Loitering with Intent, In the Dark and Little Fires Everywhere

Not only a quaint and dashing story, but from our novelist narrator, in Muriel Spark's superb Loitering with Intent, we are given a crash course in aspects of creative writing. These are some of the hints:

"Since the story of my own life is just as much constituted of the secrets of my craft as it is of other events, I may as well remark here that to make a character ring true it needs must be in some way contradictory, somewhere a paradox".

"I didn't go in for motives, I never have".

"I never described (his) motives, I simply showed the effect of his words, his hints".

"It is not to be supposed that the stamp and feeling of a novel can be conveyed by an intellectual summary".

"So I am writing about the cause of an effect."

"He had fallen back on phonetic spelling, always a literary defect in my opinion".

Do we believe all these pronouncements from Fleur, the young woman created by Muriel Spark, or are some just for fun? Does it really matter? Spark has always considered herself to be a poet first and foremost, so she feels she writes her novels in a poetic vein. Here she pokes fun at autobiographies, especially those from uninteresting people. And she has lots to say about publishers: "I didn't know then, as I do now, that the traditional paranoia of authors is as nothing compared to the inalienable schizophrenia of publishers".

She even mentions her readers: "I always hope that readers of my books are of good quality. I wouldn't like to think of anyone cheap reading my books". The cheek!

Finally, my copy (a 2007 Virago edition) has a wonderful introduction by Mark Lawson. On a personal note, in 1950 (the Kensington setting for this book) I was five years old and it was still three years until we moved to that borough. All the places are so familiar.

This book certainly has atmosphere. The crumbling South London boarding house with a curious mixture of lodgers. Set in the middle of WW1, the hardships at home are vividly portrayed. At the centre of In the Dark is Eithne Clay and her 16 year old son Ralph. His father is a casualty of the war and he misses him terribly. Less so his mother and her relationship with Mr Turk, the dreadful butcher, effects the household in different ways. I thought that Winnie, the ugly housekeeper, was a wonderful character, her beautiful mistress less so. An enjoyable, if not happy, story that pitches us headlong into wartime London. 

I enjoyed the first half of Little Fires Everywhere, an interesting story of the relationships between the two families. They are poles apart. The Richardson family are well off and are a long established part of the community that is Shaker Heights. Mia Warren and her daughter have just arrived and are renting the other family's apartment. We know from the outset that things will get "hot", but there is nothing in the first half to suggest this turn of events.

So when new characters are introduced half way, the story takes a completely different path. I found this to be too contrived as if to pave the way for a more dramatic second half. But given what we know in the first few pages, it was always going to end badly. I skipped the too detailed court case and everything that went with it but was delighted in the superb back story of Mia that comes out of the blue. A little gem in itself. It proved to me that just when you thought you might ditch the book, you never know when something great might happen. This time it did.

There is too much repetition of descriptions of Shaker Heights itself and the book could have been much better if it had lost a hundred pages. The author needs a more forceful editor.