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Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat was so strange, so not what I was expecting from the author of The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie, that I couldn’t wait to find out what else she had up her sleeve. There are quite a few to choose from, and unfortunately I don’t see them that often in the bookstores. But New Directions recently released a new edition of Not to Disturb (1971) that in its lovely black, matte cover called out to me as I was passing it one day.
Not to Disturb (perhaps obviously from its cover) follows Spark’s stranger, more moribund fiction, though I didn’t find it quite as strange as The Driver’s Seat . . . still, it’s pretty strange.
When the book begins, we are thrown into an already ongoing conversation. Several servants are talking about some future event — some future death or murder — as if it has already happened.
‘Small change,’ he says, ‘compared with what is to come, or has already come, according as one’s philosophy is temporal or eternal. To all intents and purposes, they’re already dead although as a matter of banal fact, the night’s business has still to accomplish itself.’
There is a meeting about to take place in the library between the home’s regal owner, his wife, and one of his private secretaries. They have locked the door from the inside and said they are not to be disturbed. For some reason, these servants are preparing for death. How? By arranging their alibis and signing contracts with journalists who will want their personal perspective. They think the police and camera crews will show up first thing in the morning, if not sooner. By their estimation, the event should occur around 3 o’clock in the morning or maybe 6 o’clock.
‘I really could sleep,’ she says. ‘I really feel like another nap.’
‘No,’ says Pablo. ‘Lister wants us all to be suffering from shock when the police arrive. Lack of sleep has the same effect, Lister says.’
Brewing underneath that macabre surface are the strange relationships between all of the people. One of the young maids is pregnant, and they don’t know who the father is.
‘I never went with him,’ says Heloise. ‘I had the chance, though.’
‘Didn’t we all?’ says Pablo.
Sex is very much the issue here. There are a series of other strange relationships too, and not just among the servants.
‘Sex is not to be mentioned,’ Lister says. ‘To do so would be to belittle their activities. On their sphere sex is nothing but an overdose of life. They will die of it, or rather, to all intents and purposes, have died. We treat of spontaneous combustion. One remove from sex, as in Henry James, an English American who travelled.’
Not to Disturb is a very short book. And it seems everything I can say about it would reveal its secrets, and they are more fun to learn — or, rather, discern – from the book itself. The whole book is a lot of fun, even if it is a dark criticism of the upper class and their world, which includes their servants. The characters are revealed through incisive dialogue that is almost always evasive (that’s part of the fun). However, I didn’t find in it the depth of The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie or even of The Driver’s Seat. Still, it suited my mood perfectly when I read it. There is a lot to decipher, interesting people to meet, and Spark fills it with dark comic lines like this one.
‘Death is that sort of thing that you can’t sleep off . . . .’
I have a lot more Spark to enjoy. An exciting prospect considering the fact that I have no idea what to expect next. In a way, it’s the same feeling I get when I anticipate another Aira novel: who knows what is going to be between the covers, but it will be interesting.
I decided to start my venture into the Lost Booker shortlist with the shortest of the bunch, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970). I could have produced this review as part of my Clock at the Biltmore feature that highlights classic New Yorker fiction fortnightly; The Driver’s Seat appeared in the New Yorker‘s pages on May 16, 1970. While I had no idea what I was in for, the violent New Directions cover offered little comfort.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
The only other Spark novel I’d read was The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie. However, though there are some slight thematic similarities, The Driver’s Seat is not at all what I’d have expected from the writer of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. This one is hellishly dark.
There are several stylistic similarities, though. In both, Spark eschews foreshadowing and, early on, discloses information about the characters’ fates. For example, in The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie we learn almost at the beginning that,
Mary Mcgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famour for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire . . .
Similarly, in The Driver’s Seat Spark gives us an unflattering portrait of a character — the central character here — and lets us know that we won’t be with her for too long:
Lise’s eyes are widely spaced, blue-grey and dull. Her lips are a straight line. She is neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness constructed partly by the method of identikit, party by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages.
