Aiding and Abetting
by Muriel Spark
Doubleday, 176 pp., $21
Obliged to summarize in one sentence Muriel Spark’s 1973 novel The Hothouse by the East River, a hapless library cataloguer wrote, “A group of people struggles to regain control over their lives as they deal with life in New York City.” Not bad, given constraints of space; it is also admirably discreet about the unfolding of the plot. Still, it somehow fails to convey the flavor of a novel in which (and here you must avert your eyes if there’s chance you will ever read this book) the principal characters have all been dead since 1944, when a German bomb hit the train they were taking from London. Their subsequent life in New York, as the reader only gradually puzzles out, is a figment of the imagination. And what’s keeping them in this purgatorial state, it seems, is the jealousy that obsesses one character, which he must leave behind once and for all.
Muriel Spark has been creating conundrums of this sort since her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. After that splendid debut—praised by Evelyn Waugh, among others—she never looked back. She was made a dame of the British Empire in 1993, her long residence in Italy notwithstanding, and commandeur des arts et des lettres in 1996. Twice the New Yorker has given an entire issue to one of her slim novels. The movie version of her 1961 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie introduced her most memorable character to a worldwide audience and made the book a staple of high school English classes. Now in her eighties, she has just published her twenty-first novel and her best in many years. Her hand has not lost its cunning.
Two subjects have preoccupied Spark throughout her long career. The first is the peculiar nature of her medium, the art of fiction. Most novelists strive at all costs to maintain what John Gardner called the “vivid continuous dream” that keeps readers turning pages. Spark instead plays a double game, drawing attention to the fictiveness of the story, intrusively reminding the reader of the author’s existence, while delighting in the illusion of life that persists even when the magician has revealed her tricks.
Spark’s second fascination is with human evil. A presumption of wickedness sets the tone for what is likely to happen in her fictional universe, making goodness stand out as an almost inexplicable alternative. (Spark’s outlook is, in other words, the opposite of the liberal American view in which goodness is the norm and wickedness requires special explanation.) In a handful of books, the possibility of goodness is framed explicitly in terms of the Catholic faith she accepted not long before she wrote her first novel. For the most part, however, the grace of God is glimpsed only obliquely, fleetingly. So, for example, at the end of The Ballad of Peckham Rye, after a devilish visitor to a dreary town has come and gone, wreaking havoc and provoking murder, one of the characters sees children playing by the river Rye and the women coming home from work with their shopping bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this.
Spark’s new novel, Aiding and Abetting, takes as its point of departure the sensational Lucan case. In November 1974, the seventh earl of Lucan disappeared immediately after the murder of his children’s nanny, whose battered body was found stuffed in a mail sack, and the savage attempted murder of his estranged wife, who identified Lucan as her assailant. Evidently he killed the nanny first, mistaking her in the dark for his wife. Before his disappearance, a month or so short of his fortieth birthday, “Lucky” Lucan, as he was known, had accumulated staggering gambling debts; he was recently separated from his wife, who had obtained custody of the children, and was humiliated in the bargain (in the custody hearing, it was revealed that he beat his wife with a cane for sexual excitement).
Despite a massive manhunt, Lucan escaped and has never been found, although there have been unconfirmed “sightings” over the years. His escape is widely believed to have been accomplished with the help of his upper-class friends. For the purposes of the novel, Spark assumes that Lucan has indeed survived; moreover that he employs a double, named Walker, very similar to him in height and build, whose features have been altered by plastic surgery so that he closely resembles Lucan. At the novel’s opening, both Lucan and Walker are in Paris; both, individually, are seeing the same fashionable psychiatrist, Dr. Hildegard Wolf; both claim to be the real Lucan.
Dr. Wolf has troubles of her own. Both Walker and Lucan have learned that she is really Beate Pappenheim, a fake stigmatic from Germany (she simulated the stigmata with her own menstrual blood). When her imposture was exposed in 1986, she disappeared with a great deal of money—much of it donated by the faithful poor. (In a prefatory note, Spark says that this second plot line was also inspired by a real event.)
In Spark’s hands, these parallel stories illuminate each other. Lucan’s aiders and abettors are the aristos who help him elude the law, not out of friendship—Lucan has no real friends—but class solidarity. Hildegard’s aiders and abettors are first those who help her establish her cult, second her companion in Paris, Jean-Pierre, and last her besotted patients. Because Lucan is so despicable, the reader is likely at first to sympathize with Hildegard; Spark wants us to see how easy it is to rationalize and equivocate. The reader for a while becomes an abettor.
In Aiding and Abetting, Spark looks to unmask the mechanism of evil. Elsewhere, most notably in The Only Problem, she has asked the “why” question. Here she focuses on “how.” Evil works by complicity, in webs of compromise and self-deception; the devil himself, as Aquinas wrote, cannot force a person to do wrong.
Like the other cranks, mediums, and tricksters who populate Spark’s fiction, Lucan and Hildegarde practice a banal form of black magic. They are perverse doubles of the novelist, who makes up stories intended to be convincing. Lucan, the quintessential aristocrat, is so confident that his title and lineage make him untouchable that others believe it too. “His proposition was: I am a seventh Earl, I am an aristocrat, therefore I can do what I like, I am untouchable. For a few days after the murder, this attitude overawed the investigators and his friends alike.” Hildegard says that, although she faked the stigmata, “I caused miracles. I really did cure some people.” Both are distinguished by their absolute belief in themselves, which of course entails an ultimate disregard for the reality of anyone else.
This tawdry black magic thrives on secrecy and is always threatened by exposure. Lucan and his double are perpetually on the run; Hildegard is not Hildegard. Against them Spark deploys the white magic of her novelist’s art, which comprehends their schemes—indeed, which brings them into life—and yet is not limited to their claustrophobic world. For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known.
[CORRECTION, April 30, 2001: Because of an editing error, in John Wilson’s review of Aiding and Abetting in our last issue, the date of publication for Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was given as 1969 instead of 1961.]
John Wilson is editor of Books and Culture.
