This is a really good book, five stars, as opposed to a good book, four stars, that is, truly excellent. Why? Well, first because it is good, ethically centered, true, reflective of real life, intelligent, and of a good heart, good intentions, a good will hard fought for and won. That is, ethical. But unusual: the second reason.
I'm trying to read her books in the order she wrote them, having come to them first twenty- five years ago, slightly out of that strict chronology, with Memento Mori. That book stayed in my mind, off to the side, for this quarter of a century, as a reminder of a novel that was really good, but something just a bit off, strange, but still very good, so that when I returned to reading her, in order, with The Comforters, I was immediately reassured of her excellent craft and of her eccentricity.
So now I'm up to The Public Image. It starts off pretty regularly, a fairly ordinary story, but it's Spark, and she hasn't failed even once to practice if not voodoo her judu and flipped me in the tone of my mind by her slightly off keel sense of how to tell a story and never tell it in a usual way.
I'm reading Iris Murdoch who too is excellent, but Murdoch is usual, usually brilliant, indeed profound in her ethical insight, but ordinary in her way of telling you a story. Not so Spark. What irony she should have caught up in real life with such a last name to christen her writer's style! and in this book, The Public Image, she threw me not once, not twice, but three times off center in my understanding, all at once finally, and in just eight short chapters.
I'm alternating books, one Murdoch, one Spark, which is to say alternating styles, one ordinary, one unusual, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the length of the narrative, which is not to imply that Murdoch is long winded, anything but, but Spark is just nonetheless viciously brief, again as her last name would indicate, and especially in this book where her brevity builds to a crescendo and finally crashes through the narrative itself so that by the end I had to do a double take to verify I had not skipped a page, events had sped up so abruptly so at first confusingly so, that I was bewildered not the least by an abrupt change of scene and emotional point of view. If you read the book, you will know what I mean.
But don't take my word for it: try it out for yourself, but strap yourself in: you may start out sensibly enough, smoothly moving from one psychological insight to the next, but hold on, the curves are coming, and they will come fast.
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Top reviews from other countries
Jocelin Elaine
Not worth the time
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2023S. M. Pettit
I do enjoy Muriel Spark but sometimes her books take a bit ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 11, 2014Amazon Customer
Can't believe public Image is written by the same author ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 17, 2017