A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

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reviewed by Roy Peachey

Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington is a playful, clever and occasionally disturbing comic novel. It is also a book about the publishing industry but it’s far from being a self-obsessed media novel. There is a strong satirical element to the book but there are also some great characters and an intriguing plot. As with so many of her novels, Muriel Spark enjoys toying with her readers, leading us this way and that with plot twists and time changes. She keeps us on our toes.

The central character and narrator is Mrs Hawkins, who works (and gets sacked by) a series of publishing houses. However, equally important to her and the plot are her fellow tenants in a large “rooming-house” in South Kensington. The most significant of these is Wanda Podolak, a Polish dressmaker and devout Catholic who starts to receive anonymous poison letters and phone calls, the investigation and consequences of which lie at the heart of this novel.

Mrs Hawkins, as she insists on being called, is a wonderful character. A Catholic, like Spark herself, she recites the Angelus at midday even while in the midst of work conversations (which makes for some wonderful comic juxtapositions). She is also a great dispenser of advice and so the novel provides, in passing, some wonderful passages about how to write well simply because “it fell to me to give advice to many authors which in at least two cases bore fruit. So I will repeat it here, free of charge.”

This advice includes acquiring a cat: “Alone with the cat in the room where you work …the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk-lamp. … The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquillity of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost.”

One character who fails to take any of Mrs Hawkins’ advice is Hector Bartlett, a pisseur de copie who represents all that Mrs Hawkins (and, I suspect, Spark herself) despised. He was a writer who, as he put it, took “incalculable pains with my prose style.”

“He did indeed,” the narrator agrees. “The pains showed. His writings writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words.” This literary failure, we soon discover, is inextricably linked with his moral failings; prose style in Spark’s novels is rarely an entirely neutral matter.

This is a book which fizzes with wit, intrigue and psychological insights. Muriel Spark was a great novelist and, as this and many other novels reveal, deserves to be widely read.

• Paperback: 189 pages (order from Amazon)
• Publisher: New Directions (September 2000)
• ISBN-10: 0811214575
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214575
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches