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Title: Aiding and Abetting : A Novel by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0-385-72090-4 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 12 March, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.74 (19 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Sharp and lively satire
Comment: Muriel Spark's new novel interweaves the story of Lord Lucan, a dissolute English Earl who murdered his children's nanny and tried to kill his wife in 1974, then disappeared, with the story of Hildegard Wolf, a psychiatrist with an unconventional method of treating patients and a secret past of her own.
Rumours of Lord Lucan's whereabouts continue to pop up: noone knows if he is still alive or not. In this book, Spark has two separate "Lord Lucan"'s visit Dr. Wolf for treatment. Before long Wolf is wondering how much they know about her, how much they know about each other, and which if either of them is the real Lord Lucan. Several other people are drawn into the search for Lord Lucan, including an old friend of his, and the daughter of another old friend of his, and Hildegard's long-time lover. The resolution is amusing and unexpected.
Spark considers the complicity of accomplices in crime, and the morality of the "upper classes", and the persistence of guilt. Her writing is as always extremely clever -- dare I say it sparkles? -- and the book is slantingly funny and morally insistent and a thoroughgoing joy to read. At 82, Muriel Spark remains a truly brilliant writer. (Like another reviewer, I can't quite bring myself to rate this 5 stars -- but only because the book is so short. It's better than the average 4 star book, at any rate.)
Rating: 5
Summary: Dame Muriel at Eighty
Comment: Muriel Spark hasn't lost her touch. AIDING AND ABETTING isn't one of her very best novels (of her more recent books I prefer REALITY AND DREAMS, although AIDING AND ABETTING is far superior to SYMPOSIUM), but it's still a very good book.
As one reviewer below notes, a curious doubling is one of the tropes of this book--mistaken and overlapping identities mask, I suspect, a concern with lack of identity. Spark handles her various themes with her usual grace, wit, and, most importantly, economy. This book is 166 pages, and Spark uses every one of them well (even when she tells us something twice, we can be sure it is for a good reason).
One final note: AIDING AND ABETTING and DECLARE make for interesting comparison. I have no idea whether Muriel Spark and Tim Powers have much overlap in audience, but perhaps they should. They write very different books, but these two show an interesting coincidence of subject matter. Powers and Spark investigate the possibilities of infamous British aristocrats, in Powers' case Kim Philby, and in Spark's Lord Lucan. The Burgess and Maclean case comes up in both books, and the idea of the decaying English aristocracy as letting them and Lucan escape in a fit of apathy, disbelief, class loyalty, and moral paralysis is important to both writers' aims. Spark conjures up a future for Lucan while Powers' fantasy of history "explains" Philby and indeed the entire Cold War. Doubling, noted above as key to Spark's book, is equally important to Powers, on a more fantastic level. In the end, they take different approaches: Powers' Philby is fascinating, complex, sad and deservedly damned; Spark's Lucan is a study in the banality and triviality of evil. There is mystery, but Lucan is too small to be of great interest to his own story.
Rating: 2
Summary: repetitive and boring
Comment: this comes from someone who knew nothing of the legend of lord lucan.. but still from the opening of the story i was intrigued by it.. however the book is constantly repeating the few details that it shares with us on the crime and lord lucan's disapperance over and over again. I felt the book to be very incomplete.. and the key word here really is repeatitive.. It's just a bore! Pass it! (the last two sentences being the only two in need of capitalization)
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Title: The Bachelors (New Directions Classics,) by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811214249 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811214575 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811214745 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Driver's Seat (The New Directions Bibelots) by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811212718 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: May, 1994 List Price(USD): $7.00 |
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Title: The Ballad of Peckham Rye (New Directions Classics.) by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811214087 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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