquote the most formidable of my university tutors, declining to follow up my recommendation that he should see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie).

I had the presence of mind to answer 'Well so have I' but not the gall to say to him 'How about you?' Really she only has a 'bad' mind in the sense we all have bad minds -- there are thoughts we do not lightly own up to. What makes Spark so unique is that the thoughts are so diverse and fanciful. She is all over the place in the best sense, she is as light-footed as a Mendelssohn scherzo, and there is never a demeaning touch in all her writing. I never really know where I am with her. She deals with senility (Memento Mori), satanism (The Ballad of Peckham Rye), fascism (Brodie), epilepsy (The Bachelors) and sexual situations too various to list (passim) like the shallop flitting silken-sailed in The Lady of Shalott. They never become issues, they never become themes and there is often an overlay of the outright fantastic, as when Mrs Georgina Hogg in The Comforters, who has no private life, disappears when she closes her bedroom door behind her.

The Abbess gets 4 stars from me because it is one of her slighter efforts compared with the novels mentioned above and certain others. Anyone getting to know Spark's work could start as well with this as with those, or indeed as well with those as with this. If you can get her wavelength at all this book will not 'lose' you as The Hothouse by the East River might do. I have seen it described as 'a wicked satire on Watergate', a plonking, insensitive characterisation -- you do not pin Spark down like that. Any fool can see what might have suggested the election campaign for Abbess between the sewing nun and the electronics nun, and the repeated question to the foreign missionary nun when she rings in from various parts of the globe 'Gertrude, do you have a cold?' is an obvious reference to Kissinger but fantasy not satire. Dame Muriel was Jewish by birth and a convert to Catholicism, with which she is obviously fixated in her own strange way. I have never understood what its special attraction was for an author who has an affair going on between one of the nuns and a local Jesuit, but I don't think this author allows us that kind of insight into her thinking. This book is even more of a gossamer effort than usual and you will get to the end before you know it, at which point you will be hit out of the blue by the sudden and startling poetry of the last sentence.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a fable to keep you laughing, June 9, 2001

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Abbess of Crewe (Paperback)

If this book were written in a serious tone, I fear it could be taken as very offensive slander. Instead, it is a brilliant send-up of Watergate and similar abuses of power. It centers on the election of a new abbess.

Candidate 1 recites her favorite (Protestant) English poetry rather than the Psalms, supports a strong sense of societial class, and uses electronic eavesdropping as a mere extention of listening to convent gossip as a way to maintain proper order.

Candidate 2 is compulsive regarding order in her sewing box, maintains an all-too-public liaison with a young Jesuit (outdoors rather than linen closets), and leads the sewing nuns to dreams of freedom.

Add to this a missionary nun using Machivelli to deal with cannibal and vegetarian tribes, young Jesuits bungling break-ins, a nun cross-dressing to deliver hush money ... and you have an absolutely hilarious study in justification of means to insure one's "destiny".

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nixon Improved, May 31, 2000

By 

Alex D. Groce (Pasadena, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Abbess of Crewe (Paperback)

Muriel Spark's "Watergate novel" transmutes the interesting but often squalid Washington scandal into something better--the Abbess is more sure-footed and considerably more charming than Nixon, imperious and impervious where Nixon was paranoid. As usual, Spark takes the material of life and, well, to put it bluntly, she improves upon it. Of course, this is the task of the true artist, but Spark doesn't soften the blow of discovering just how disordered and unsavory real-life often is--as when she is dispatching her characters to their various fates, she is sharp, sympathetic, and economical. The perfect necessity of every word is the key, I think to Spark's novels.

Literary blathering aside, this is also one of Muriel Spark's funniest books, which makes it doubly wonderful.