“Can you not ignore it, Dame Lettie?”

“No, I cannot. I have tried, but it troubles me deeply. It is a troublesome remark.”

“Perhaps you might obey it,” said Miss Taylor.

“What’s that you say?”

“You might, perhaps, try to remember you must die.”

The opening pages of Memento Mori are funny and mysterious. It’s there that we learn that the elderly Dame Lettie Colston (and soon there will be others) has received a phone call in which a civil voice says simply: “Remember you must die.” It’s a wonderful setup, particularly because Muriel Spark is, at the same time, introducing us to her characters, and she is always so good at doing that. We meet Dame Lettie’s self-centered brother Godfrey and Godfrey’s wife, Charmian, a once-successful novelist.

Before long, though, the cast expands. Perspectives shift, social lives reveal a tangled web, and what first appeared to be a central mystery begins, strangely, to recede. The calls continue, but the characters are just as concerned with old affairs, petty grievances, and questions of inheritance. Memento Mori is delightful and not at all difficult at the level of sentence or scene, yet, for me, it was challenging to take in as a novel.

But what a fine novel it is. The scattered cast, the social chatter, the sense that the central device is somehow beside the point, all of this is just what makes the book work.

Reading Memento Mori so soon after The Comforters, I am intrigued by the recurrence of disembodied voices. In the earlier novel, the voices are overt, almost playful, calling attention to the act of authorship itself. Here, they arrive more quietly in the form of almost banal anonymous phone calls. It begins to feel as though Muriel Spark is positioning herself as a kind of authorial god, introducing a single, undeniable truth into her characters’ lives through strange means and then watching what happens. Faced with the reminder that they must die, the characters might be given an opportunity for some good old Flannery O’Connor style grace as self-awarenesss. Or maybe not.

Next up for #22MonthswithMuriel, The Ballad of Peckham Rye!