The Comforters (Virago Modern Classics)

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The Comforters is the first novel by Scottish author Muriel Spark. She drew on experiences as a recent convert to Catholicism and having suffered hallucinations due to using Dexedrine, an amphetamine then available over the counter for dieting. Although completed in late 1955, the book was not published until 1957. A mutual friend, novelist Alan Barnsley, had sent the proofs to Evelyn Waugh. At the time Waugh was writing The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which dealt with his own drug-induced hallucinations. Por el otro lado, nos regala una novela que encierra suspenso y que en cierta manera se desdobla en primer lugar en las complejas relaciones humanas que se dan entre los náufragos, January Marlow (qué casualidad, el apellido de un personaje de Joseph Conrad), Tom Wells (el apellido recuerda a H. G. Wells) y Jimmie Waterford y su anfitrión, el misterioso Robinson, con una personalidad que se puede asociar a otros personajes también misteriosos de las novelas de Verne, como Robur el conquistador o el capitán Nemo, que siempre encierran un secreto inabordable. One of the problems that the characters have is that because they are only characters rather than people, their efforts to comfort others run awry. They are too caught up with their own hobby horses to ever be helpful to each others, except accidentally. There are few writers that come out of the barriers fully fledged with a distinctive style and ideas, as Muriel Spark did. Fortunately, she had literary friends who read the manuscript and championed it, and a new literary star was born. Excluding The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark consistently broke the novel conventions of the day. In this one, she breaks the 4th wall, but instead of the characters talking to the audience, the audience (ie the writer) talks to the characters, well, one in particular. WE don’t find it disconcerting (well, we shouldn’t), but our character Caroline does, just as an audience can feel uncomfortable when we are confronted by an actor on staff deliberately talking to us when we aren’t supposed to be there.

Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark: the biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2009) (includes an excellent bibliography) Pedant’s corner:- Manders’ (Manders’s,) “Pat it came out just as he had expected” (is syntactically awkward. ‘It came out pat’ is more organic,) “its body from which hangs the roots” (body is not the subject of the verb here, that would be ‘roots’, in the plural, therefore ‘from which hang the roots’,) “among her acquaintance” (acquaintance is used unusually in a plural sense here, there would be nothing wrong with ‘acquaintances’,) Lady Manders’ (Manders’s,) “He thought. How cunning of her” (why the full stop before ‘How’?) “Mervyn was hoping against time” (I have absolutely no idea what this meant,) week-end (weekend,) “using the financial reward as a bribery” (as a bribe,) What is apparent is the ineptitude of the friends. Laurence is a busybody, and thus one would feel would make a clever detective, but even with all the “clues” surrounding the mystery of his grandmother, and of which we, the reader, see very clearly (Hell! Gran practically tells him), he still isn’t absolutely sure what he has is the truth. Laurence’s mother likes to help people using her influence, but she consistently places inappropriate applicants resulting in disastrous and comic outcomes. Events do take a turn--mayhaps it's not for nothing that the island is shaped somewhat ridiculously like the chalk outside of a corpse at a crime scene, but a murder mystery would be just too conventional for Spark.I’ll have a large wholemeal. I’ve got my grandson stopping for a week, who’s on the BBC. That’s my daughter’s boy, Lady Manders. He won’t eat white bread, one of his fads.’ The Comforters was Muriel Spark's first novel. She went on to write a further 21, gaining a reputation for blending wit and humour within darker themes of evil and suffering.