And, just in case the reader didn’t catch the meaning of that “identikit” (which, incidentally, is the name of the film based on The Driver’s Seat, starring Elizabeth Taylor as Lise), Spark doesn’t keep us in the dark for long:
She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.
Knowing that Lise will be dead the next morning doesn’t offer much light on the story, though. We don’t know who will commit the murder. Throughout the day Lise will meet several brutal men, and we will keep wondering, “Is it him?” But even if we did know who the murderer was early on, we would still have no idea why. And that is the crux of this story: why does this woman end up dead the next morning?
So we know the story won’t end happily. But, the story doesn’t begin happily either. Lise is going on a holiday, and she’s trying to find the perfect dress. Just when she thinks she’s found one, the sales clerk tells her it is made of that new stain-resistant material. Lise freaks out, giving us our first clue early on that Lisa is just not a stable person. This is not a comical scene, either; it’s uncomfortable to read. Spark has us in her control immediately, and her confidence is apparent without getting in the way.
Finally, Lise does find an awful dress she likes and goes to the airport. She keeps telling people that she’s going on holiday and that her boyfriend is waiting for her at the other end. However, we get the sense that she doesn’t know who this man is yet, only that she will know him when she sees him. And, just as in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie we get Jean’s common refrain “I am in my prime” whenever she defends herself, in The Driver’s Seat we get “he’s not my type” with almost everyone Lise meets.
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The chapter on the airplane is strange. Honestly, throughout the novel I felt I was reading something by Roberto Bolaño. People just kept doing strange things for no apparent reason. It’s unsettling. It’s also at this point when we meet, Bill, one of the most unsettling characters in the novel:
Lise’s left-hand neighbor smiles. The loudspeaker tells the passengers to fasten their seat-belts and refrain from smoking. Her admirer’s brown eyes are warm, his smile, as wide as his forehead, seems to take up most of his lean face. Lise says, audibly above the other voices on the plan, ‘You look like Red Riding-Hood’s grandmother. Do you want to eat me up?’
If you’ve seen the Elizabeth Taylor film, then you cannot get this image out of your mind. Bill is just creepy as he stares, almost salivating, at Lise. He’s on a macrobiotic diet, always eschewing Yin for Yang. On his diet he is required to have one orgasm per day. He will pester Lise through much of the book. If he doesn’t, he has to make up for it the next. And it gets stranger:
The engines rev up. Her ardent neighbour’s widened lips give out a deep, satisfied laughter, while he slaps her knee in applause. Suddenly her other neighbour looks at Lise in alarm. He stares, as if recognizing her, with his brief-case on his lap, an dhis hand in the position of pulling out a batch of papers. Something about Lise, about her exchange with the man on her left, has casued a kind of paralysis in his act of fetching out some papers from his brief-case. He opesn his mouth, gasping and startled, staring at her as if she is someone he has known and forgotten and now sees again. She smiles at him; it is a smile of relief and delight. His hand moves again, hurriedly putting back the papers that he had half-drawn out of his brief-case. He trembles as he unfastens his seat-belt and makes as if to leave his seat, grabbing his brief-case.
Throughout the book, Spark has her characters flashforward a day, and we see them answering questions about Lise for police reports. Here’s what the man who abandoned his seat says:
On the evening of the following day he will tell the police quite truthfully, ‘The first time I saw her was at the airport. Then on the plane. She sat beside me.’
‘You never saw her before at any time? You didn’t know her?’
‘No, never.’
‘What was your conversation on the plane?’
‘Nothing. I moved my seat. I was afraid.’
‘Afraid?’
‘Yes, frightened. I moved to another seat, away from her.’
‘What frightened you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why did you move your seat at that time?’
‘I don’t know. I must have sensed somehting.’
‘What did she say to you?’
‘Nothing much. She got her seat-belt mixed with mine. Then she was carrying on a bit with the man at the end seat.’
