Intentionally sparkling diversion

Loitering With Intent b■ Muriel Spark (Bodley Head, £6.50)
HOW DOES a novelist feel about being labelled? When Muriel Spark is nominated one of our leading woman novelists, does the superfluous word 'woman' irritate? Some would claim that novels by women have a special flavour, an insight. an attention to detail and that they should perhaps be weighed against each other . rather than against the work of their male-counterparts, like women tennis players with less strength but an extra flair.
But if we add the description 'Catholic' — a 'Catholic novelist' — what then? A novelist whose formative years were spent in a Catholic family. conventeducated and now lapsed; a novelist who converted in the enthusiasm of youth and has long since wearied of the whole affair; a novelist who is intellectually and spiritually committed to the Roman persuasion — all these could qualify. and probably do.
We might class Edna O'Brien with Grahame Greene. Or do we restrict the title 'Catholic' to the novelist whose work is infiltrated by the complex machinery as well as the moral instransigence or the
Catholic Church? Certainly Muriel Spark's work shows a familiarity with ecclesiastical paraphenalia as well as a Catholic consciousness of good and evil and the dichotomy of humannature.
Her latest novel, Loitering With Intent, has an intriguing theme. The narrator, Fleur, is a 'Catholic woman novelist' who has just completed her first fulllength work and is looking for a publisher. In the meantime she needs a job. This she finds with the oddly unreal Sir Quentin Oliver who runs a non-profit making organisation. the Autobiographical Association, which is intended to advise and assist people whose lives seem, to themselves at least, worthy of an autobiography.
Sir Quentin engages Fleur to act as part-secretary, part-ghostwriter to his group. The members of the Association all appear to be 'suitable cases for treatment' including an unfrocked priest, a cripple and a French baronne — ail eccentrics to say the least, and all, according to Fleur 'more or less illiterate'. In her efforts to enliven their autobiographies, she adds some imaginative detail and incidents and is fascinated to find that these are accepted without question b.■.. the would-be authors.
Sir Quentin himself seems to be manipulating his clients in the most sinister way and Fleur is somewhat alarmed when she finds that the plot of her own novel is somehow the script for the real-life drama of these people's lives. The bizarre tragicomedy that develops forms the basis for Loitering With Intent. There is more than a touch of the Abbess of Crewe in the ambivalent figure of Sir Quentin.
As always, Muriel Spark has an amusing and cynical touch — revealingly her narrator describes her methods — "I treated the story ... with a light and heartless hand. as is my way when I have to give a perfectly serious account of things. No matter what is described it seems to me a sort of hypocrisy for a writer to pretend to be undergoing tragic experiences when obviously one is sitting in relative comfort with a pen and paper or before a typewriter".
It is this 'light and heartless hand' which makes Miss Spark's novels so distinctive and entertaining. Her tour-de-force in this latest book is the character Edwina, mother of the horrid Sir Quentin.
She is an ancient witch-like creature with garish maquillage and flamboyantly feminine decor. As convenient to her whims, she pretends to be ga-ga and her most impish ploy is to wet her knickers on every possible and crucial occasion! She is Fleur's ally in the complicated quest for some sweet reasonableness to emerge from this amazing conglomerate of fact and fiction.
There is a host of other equally peculiar characters here. Loitering With Intent is eminently readable, diverting and (no pun intended) sparkling.
Barbara Hamilton-Smith