Georgina Hogg is a veritable beast of a woman, mean-spirited and unforgiving, with an ample bosom that threatens all in her path. Worse yet, she "suffers from chronic righteousness." Caroline on the other hand is is frightened by her mystery. Her friends cannot hear the noises of typewriter keys being tapped and a voice that sounds “like one person speaking in several tones at once”. Nor do they manage to record them on tape. Caroline thus fears the worst, that the visitations mean she is going mad. This adds to the isolation she feels because of her religious beliefs and the fact other converts she encounters are either distasteful or a bit dense. Seguramente leeré otros libros de Muriel Spark que tiene la "chispa" (su apellido significa chispa en español) que enciende el interés y la intriga en el lector gracias a una narrativa muy cuidada y que hace hincapié en los momentos justos para atrapar al lector. Other, more astute readers, will probably have understood the significance but it went over my head, and I wasn’t so deeply engaged with the novel otherwise that I wanted to expend any more energy in trying to work it all out.She appears to be in a novel; but it's up to the reader to decide how much of this is a genuine piece of metafiction, and how much is purely in Caroline's mind. Every time Caroline has a thought, it gets echoed by the Typing Ghost. One day she has just written “ On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.” when she hears the sound of a typewriter. Caroline recuperó la comodidad que sentía en compañía del sacerdote, que jamás la trataba como alguien muy distinta a quien era en realidad. La trataba no solo como a una niña, no solo como a una intelectual, no solo como a una mujer nerviosa, no solo como a una rara; parecía asumir sin más que ella era como era." Such novels assume the reader’s sympathetic participation in muddle, they assume a reality unaware that it conceals patterns of truth. But when an imagination ( naturaliter christiana) makes fictions it imposes patterns, and the patterns are figures of the truth. The relations of time and eternity are asserted by juxtaposing poetry and mess, by solemn puns about poverty. None of it would matter to the pagan were it not for the admirable power with which all the elements are fused into shapes of self-evident truth – the power one looks for in poems. Mrs Spark, in her prime, is a poet-novelist of formidable power. In 1985, Muriel Spark was acclaimed ‘the most gifted and innovative British novelist of her generation’; after her death in 2006, tributes and accolades multiplied, none, perhaps, more fitting than that of a fellow Scot, Ian Rankin, who deemed her ‘the greatest Scottish novelist of modern times’. Poet, playwright, editor, biographer, essayist, short story writer, most of all novelist, Muriel Spark achieved an eminence denied by few, but her work is often misinterpreted or misunderstood. Though she lived outside Scotland for most of her life, Spark was a Scottish writer, indelibly stamped by her first nineteen years in Edinburgh: she was ‘Scottish by formation’. And she was a theological writer, an artist of religious conviction and spiritual concerns, a Roman Catholic by conversion.

In this first novel by Muriel Spark – author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie –the only things that aren’t ambiguous are Spark’s matchless originality and glittering wit. This thought is expressed by a character who is a recent convert who is haunted by a muse that at last succeeds in making the character to write a novel. Surely that character in the novel must be Spark. The autobiographical elements add flavour and I love them. For I love Spark. urn:lcp:comforters0000spar_h6n6:epub:a3b2c7db-a0f4-4f99-96ce-626a7821a643 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier comforters0000spar_h6n6 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t8xb25x8m Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780753185513 Spark’s last publications appeared in 2004: her novel, The Finishing School, and All the Poems. The latter title is misleading: it is a selection of poems from 1943 to 2003, arranged according to theme by her editor, Barbara Epler. Spark herself provided the dates that enable a chronological reading, and a statement claiming that her poems are central rather than peripheral to her work: ‘I have always thought of myself as a poet … for creative writing of any sort, an early apprenticeship as a poet is a wonderful stimulant and start’ (AP, xii).Hay un exceso de reflexiones sobre la religión – en particular la católica – producto al parecer de la reciente conversión de la autora y sus cuitas particulares, pero que aquí me han parecido traídas por los pelos. Nonfiction: Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1951 (revised as Mary Shelley, 1987); Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work, 1953 (with Derek Stanford); John Masefield, 1953; Curriculum Vitae, 1992 (autobiography); The Essence of the Brontës: A Compilation with Essays, 1993. La segunda parte de la novela se pone aún más interesante ante la supuesta desaparición de uno de los personajes principales, lo que desatará aún más sospechas entre los que quedan en la isla y es aquí en donde la autora pone más énfasis. Most of the novel is connected to the differing reactions of Laurence and Caroline to these mysteries. Laurence is excited and intrigued when he discovers jewels hidden in a loaf of bread at his grandmother's cottage and finds her in a conflab with three mysterious figures. Mr Webster the baker and the Hogarths, a father and his crippled son could, he surmises be "a gang ... maybe Communist spies". The plot line involving Caroline’s hallucinations was an interesting meta-fictive element but the rest of the book was way too jumbled.