Unlike a Bolaño novel, however, this one does begin to resolve itself, and we begin to connect the dots in the narrative. Ultimately, it is a sad novel displaying emptiness. And, in one final effort to compare this one to The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie: I think The Driver’s Seat is better.
I’ve been casting glances across the room at Muriel Spark for some time now. Thanks to Bookmooch (more on the joys of reading this book used later), however, I found a nice copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). It was first published in The New Yorker‘s October 16, 1961, issue, extending over 100 ad-plastered pages (I just found out that my subscription to The New Yorker gives full access to digital editions of all past issues—as if one doesn’t get enough for the $40).
When I picked up the book, I was a bit afraid I would be reading the inspiration for movies like Dead Poets Society or Mona Lisa Smile or any number of films and stories lauding an inspiring teacher. Perhaps Miss Brodie’s is a bit of an unconventional life, helping the students think outside of their roles. Happily (though I enjoyed Dead Poets Society), this was not the case.
Miss Brodie sees herself as the ideal teacher, approaching “education” from its original meaning: ”to lead out.” She teaches her all-girl students about art and history and broaches the subject of sex, though mostly by allusion. Miss Brodie is unconventional, but she isn’t necessarily a beacon of light for her drifting students, known in the school as “the Brodie set.” She has sparked their imaginations, but perhaps not in the way intended.
After Miss Brodie tells the girls about her lover, killed in World War I, a few of the girls imagine Miss Brodie’s love life, writing melodramatic stories and expostulate on their growing awareness of sex. Their naïve perspective on sex is pleasantly comic (“He must have committed sex with his wife.”). In the girls’ lives, Miss Brodie becomes a looming personality. The thrill of the novel is in watching the girls grow older trying to work their way under her disturbing shadow. All becomes more complex when the girls discover Miss Brodie’s love triangle with two of the other teachers.
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Though I found the book intriguing, I think I was distracted while reading it. I could sense the depth of psychological insight and I could capture some of the themes, but nothing came to life. I didn’t care about the characters, neither wishing them well or ill, though I enjoyed watching them interact in their terribly flawed lives. While the “why” was intriguing, neither the who nor what compelled me to keep reading.
This is not to say it wasn’t enjoyable. The details about the characters do make the characters come to life. As I mentioned above, some of Spark’s perceptive prose is very comical. Some of it is very sad. Here is an example of sadness. Early in the novel, we get a glimpse of one of the bullied girl’s grown-up life. Miss Brodie constantly picks on poor Mary, and things don’t get better for her.
On one occasion of real misery—when her first and last boy-friend, a corporal whom she had known for two weeks, deserted her by failing to turn up at an appointed place and failing to come near her again—she thought back to see if she had ever really been happy in her life . . . .
The narrative structure is another interesting aspect of the novella. Here, the narrator knows everything that has happened and that will happen to the characters. We get snippets of the future while we read about the past. For example, we know early on that one of the girls betrays Miss Brodie, causing her termination at the school. It does not take much longer before we find out which one did it. Much of the book is focused on why.
I promised to bring up Bookmooch, the online book swapping cite I joined a couple of months ago to get rid of some of my old books while acquiring some others. Generally, I’m not thrilled with the results. Books I read still look new (and I get a lot of snarky comments about that, from jealous people obviously). Most of the books I got came to me in pretty terrible shape. Some are unreadable, frankly. This book, however, brought some unexpected joy. A prior owner had annotated it for me, marking every time fascism was brought up and linking it (I’m not sure quite how) to Hitler’s army. Sure, fascism plays a role in the book, but this person skipped over most everything else and made some flying leaps of inference. It added a nice bit of color to my time with Miss Brodie.
I’m fully aware that my misgivings with the novel can be summed up in one phrase: it’s just me. Thankfully, my wife, who is much more perceptive to female psychology than I, has also read the book—and she liked it, may have even started re-reading it. Hopefully she’ll make some comments spelling out some of the other intriguing aspects of the book and pointing out how many ways I missed the boat. I’m already shifting my attention to Memento Mori.
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