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Title: The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0-8112-1296-3 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: May, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.57 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: "Beware the ire of the calm."
Comment: Electronic surveillance equipment, bugging devices, rigged elections and a secret love affair--yes, these are all elements of daily life at the Abbey of Crewe. Following the death of Abbess Hildegarde, a battle for power takes place. In one corner--Alexandra and her henchnuns, Wallburga, the Prioress and Mildred, the Novice Mistress. In the other corner is Sister Felicity--a popular nun who campaigns on the platform of an "open audit of all dowries" and she also (according to her enemies) "advocates indiscreet sex." Felicity, you see, is actually embroiled in a sordid love affair with a "lax and leaky Jesuit." Felicity's popularity is growing as "a result of her nauseating propaganda."
The stately and perpetually calm Alexandra feels that it's her "destiny" to serve as the next Abbess, but she's not taking any chances on Divine Providence. Armed with a copy of "The Art of War" she sets to work to rig the election and solve "this crisis of leadership."
Muriel Spark's books are always entertaining, well written and full of perverse characters. 'Nice' fictional characters with morally superior motivations are for other authors to explore--Spark prefers the dark regions of human nature. Ambition, power, and pride are pervasive in the abbey--an institution in which those particular elements of human nature are supposed to be non-existent. "The Abbess of Crewe" takes a cynical look at the political network within a convent and skewers religion unmercifully. As the squabble in the Abbey rages, the ever-faithful nuns do not for a moment forget their around-the-clock prayers. The nuns are all delightfully naughty characters--dim-witted Winifrede, wily Gertrude, and ever-loyal Mildred and Wallburga. Muriel Spark fans will be delighted with this clever novella--it's wicked, saucy fun. Five stars for sheer unabashed cheek and making me laugh out loud into the bargain--displacedhuman
Rating: 4
Summary: 'That woman has a bad mind'
Comment: -- unquote the most formidable of my university tutors, declining to follow up my recommendation that he should see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie).
I had the presence of mind to answer 'Well so have I' but not the gall to say to him 'How about you?' Really she only has a 'bad' mind in the sense we all have bad minds -- there are thoughts we do not lightly own up to. What makes Spark so unique is that the thoughts are so diverse and fanciful. She is all over the place in the best sense, she is as light-footed as a Mendelssohn scherzo, and there is never a demeaning touch in all her writing. I never really know where I am with her. She deals with senility (Memento Mori), satanism (The Ballad of Peckham Rye), fascism (Brodie), epilepsy (The Bachelors) and sexual situations too various to list (passim) like the shallop flitting silken-sailed in The Lady of Shalott. They never become issues, they never become themes and there is often an overlay of the outright fantastic, as when Mrs Georgina Hogg in The Comforters, who has no private life, disappears when she closes her bedroom door behind her.
The Abbess gets 4 stars from me because it is one of her slighter efforts compared with the novels mentioned above and certain others. Anyone getting to know Spark's work could start as well with this as with those, or indeed as well with those as with this. If you can get her wavelength at all this book will not 'lose' you as The Hothouse by the East River might do. I have seen it described as 'a wicked satire on Watergate', a plonking, insensitive characterisation -- you do not pin Spark down like that. Any fool can see what might have suggested the election campaign for Abbess between the sewing nun and the electronics nun, and the repeated question to the foreign missionary nun when she rings in from various parts of the globe 'Gertrude, do you have a cold?' is an obvious reference to Kissinger but fantasy not satire. Dame Muriel was Jewish by birth and a convert to Catholicism, with which she is obviously fixated in her own strange way. I have never understood what its special attraction was for an author who has an affair going on between one of the nuns and a local Jesuit, but I don't think this author allows us that kind of insight into her thinking. This book is even more of a gossamer effort than usual and you will get to the end before you know it, at which point you will be hit out of the blue by the sudden and startling poetry of the last sentence.
Rating: 4
Summary: a fable to keep you laughing
Comment: If this book were written in a serious tone, I fear it could be taken as very offensive slander. Instead, it is a brilliant send-up of Watergate and similar abuses of power. It centers on the election of a new abbess.
Candidate 1 recites her favorite (Protestant) English poetry rather than the Psalms, supports a strong sense of societial class, and uses electronic eavesdropping as a mere extention of listening to convent gossip as a way to maintain proper order.
Candidate 2 is compulsive regarding order in her sewing box, maintains an all-too-public liaison with a young Jesuit (outdoors rather than linen closets), and leads the sewing nuns to dreams of freedom.
Add to this a missionary nun using Machivelli to deal with cannibal and vegetarian tribes, young Jesuits bungling break-ins, a nun cross-dressing to deliver hush money ... and you have an absolutely hilarious study in justification of means to insure one's "destiny".
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Title: Memento Mori by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811214389 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: June, 2000 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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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 Public Image (A Revived Modern Classic) by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811212467 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: April, 1993 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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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: The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark ISBN: 081121379X Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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