Memento Mori

A wonderful novel about a subject taboo in the 1950's in London... growing old. One of the very few books of its time to talk about those in their 70's and 80's without being patronizing or treating them as stereotypes. BBC Television produced a wonderful version filled with stars who had not held starring roles in decades (except Maggie Smith). Wonderful character studies and a clever premise. Vintage Muriel Spark, for me her finest novel.

Ms. Spark's writing is akin to a master political cartoonist: With deceptively simple strokes, she illuminates the extraordinary, the mundane, and the absurdities of our human condition as we tussle with aging, class, greed, and our mortality.

Loved this book. It was witty, insightful, and very well-crafted. The subject of old age is treated not only without the usual sappiness and maudlin sentimentality, but with irreverence. Though the book is entertaining, it touches upon a number of important ideas- the meaning (or lack thereof) of life, how modern society regards death, and the treatment of the elderly in today's society. Though the book was written in the mid to late 1950's, it is just as relevant today as it was when originally published.

Memento Mori--"Remember you must die"--is the persistent message that intrudes itself into the characters here, a collection of very elderly Englishmen and women of the mid-1950's. Don't be put off by the message, although most of the characters are. This is not a gruesome book. It is a humane, gently hilarious and deadly accurate depiction of what happens to people as they reach and live in old age. The message is a foil for the author's revelation of the individual natures of her characters. I was amazed that I laughed out loud at several points, so acute are Ms. Spark's observations. If you have known very old people or are one yourself, at least one who has a sense of humor and irony, you can appreciate the universality of these people and their attitudes. The individual characters are bound to their own times and situations, youth in the high Victorian Empire and the years thereafter into the twilight of the post war traumas of diminished England. But I am certain that wherever you are, if you have known old people, and observed them interacting with each other, you will recognize Spark's cast of characters and their adventures. The loves and hates, successes and failures that marked their youth are all carried forward and nursed. People bide their time to avenge, in mundane and petty ways, the petty slights and bullying of their spouses and friends accumulated over a lifetime. It all comes together memorably in a very readable way.

Muriel Spark is, as always, deliciously sharp, witty, entertaining, and terrifying. Here a mysterious voice (God? Death? the author?) admonishes a set of alternately charming and despicable souls: "Remember, you must die." Spark is a better novelist than Evelyn Waugh because, while Waugh is often more riotously funny than the ever-subtle Spark, Waugh focuses more on the foibles of the moment--some of his characters will be (though still entertaining) "dated" by the middle of the next century, one suspects. Spark, however, through her tiny intrustions into fictional reality (the voices here, the typewriter in THE COMFORTERS, etc.) enlarges her scope--so long as people die and don't want to think about that fact, MOMENTO MORI will be on target. It is curious that it is the women--Flannery O'Connor and Muriel Spark--who are strong enough to emphasize in the theology of their fiction the "terrible swiftness of mercy," the sheer audacity of the Holy Spirit, as it were. Spark is not only one of the best novelists of our century--she is very likely the most economical. MOMENTO MORI is one of her best. Spark says more in a little over 200 pages than many novelists manage to say in a lifetime of long novels.