The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 7: Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark was a prolific poet and novelist who was nominated for the Booker Prize three times over the course of her long and distinguished writing career. In 1981, Spark’s Loitering with Intent was shortlisted for the prize alongside that year’s eventual winner, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. The novel is a wonderfully gossipy and entertaining literary joyride which sees a would-be novelist takes inspiration from her life only to find the tables are mysteriously turned – and it’s our August Book of the Month.

Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
The Public Image by Muriel Spark
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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James Walton:
“As I met her at one of our meetings and knew she disliked me intensely on sight. I was young and pretty and she had totally succumbed to the law of gravity without attempting to do a thing about it.”
Hello everybody and welcome to the latest Booker Prize Podcast with me, James Walton…

Jo Hamya:
…And me, Jo Hamya.

James Walton:
And today we’re doing another of the Booker books of the month for August, obviously, and it is going to be Muriel Sparks’ Loitering with Intent. But let’s just launch off with intent ourselves for a bit while we start off with our traditional questions to each other. Let’s go for it.

Jo Hamya:
Loitering with Intent starts out… We know that it starts out with Fleur Talbot writing a memoir. And we’re essentially reading a book within a book.

James Walton:
Within a book, within a book. But we’ll get onto that.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah. Don’t confuse them yet, James. But it did get me wondering. So the book opens with this remarkable scene of Fleur in a graveyard writing a poem and a policeman comes up to her and she’s eating a sandwich and she offers him lunch, and it’s just so gorgeous. I was wondering if you were going to write a memoir what life event or day of your life you would start on? Don’t say birth because that’s boring.

James Walton:
Oh, there’s my answer gone then. Okay. Yes. It is interesting. She picks a turning… She does say, “This is a big turning point in my life.” She just finished one job and she’s about to move on to another one. There’s that line from the song That was the River by The Waterboys that I am quite fond of. The chorus goes ”That was the river. This is the Sea.” And that bit when you…  this might be on my mind now because my son is -absolutely heartbreaking- at a university open day today, which means he’s going to leave home. Honestly, I’ve got to the stage now where I can’t watch David Attenborough documentaries in which birds leave the nest. I mean, seriously, it’s absolutely horrible. And so because that’s on my mind and I think his life now, I’m about to… He just got a provisional licence, but just take him driving, the little fella. And he is… So that point at which that was the river, this is the sea for him. So maybe it was that, maybe it is you-

Jo Hamya:
That’s where you’d start with your son leaving home?

James Walton:
No, I’d leave… No, it’s made me think of that bit where you suddenly realise uh-oh or hurrah or a bit of both. My parents are gone now and it’s me. That was the river. This is the sea.

Jo Hamya:
Do you want a tissue? I’ve actually got one.

James Walton:
I actually have… I’m not faking this. I don’t know how parents do the empty nest syndrome business. Just seems empty.

Jo Hamya:
It’s okay.

James Walton:
It’s okay. Yeah.

Jo Hamya:
My mom cried for days when I left or she lied about it. She went, “I didn’t cry at all when you left.” And then my sister was there saying, “She cried for a week.”

James Walton:
And obviously, you prepare them for this and this means you’ve done your job and everything and it’s great that he’s out there in the world, but it isn’t really. Well, let me come back to you with a question of almost profound and complete shallowness after all that. You brought that out, God, you’ve set me off now. Okay, Jo, what’s your favourite album of all time? The only way to do this is just the first two or three that pop into your head.

Jo Hamya:
First two or three that pop into my head. They’re all Nick Cave albums. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

James Walton:
That’s fine by me.

Jo Hamya:
And I think I have a really soft spot for Push the Sky Away because it’s the first album. It was released in 2013 and I was a teenager at the time and that was my first, it wasn’t my first Nick Cave album that I’d ever heard of, but the first one that I was conscious of being released that I waited for, it had its 10-year anniversary this year and I cried for a more pathetic reason. I listened to it all the way through.

James Walton:
Boatman’s Call. I’m a Boatman’s Call boy myself.

Jo Hamya:
Are you? See, I find it really rough. I feel that album has become cliche to a point.

James Walton:
But that’s like saying what’s your favourite album, Salt and Pepper, but what if it just is the best? You know what I mean? We’re about to get onto Muriel Spark and people will say The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is by far her best book. And that’s a cliche and it’s also as far as I can see true.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah. Maybe it’s just the fact that Into My Arms has been so tragically overplayed at this point.

James Walton:
Yes. So Muriel Spark and the reason we’re doing Muriel Sparks’ Loitering with Intent because this was one of three of her books that were shortlisted for the Booker Prize over the years and the last one to be, so in 1981.

Jo Hamya:
Amazing shortlist.

James Walton:
Yeah, it was. That was the year that Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie won and in some ways revolutionised literature or revolutionised modern fiction.

Jo Hamya:
Certainly revolutionised Booker.

James Walton:
It really did. Other books on the shortlist that year included Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers, Rushdie and McEwan in fact the only two people born after the war on that list. But he’s 81, which was not that long after the war, but Muriel Spark, by no means the oldest, and Molly Keane, I think was born 1904 or something. Anyway, so that’s why we’ve picked Loitering with Intent. I mean apart from its obvious qualities that we’ll be coming onto. It might be worth saying a bit about Muriel Spark herself. I get the slight impression… And I don’t know if this is unfair, but 30 years ago, she was absolutely one of the leading British novelists and seemed absolutely locked in stone. I’m not sure that apart from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which you may come back to the fact that, I think it is probably is by some distance her best book, whether she’s read widely anymore, or whether she’s become something of a name. I mean, we would encourage people to read her more, wouldn’t we? But should we say a bit about Muriel Spark herself first?

Jo Hamya:
Sure. So to your point, I always had the impression that Muriel Spark was always on my to read list. It’s great to have the excuse now, but I always pictured myself reading Muriel Spark on a beach, even though I’m inherently opposed to the idea of beach reads. But it’s because I had this image of her as a literary hot girl. I was so thrilled when I started looking into her that that was utterly correct. And she does have this very glamorous literary vagabond backstory. So she was born in Edinburgh, a quite good neighbourhood, apparently I have this from Alan Massey, a very respectable neighbourhood. When 19-

James Walton:
1918 when she was born.

Jo Hamya:
… 18.

James Walton:
She was first published at the age of 12. She was a poet and she also went to James Gillespie’ School where one of her teachers was Christine Kay.

Jo Hamya:
And that was the inspiration for-

James Walton:
Miss Jean Brodie. Miss Jean Brodie got twisted from Christine Kay in a way that she is one of her ways of operating as we may discuss. I mean she calls in her autobiography Christine Kay wonderful, inspiring and it does say she was a model for Jean Brodie. But Jean Brodie is more complicated than that.

Jo Hamya:
As a young woman, she has a rather unfortunate marriage. There’s this amazing interview where she says that she got married because it was the only way a young woman at the time was permitted to have sex and have fun. But it turned out that her husband was a depressive and she’d actually followed him to what was then Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe.

James Walton:
That’s right. As luck would have it, he was called Sydney Oswald Spark, so his initials were SOS. She played with a bit and she also said at one point he was a borderline case and I didn’t like what was on either side of the border, but she also… I think it was a good point, she said one thing she did get out of it was a good surname. So that marriage fell apart. She came back to Britain during the war, started working for The Poetry Society, edited The Poetry Society magazine where she feels in her autobiography, she’s absolutely savage about her enemies. She feels she was patronised as a young woman. She was more modernist than the old-fashioned people there. And she writes about that with her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae with a bit on The Poetry Society is fantastically bitter. Here she is on Marie Stopes, the famous champion of birth control for women controversially at the time, the Marie Stopes Clinics and so on. And she’s one of her enemies at The Poetry Society because she was involved in that. And she says, “I met her at one of our meetings and knew she disliked me intensely on sight. I was young and pretty and she had totally succumbed to the law of gravity without attempting to do a thing about it. I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she, had not thought of birth control.”
So anyway. And she also says in that book that she fed The Poetry Society experiences into Loitering with Intent. But again, in the same twisted way in which Christine Kay becomes Miss Jean Brodie, because it’s not absolutely apparent. Picking up the story, she is sacked by The Poetry Society as the editor of the magazine. So then she hung around literally London, on the edge of literary London rather like the character in Loitering with Intent. Wrote biographies of Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë and others. Won a very prestigious short story competition in The Observer in 1951. And then she was off her first novel, The Comforters came in 1954, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie conquers the world in 1961 that brings her loads of money from films and TVs and theatre awards. And then she did become a literary Grande Dame living in New York and then Rome and then Tuscany and hosting glamorous parties and living a writer’s life that… I don’t know how many people do that anymore.

Jo Hamya:
She’s buried in Tuscany now.

James Walton:
Yeah.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah. It’s amazing. Her gravestone just says [foreign language 00:09:43], Poet.

James Walton:
Well, she always considered herself a poet rather than a novelist.

Jo Hamya:
I tried to read some of her poetry. It is incredibly formal even though you know that she’s completely in command of her craft when she’s writing. There is a carefree attitude in her book, or not exactly carelessness, but an easiness. But her poetry, it’s incredibly rigorous.

James Walton:
I mean, I must say it’s not unusual in my experience for writers to not realise what they’re best at. I think she’s much better as a novelist than a poet.

