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The Bachelors

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Forgetting that I read this book some years ago, I recently picked up the new edition. Expecting to page through innocently and put the book back on the shelf, I suddenly found myself drawn into this devilish and absorbing tale about spiritual mediums, forgery, betrayal and yes, bachelors. Spark turns her marvelous eye on that group of men who want girls for companionship, but not marriage. This is a sly and yet poignant look at a group of intelligent, but not very bright Londoners circa 1960. I recommend it without reservation.

"Daylight was appearing over London, the great city of bachelors" is the fist sentence of Muriel Sparks's book, "The Bachelors". The areas of London that had the greatest concentration of bachelors were Queen's Gate, Kensington and King's Road. Places all near the center of the shopping district.

The very British bachelors in this novel, a barrister, a councilman, a detective, an unusual priest, a spiritual medium, a handwriting expert, a man with uncontrolled seizures, and a man who eats onions to ward off advances from women, all well developed characters in this novel.

All start out on a Saturday morn, organizing their food shopping with their meal planning, and who will cook and clean for them.
They are all drawn in eventually into the social register of the group, and into the spiritual atmosphere of the medium, Patrick Seton.

Patrick Seton, a man who is a well known fraud to some. A man with little or no conscience and a man who will draw all of these bachelors into a lawsuit. Is Patrick Seton so demonized that he would try to kill his diabetic, pregnant girlfriend? So thinks the physician who is being blackmailed by Mr. Seton. Ahh, but what of this woman who is so in love with Mr. Seton? Is she a silly girl who will do anything for the love of he man?

Are any of these bachelors really in love with their women, or do they need them for other nefarious reasons? What are their motives? How will this man Patrick Seton confuse their spirits and their lives?

Dame Muriel Sparks was born in 1918, and in a few months her 26th novel will be published. She is a well beloved novelist from England. She writes of the dark, terrifying, evilness of the human spirit; and the deadpan humor of the human experience. This is a novel to be relished and to be read again to really experience the malevolence of the human mind. prisrob

The scene is a London courtroom where a spiritualist medium is on trial for defrauding a widow of her life savings. One of the main prosecution witnesses is a handwriting expert who suffers from epilepsy. Under questioning he suffers a seizure and the judge asks `Is this man a medium?' It's very clever, in this instance it's very funny, and it's more than slightly heartless. It is the distinctive individual tone of Muriel Spark.

This is one of her best. I found I had to be very alert and attentive or I was liable to miss some new element lightly thrown into the plot without warning. Muriel Spark's touch is as light as thistledown. The characters in The Bachelors are a down-in-the-mouth lot, ranging from nondescript to squalid, but the author typically stays above, or at least outside, their dreary lightless existence. Thinking back over the book, I can't recall anything that I would classify as a single noble thought or piece of lofty motivation. The theme of bachelordom is not really central to the action, more a storyteller's device to help maintain a sense of unity in the narrative. One has to admire the sheer skill with which she keeps control of such a large cast and so many convoluted situations. The characters talk non-stop - virtually all of the book is between quotation-marks - and we have to get to know them, except in two instances, through what they say, not through what they think by themselves. In one of these cases we get a startling insight into what the medium is really pondering and planning, startling because of the way it contrasts with the idiom of the book generally at least as much as because of the nature of his mind. In the other instance a doctor who hardly features at all in the dialogue shines a moment's blinding light through the encircling murk.

The many characters are lively and convincing, their individuality beautifully touched in through subtle little touches that you will be liable to miss if your attention falters even for a moment. Despite that they have a feel of human puppets about them, a show put on for us by a clear-headed, clever, elegant and rather cold-hearted puppeteer. It may be that Muriel Spark is herself putting on an act by letting herself appear in such a light. My own feeling is that she is not minded to resolve that question for us - we can view her how we like for all she seems to care. I like her just the way she chooses to be.

Mark Twain said a classic is a book nobody reads. This book will be read for a long time to come. As with another reviewer I too found myself returning to this book after several years of having not thrown it away--I am thankful for that. I read it twice. And then I found another novel of Muriel Spark's Memento Mori still on my shelf and read it. Wow, am I ever thankful.

