Ballad Of Peckham Rye

This novel was new when I first picked it up for a train journey. I had been reading a good deal about Muriel Spark in newspaper notices at the time, so this was the chance to find out for myself. It was love at first read, and I was curious whether the wonder of it all might have survived the decades. Muriel Spark's work is commonly classified as `satire', and I suppose that's fair. However something that her early admirers, including Evelyn Waugh, stressed was that she is not really like anyone else, and I believe that is true also. Obviously, satire has contemporary themes, so it might seem a likely candidate for early obsolescence, but a few moments' thought suggests otherwise. Juvenal Voltaire Swift and Macaulay have not exactly gone out of fashion, and are still read with enjoyment by people who cannot be bothered to look up their contemporary allusions, and 40 or more years after it was launched the satirical magazine Private Eye seems not only to be still going strong but to have passed on its special vocabulary, originally attached to figures now little remembered, to a new generation of fans. Small wonder in that case that Mrs Spark is still wearing well. For newcomers to the author, this is as good an introduction as any. It is completely characteristic of her, it does not threaten memory overload with a huge cast of characters as The Bachelors possibly does, it stops short of being downright weird like The Hothouse by the East River, but on the other hand it escapes being lightweight like The Abbess of Crewe or even the immortal Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Of the standard Spark features, Catholicism is relegated to a brief mention, of much the usual kind, in the last page or two, but two of the characters, including the principal character (hardly qualifying as any `hero') are Scots. Her ear is as acute as ever, and readers old enough to remember the fashion for addressing people with rhyming animal names (`See you later, alligator.' `In a while, crocodile.' etc) must smile at the way the thing is done here. The book evokes an era, and one that I remember quite well. This was the impoverished post-war Britain of dull clothes and duller food, before we first swang in the Swinging Sixties. Small manufacturing companies were still common, and it was still common for them to be British-owned and managed before automation, globalisation, the EU, MBA's and consultant-speak set in. Mrs Spark is a talented observer and mimic, and as usual there is little or no sense of affection for, or between, any of her characters. She is funny in a wry way rather than any aisles-rolled-in way, and as usual you never quite know where you are with her. Situations can become serious and even lethal in the proverbial twinkling of an optic, and one of her dramatis personae in this book is murdered and there is another attempt at murder or at least serious assault. There is no outright irrationality this time, at least if you opt as I do for the theory that

The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) seems more typical Sparkian fare than 1958's Robinson, which is to say more arch, more satirical, and more stylistically bizarre. And yet, while in Robinson Spark uses realism to loosen readers from their moorings so that they founder in the depths of what seemed to be a straightforward story, in Peckham Rye her wry, detached sketches release the reader into a kind of drunken clarity about such Big Ideas as, say, human nature. Reading this short novel, I told a friend at the time, felt like being in one of those whiskey-induced hazes in which certain lines and observations blaze with a delightful, transcendent truth--for example, "Dougal gazed at him like a succubus whose mouth is in its eyes," or "My lonely heart is deluged by melancholy and it feels quite nice"--while the lesser details, like What Is Actually Going On, recede elegantly into obscurity.

Dougal Douglas (or Douglas Dougal, depending on who you're talking to) may be a devil, and some people think he seems more Irish than Scottish. Whatever else he is, he is a lot of fun. THE BALLAD OF PECKHAM RYE lacks the sympathetic, possibly autobiographical central character found in many Spark novels (THE COMFORTERS, THE BACHELORS, etc.); however, it doens't fall into the black hole that swallows THE DRIVER'S SEAT or other works consumed by Spark's sense of evil. Instead, Dougal Douglas, the ever-present mischief-maker, takes the place of the sympathetic center. He wreaks havoc, but only by bringing out the devil in others--he himself has a kind of curious innocence in the midst of their scheming and violence, and acts as a (presumable) spokesman for Spark when he categorizes their various moralities (Functional, Emotional, Puritanical and Christian).Such a summary doesn't begin to capture the delight and wit of one of Spark's most enjoyable and economical (again, not a page too long, which cannot be said for many of even our best writers today) books.

Dougal Douglas, the protagonist of this short novel, is a modern-day trickster, stirring up the sleeping industrial town of Peckham, where secrets and neuroses are in abundance. I loved Ms. Spark's sense of comedy. It makes her books always a fun read, and it's subtle enough so it never becomes an annoyance to distract one from the story.

Loved the novel and loved the story. There was too much inside British stuff in the novel for a Houstonian like me to get the irony of.