Sparks of simplicity

Muriel Spark is a novelist who seems equally at hame in Edinburgh classrooms or in the mysterious cloisters of a monastic Watergate. In her latest novel, reviewed here by Mary Kenny, she turns her attention to Venice.
'Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark (Macmillan £5.95) Muriel Spark's reputation is a dazzling one. She is prized as one of the leading British novelists of our time, A Catholic. she is the author of The Abbess of Crewe (recently a film with Glenda Jackson), The Ballad of Peckham Rye, and of course, The Prime of Aliss Jean Brodie, whose legend has almost become part of public imagination.
Speaking about the power of teachers over a child's formation, 1 heard a friend say recently: It sometimes seems that everyone has a Jean Brodie in their lives." Muria! Spark seems to have entered the classics.
Yet she really is an extraordinarily simple writer. Perhaps l should not express such surprise at this; all our own English school teachers always taught us to write as simply, as clearly as possible.
But clear and simple writing somehow seems to have gone out of fashion; one has become accustomed to convoluted sentences. to jargon, to elliptical writing, so a straightforward, tinfussy, style in a highbrow novelist today somehow takes one aback.
One searches for dense meanings, complicated thoughtprocesses behind the plain prose „ . But I came to the conclusion, after reading Territorial Rights, Miss Spark's latest novel, that no such hidden depths are intended.
It is quite simply rather an amusing story well told. It is easy to read, skilfully woven. ironically decadent, a witty romp — and nothing else. One searches. with major novelists, for the "significance" of the work; one thinks "What is she trying to tell us'?"
With Muriel Spark the joke is — she is not trying to tell us anything "significant". Like the good
storyteller that she is, she is merely offering to while away an hour or two on a train, at the hairdresser, relaxing on a wet Sunday afternoon.
'Territorial Rights is the story of Robert Leaver, an ambivalent young English art student who lives in Paris and comes to Venice in pursuit of a Bulgarian girl. Venice is beautifully evoked; Miss Spark never forgets to put you in mind of the background, to recall the water lapping against the gondola prow or the presence of low or high tides,
Robert is pursued to Venice by the man he has been living with in Paris who is a rich, worldly, sohpisticated art dealer and suddenly, everyone seems to fetch up in Venice. -Robert's father mit mistress; the matron from his old school ;nil young boyfriend; the Bulgarian girl's old boyfriend and now Communist Party boss; the rich art dealer's war-time lady-friend and co-collaborator.
The plot duly thickens and it all becomes like one of those funny farces in which one unlikely person pairs off with the next, entering and exiting through different doors and french windows of the same stage-set.
It is all good, contemporary fun, the casual shallow relationships that are common today (among a certain set) being taken breezily for granted.
Among her many other gifts, Spark is a brilliant parodist of styles; in mock newspaper reports she captures perfectly the tone of
inflated banality characteristic of media headlines: "Red Girl Painter Defects" and "Balkan Woman Artist Makes Getaway"
"Lina Pancev, a top Bulgarian artist was today reported to be in hiding under protection or wellwishers after her defection on Tuesday."
How often one has written thus. And how different the newspaper report always seems from real life, somehow.
Spark really does love a good joke which manages to point at oblique truths by turning norms upside down, And the last time I went to a service here in Venice," (says Grace, the school matron) "there was a sermon about birth control that Leo translated for me under his breath. I don't know . why the RC church doesn't stick to politics end keep its nose out of morals."
Perhaps I have been mistaken. Perhaps there is more to Muriel Spark than meets the eye: perhaps she does intend to "say sonic
thing'. _