The Bachelors: Novel

The scene is a London courtroom where a spiritualist medium is on trial for defrauding a widow of her life savings. One of the main prosecution witnesses is a handwriting expert who suffers from epilepsy. Under questioning he suffers a seizure and the judge asks `Is this man a medium?' It's very clever, in this instance it's very funny, and it's more than slightly heartless. It is the distinctive individual tone of Muriel Spark. This is one of her best. I found I had to be very alert and attentive or I was liable to miss some new element lightly thrown into the plot without warning. Muriel Spark's touch is as light as thistledown. The characters in The Bachelors are a down-in-the-mouth lot, ranging from nondescript to squalid, but the author typically stays above, or at least outside, their dreary lightless existence. Thinking back over the book, I can't recall anything that I would classify as a single noble thought or piece of lofty motivation. The theme of bachelordom is not really central to the action, more a storyteller's device to help maintain a sense of unity in the narrative. One has to admire the sheer skill with which she keeps control of such a large cast and so many convoluted situations. The characters talk non-stop - virtually all of the book is between quotation-marks - and we have to get to know them, except in two instances, through what they say, not through what they think by themselves. In one of these cases we get a startling insight into what the medium is really pondering and planning, startling because of the way it contrasts with the idiom of the book generally at least as much as because of the nature of his mind. In the other instance a doctor who hardly features at all in the dialogue shines a moment's blinding light through the encircling murk. The many characters are lively and convincing, their individuality beautifully touched in through subtle little touches that you will be liable to miss if your attention falters even for a moment. Despite that they have a feel of human puppets about them, a show put on for us by a clear-headed, clever, elegant and rather cold-hearted puppeteer. It may be that Muriel Spark is herself putting on an act by letting herself appear in such a light. My own feeling is that she is not minded to resolve that question for us - we can view her how we like for all she seems to care. I like her just the way she chooses to be.

"Daylight was appearing over London, the great city of bachelors" is the fist sentence of Muriel Sparks's book, "The Bachelors". The areas of London that had the greatest concentration of bachelors were Queen's Gate, Kensington and King's Road. Places all near the center of the shopping district.The very British bachelors in this novel, a barrister, a councilman, a detective, an unusual priest, a spiritual medium, a handwriting expert, a man with uncontrolled seizures, and a man who eats onions to ward off advances from women, all well developed characters in this novel.All start out on a Saturday morn, organizing their food shopping with their meal planning, and who will cook and clean for them.They are all drawn in eventually into the social register of the group, and into the spiritual atmosphere of the medium, Patrick Seton.Patrick Seton, a man who is a well known fraud to some. A man with little or no conscience and a man who will draw all of these bachelors into a lawsuit. Is Patrick Seton so demonized that he would try to kill his diabetic, pregnant girlfriend? So thinks the physician who is being blackmailed by Mr. Seton. Ahh, but what of this woman who is so in love with Mr. Seton? Is she a silly girl who will do anything for the love of he man?Are any of these bachelors really in love with their women, or do they need them for other nefarious reasons? What are their motives? How will this man Patrick Seton confuse their spirits and their lives?Dame Muriel Sparks was born in 1918, and in a few months her 26th novel will be published. She is a well beloved novelist from England. She writes of the dark, terrifying, evilness of the human spirit; and the deadpan humor of the human experience. This is a novel to be relished and to be read again to really experience the malevolence of the human mind. prisrob

Muriel Spark is deliciously witty and writes with a lively charm. This does not prevent her from having an extraordinary talent for portraying the monstrously abnormal--to be precise, the diabolical. THE DRIVER'S SEAT, for instance, is overwhelmed by this malevolence--it is an excellent nightmare, but has only small moments of the Spark charm.THE BACHELORS has a lot of both--the "medium" Patrick is one of Spark's most chilling portraits of evil. The scheming Spiritualists resemble more typical Spark "villains" (like the literary circle in LOITERING WITH INTENT), but are perhaps even more harmless in and of themselves. However, unwittingly they touch on something far grimmer--Spark demolishes the Spiritualists by showing that the only thing worse than their nonsense is when they stumble upon something genuine.The "good" bachelors' interactions with this group provide an entertaining and equally true view of things, preventing the chill from permeating the book.

Forgetting that I read this book some years ago, I recently picked up the new edition. Expecting to page through innocently and put the book back on the shelf, I suddenly found myself drawn into this devilish and absorbing tale about spiritual mediums, forgery, betrayal and yes, bachelors. Spark turns her marvelous eye on that group of men who want girls for companionship, but not marriage. This is a sly and yet poignant look at a group of intelligent, but not very bright Londoners circa 1960. I recommend it without reservation.