A Far Cry from Kensington (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

First and foremost, Muriel Spark’s novels are performances; their effect does not depend on the reader’s forgetting that he is holding a book in his hands. One reads her books as they are written, with a certain detachment, admiring their skillful artifice. Yet if Spark’s novels are coolly ironic entertainments, they are also oblique parables, many of which explore the nature of evil.

A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON is a retrospective first-person narrative. From the vantage point of the 1980’s, the narrator recalls events which took place in 1954 and 1955. She was then in her late twenties, a war widow who had married at age eighteen a man whom she had met only a month before. Throughout the narrative other characters address her as Mrs. Hawkins (her married name), rather than by her given name, and she is regarded as a reliable confidante--in part, she suggests, because she was then rather fat. (As she loses weight, she begins to lose the role which others have assigned to her.)

The backdrop for the story is the London publishing scene, especially its eccentric fringe. The narrator’s encounters with a variety of publishers and literary hangers-on are deftly sketched; also figuring in the plot are devotees of “radionics,” a pseudoscience employing a device similar to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box. In particular, Mrs. Hawkins jousts with a hack writer and an adept of radionics, Hector Bartlett, whom she dubs a “pisseur de copie.” Initially, this conflict might seem to be merely a matter of aesthetics, and Bartlett--with his absurd pretensions and truly awful writing--merely a figure of comedy, yet ultimately he is shown to be an agent of evil, responsible for the death of a troubled woman. Unsettled by this mixture of nostalgia and satire, light comedy and metaphysical probing, the reader is never allowed to get comfortable. Such, evidently, is Spark’s intention.

Sources for Further Study

The Atlantic. CCLXII, August, 1988, p. 80.

Chicago Tribune. July 11, 1988, V, p. 3.

Contemporary Review. CCLII, April, 1988, p. 213.

Library Journal. CXIII, July, 1988, p. 96.

Los Angeles Times. July 14, 1988, V, p. 12.

New York. XXI, August 1, 1988, p. 45.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, July 31, 1988, p. 1.

Newsweek. CXII, August 15, 1988, p. 60.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIII, May 27, 1988, p. 48.

Time. CXXXII, July 4, 1988, p. 70.

The Times Literary Supplement. March 18, 1988, p. 301.