The Comforters

 Lately it occurred to me that, what with one thing and another, I hadn't read a novel for quite a while – I think the last one was probably James Hamilton Paterson's Rancid Pansies. So I reached for a recent charity shop find, Muriel Spark's The Comforters. This was her first novel (one of the dwindling few I haven't read) and it finds her sprinting from the starting blocks with absolute assurance, already fully formed, unique and unmistakable. It was published in 1957, but it could have come from any period of her career, though it does play with some elements of late 1950s fiction, notably the 'Reds under the bed' thriller, the supernatural tale, and the more modish experiments with 'metafiction'. Caroline Rose, who is trying to write a book about the modern novel, finds herself plagued by the sound of typewriter keys and a voice narrating her own thoughts and actions, as if – exactly as if – she is a character in a novel that someone else, the 'Typewriting Ghost', is writing. This element of the story was inspired by Spark's own uncanny experiences while she was having a paranoid breakdown, brought on by overwork, stress, a baked-bean diet and the consumption of large quantities of dexedrine. Meanwhile, Caroline's off-and-on lover Laurence, a sports commentator (of all things) with an excessively inquisitive mind, has become convinced that his grandmother, in her cottage down in Sussex, is running some kind of nefarious gang – and when he finds diamonds hidden in a loaf of bread, this seems to confirm his suspicions. Caroline's friend, the self-styled Baron Stock, a bookseller of sorts, has suspicions of his own, and is convinced that he is on the trail of Britain's leading diabolist. Spark weaves these threads (and more) together with her familiar lightness of touch and, as ever, without wasting a word. She leaves you fully satisfied, and yet in a state of uncertainty as to what exactly it is that you have been reading. If only we could say the same about more recent fiction, which tends to leave you both unsatisfied and quite sure what you've seen reading...
   Oddly, Evelyn Waugh happened upon The Comforters just as he was finishing his own account of a paranoid breakdown, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Like Spark, Waugh was tormented by voices – brought on in his case by a hair-raising combination of bromide, chloral and crème be menthe, imbibed in response to rheumatic pains and insomnia. Both he and Spark had their breakdowns in January 1954, but Waugh did not intrude on Spark's hallucinations – no, she believed she was being persecuted by T.S. Eliot, no less, who was sending her coded messages in the programme notes to The Confidential Clerk and in his Faber blurbs. Anyway, Spark recovered, Waugh recovered, and the front cover of my edition of The Comforters has the endorsement of Evelyn Waugh: 'Brilliantly original and fascinating,' he says. And so it is.