3 novels by Muriel Spark: The Public Image, The Driver’s Seat, and Reality and Dreams

I don’t blog about everything I read. I’ve realised that there are writers I like that for some reason I’ve never written about, such as Akutagawa (the last post is too brief and general to count), R. K. Narayan, or Muriel Spark. Not sure why I didn’t have much to say about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. 

Great writer though, with a deceptively light touch. 

The Public Image 

This novel is about Annabel Christopher, a new film star who carefully cultivates her public image as an English tiger-lady happily married to an intellectual husband: “impeccably formal by the light of day, voluptuously enamoured with each other under the cover of night.” In reality, she and her husband Frederick have long fallen out of love—worse, he despises and resents her—does no one else see that she is shallow and has no talent? He’s fed up with her, fed up with the marriage, fed up with their vapid existence and the role he has to play as a part of her public image—he must tear it apart. 

The Public Image may not be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and Spark’s fans rarely speak of it, but it’s a fascinating book about an unhappy marriage, about appearance and the masks we wear, about deception and the inability to truly know another person, about lurking evil (Spark’s favourite theme), about narratives and the truth, and many other things. You probably know some of these are my favourite themes. And of course there are questions: is Annabel really stupid and untalented as the husband says she is, for instance? (I doubt it, she mentions The Turn of the Screw and Pygmalion). 

(I wonder if one of my favourite films from recent years was partly inspired by this novel, but I’m not naming the film so as not to spoil the plot). 

Muriel Spark is very good at writing about cruelty, and in The Public Image, there are (at least) three characters who are just ruthless. 

The Driver’s Seat 

Muriel Spark’s always been strange and disturbing, but The Driver’s Seat is possibly the strangest and most disturbing of them all. 

(Perhaps not ideal for a sick girl). 

The Driver’s Seat is a psychological thriller. I’m going to assume many of you have not read the book, so I’m not going into details—you should know as little as possible when you pick it up. 

But the novel (or novella) is so unsettling not only because of the story and the ending, but also because Muriel Spark raises lots of questions in one’s mind and leaves (most of) them unanswered. 

“Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell?” (ch.4) 

Some reviewers call it a whydunnit, which is what Lise calls a book she’s been carrying around (this may be another lie as we don’t see her reading it), but Spark never tells us why. We don’t know what Lise thinks; we don’t know why she does what she does; we don’t even know where she’s from (possibly Denmark), where she lives (maybe Denmark, maybe Britain), or where she travels to (maybe Italy); and there are lots of questions that remain unanswered. The Driver’s Seat sometimes reads like the police’s attempt to reconstruct all the events leading up to “the incident”.   

“Lise is thin. Her height is about five-foot-six. Her hair is pale brown, probably tinted, a very light streaked lock sweeping from the middle of her hair-line to the top of her crown; her hair is cut short at the sides and back, and is styled high. She might be as young as twenty-nine or as old as thirty-six, but hardly younger, hardly older.” (ch.2)

Does that not sound like a mix of eyewitnesses’ accounts? 

The one thing that is clear in the story, is that something is mentally wrong with Lise. But even then, I’m not sure how much of her erratic behaviour is because of her unsound mind and how much of it is acting. 

“And it is almost as if, satisfied that she has successfully registered the fact of her presence at the airport among the July thousands there, she has fulfilled a small item of a greater purpose.” (ibid.)  

Note too: 

“So she lays the trail…” (ch.4) 

All the unanswered questions are not a fault however—the most important one (why) is unanswerable—the idea, I think, is that certain things are beyond analysis, certain things can never be known or understood. 

Excellent book. 

Reality and Dreams 

I don’t know what possessed me to read one Muriel Spark book after another (especially when I’m ill), but it’s a good idea to read Reality and Dreams quite close to The Public Image—both are about the film industry. 

The Public Image is about an actress; Reality and Dreams is about a film director, Tom Richards. 

“He felt that all through his illness from the accident and convalescence, he had been directing a film, interviewing interminable faces for casting with a mixture of critical scrutiny, criticism and sincere involvement which, to him, represented sixty per cent of a film. It was a surrealistic process, this casting and creatively feeling at the same time.” (ch.8) 

I like these sentences as Muriel Spark describes Tom drifting in and out of consciousness: 

“Tom was a film director. Cut into the scene of the morning with the scene of the evening. The same nurse, but was it the same? Anyway it was Edna and the same scene.” (ch.1)

The novel is about Tom Richards and the women in his life: his wife Claire; Cora, his beautiful daughter from the previous marriage; Marigold, his uncharismatic daughter with Claire; Rose Woodstock, his lead actress and lover; the hamburger girl, who has inspired the film; Jeanne, the actress who plays the hamburger girl; and so on. Muriel Spark gets you to think Reality and Dreams is about the director’s struggle to make his film after a dangerous accident on set, whilst he juggles multiple women in real life, then about halfway through, the novel seems to move in another direction: Marigold goes missing. 

“The answers that Marigold’s family and friends were able to give to the police about her habits, her possible movements, her whereabouts, only served to show how little anyone knew her.” (ch.10) 

But contrary to (my) expectations, it doesn’t turn into a thriller. Spark’s interest is in the characters and their relationships, and her book makes one uneasy. What do you do if you don’t like your child? What do you do if both of your parents don’t like you? There is in Marigold some of Mary Bennet. 

This is a masterfully crafted novel. 

On the novels of Muriel Spark 

Muriel Spark is now one of my favourite writers. I enjoyed all the six novels I read (some of you might ask if “enjoy” is the right word). 

She is never boring. Never superfluous. Her novels are always strange and disturbing, because she’s interested in exploring evil and cruelty and the mystery of the human heart, but heavy they are not—she has wit and a light touch and a wicked sense of humour. Very different from, say, Flannery O’Connor. 

Wonderful writer. I must read more.