Just as a way of reminder a novel impresses different people different ways, being this way or that way so effected by each reader's own inclinations and biases; so anyone's perspective on this novel's story will be so affecting. That being said, Muriel Sparks was a Scottish convert to Catholicism. That is why I begin by saying what is important and what reviewers have left out is that the author, Muriel Sparks, was and considered herself to be a Catholic writer. In Britain where she lived this made her an oddity and at a first meeting someone somewhat looked down upon with suspicion, something a Catholic character in this book, Ronald Bridges, deals with on such occassion by using some handy responses he has thought up along the way. In the two novels, this and the other I mentioned, it is in a Catholic character where the moral compass is to be found--through whom the novel's moral compass is given expression. These stories have no way of not ultimately being testimonies of sorts to Mrs. Sparks faith.

To acknowledge this should create no great bother. It is not overtly presented at all, and it is not to say she could not write in a way that seemed to let everything speak for itself. It's just that without her adopted form of Christianity the novels would have been impossible for Ms. Sparks to write. It is my opinion that in The Bachelors she has the character Ronald Bridges kindly explain to us how his Cathoic faith plays a part in his life as a way of explaining it's part in her's--a reader could even legitimately consider the moment to be a testimony of her bias and her defense of it to the English literary establishment. In a piece of biting and humorous dialogue, she has Ronald angrly tell it to us by Ronald giving it to his fellow Catholic and Irish friend Mathew Finch.

Let the dialogue begin with Mathew the Irish Catholic:

""Well, as a Catholic how do you feel about-"

Ronald turned on him in a huge attack of irriataion. "As a Catholic I loathe all other Catholics."

"I can well understand it. Don't shout, for goodness sake-" Mathew said.

"And I can't bear the Irish."

"I wont stand for that," Mathew said

"Don't ask me" Ronald shouted, " how I feel about things as a Catholic. To me, being a Catholic is part of my human existence. I don't feel one way as a human being and another as a Catholic." "

As a couple of footnotes, in the novel the author herself highlighted "as a Catholic.", and it is widely acknowledged that Mrs. Sparks found her literary voice after her conversion to Catholicism.

I explain all of this so that for the truth's sake you wont let yourself be ignorant of the importance of her faith to her works. She writes as a Catholic. And don't be bothered by it. As any writer worth reading she also speaks of many things that are universally felt and knowable. All the other reveiws have been dead on about what you will find in this book. Be aware that there is more, much more.

As I have said I have also recently reread this and her novel Memento Mori. I will let two great English writers, writers of classics of our times, tell of the impression her novels have left on them. One of these literary figures was a Catholic, Evelyn Waugh, and the other was an atheist with a profound pessimistic streak, Tennessee Williams. Of The Bachelors Evelyn Waugh wrote that "I am dazzled by The Bachelors. It is the cleverest and most elegant of all Mrs. Spark's clever and elegant books." Tennessee Williiams wrote of Memento Mori that Mrs. Sparks is "A marvelously witty English writer--her best, I think, is Memento Mori, which is chillingly brilliant."

These two writers are quite set apart in their outlook on life, and they both went to her novels to be entertained and to be given a bit of, to paraphrase Joseph Conrad, that truth we have forgoten to ask of from the novel. After reading her novels a reader is amused, entertained, and has entered fully into a believable other world and fully into other's existences in it. At the end of the day the perenial issues crown her works: the nature of existence and human existence is felt both as profoundly funny and serious, as evil and good, on the surface not at all clear of malevolence, and as troubled and lowly, and as heroic, it being capable of both genuine friendship and love, a reality that Tennessee Williams had some profond doubts about being possible at all. On behalf of Tennessee William's I must add that indeed no one is perfect nor can anyone escape life's troubles.

Bachelors are a funny breed; as for the pitable and redeemable bachelors and bacholerttes in the novel, there are of the same kind roaming the earth today; in the short time frame of the novel one set does get married---a bachelor found himself an irresistable lady friend who found him equally irresistable.

Muriel Spark is deliciously witty and writes with a lively charm. This does not prevent her from having an extraordinary talent for portraying the monstrously abnormal--to be precise, the diabolical. THE DRIVER'S SEAT, for instance, is overwhelmed by this malevolence--it is an excellent nightmare, but has only small moments of the Spark charm.

THE BACHELORS has a lot of both--the "medium" Patrick is one of Spark's most chilling portraits of evil. The scheming Spiritualists resemble more typical Spark "villains" (like the literary circle in LOITERING WITH INTENT), but are perhaps even more harmless in and of themselves. However, unwittingly they touch on something far grimmer--Spark demolishes the Spiritualists by showing that the only thing worse than their nonsense is when they stumble upon something genuine.

The "good" bachelors' interactions with this group provide an entertaining and equally true view of things, preventing the chill from permeating the book.