Jo Hamya:
Well, it’s interesting, I was watching an interview with her where she was saying that the novel is a cheat for a short story and the short story is a cheat for a poem. And she considered the poem a completely superior form and that was because she felt that the only way one could be a creative writer, and I do agree with her on this, is that you had to have an ear for musicality. You had to know how to construct a sentence so it would sound good. So with all of that, we should now summarise Loitering with Intent.

James Walton:
Which even by our standards, it’s a pretty hard book to summarise.

Jo Hamya:
I don’t know. I feel this one’s going to be-

James Walton:
Right. Okay. In that case-

Jo Hamya:
… unusually short.

James Walton:
In that case, consider the buck passed. I mean maybe you should set this up. So after Miss Jean Brodie, early sixties, she’s got that, she’s got The Girls of Slender Means and then tools along. She’s also shortlisted in the very first Booker Prize for The Public Image, which I’ve read and couldn’t quite see what the fuss was about. The Driver’s Seat was also appeared on the shortlist when there was a Booker Prize for the missing year. So for the missing year, 1970, The Driver’s Seat appears on that and she considered that her best book. It was a very weird one about a woman who basically shows up in a city in Italy deciding she wants to be murdered and she has to identify who’s going to murder her and make him murder her. We can come back to themes of predestination, but in quite a lot of her books, there’s a novelist figure who creates characters really. Miss Jean Brodie famously has her set and she describes what characteristics each of them should have and they live up to it as best they can in a way, certainly at school. So they’re literary creations. So bearing all that in mind, the main character in here is a novelist who seems to be based on Muriel Spark. And then what happens?

Jo Hamya:
So we open with our novelist whose name is Fleur Talbot. I love that because there’s a recurring disdain for the figure of the English rose in this book. And yet its main character who hands out parcels at this disdain is called Fleur. We open with an image of her in a graveyard around Earls Court, I think-

James Walton:
Kensington.

Jo Hamya:
Oh, Kensington-

James Walton:
It’s not that far from Earls Court-

Jo Hamya:
I loved reading this. It was so local to me. I love it when that happens. And she’s in a graveyard. She’s working on a poem. She’s approached by a policeman and she basically begins to set out the premise that she will be writing a memoir of a year in her life in the middle of the century. This book takes place in 1949, stretches through to 1950. And at the beginning of this year, Fleur is… She’s working on her very first novel called Warrender Chase. It’s a psychological thriller. She’s broke in the manner of all writers. We know this. And so a friend finds her a job at the Autobiographical Association, which I believe is based on the Poetry Society.

James Walton:
Well, so she says in Curriculum Vitae that it’s very… Well the Autobiographical Association, not the only example of this at all in Muriel Spark is semi-realistic and semi weirder than that. So it’s a group of people who decide they’re going to write their autobiographies, but because they don’t want to scandalise people, they’re going to write them and then wait 70 years before they publish them. It’s run by a guy called Sir Quentin and it consists mainly of posh people. Fleur is brought in to crack their grammar and everything, but starts to just sex up their stories really. Meanwhile…

Jo Hamya:
Meanwhile… Well we should also mention, because I think she may be my favourite character in this whole book, Sir Quentin is also quite beleaguered with his rather elderly slightly spiteful and wonderful mother.

James Walton:
Edwina.

Jo Hamya:
Edwina, who will lose control of her bladder at will whenever it suits her. And I love the phrase that’s used, “flux of precipitations.”

James Walton:
Yes, flux of precipitations. Well that’s one of the tricks is that Fleur suggests that phrase to Beryl Tims who is the housekeeper who starts using it. And so in a way she’s creating dialogue for it. I mean the mix of novel and… And this is why I think it is quite hard to summarise novel and reality and-

Jo Hamya:
It bleeds.

James Walton:
It really does. So even that bit, when you are mentioning her name Fleur, she says, “I’ve got one of these names haphazardly chosen Fleur.” Well, it’s not haphazardly chosen because Muriel Sparks chosen it quite carefully. Anyway.

Jo Hamya:
So Fleur is tarting up the Autobiographical Associations’ manuscript. She’s made friends with Edwina, she’s working on her Warrender Chase manuscript by night. She is also and I adore this, having an affair with her friend Dottie’s husband, who is a rather unaccomplished writer who later in the novel decides that not being satisfied with his wife or his mistress, he will take up with a poet, amazingly named Grey Mauser.

James Walton:
Yes, indeed.

Jo Hamya:
But very early on into the mix, and I adore Muriel Spark for this Fleur begins to be suspicious of Sir Quentin’s intent towards these members of the Autobiographical Association. Spark is wonderful because she spoils her own novels around page five. We know that Sir Quentin is a quote psychological Jack the Ripper, unquote and that he will end up dead by the end of the novel. The more interesting part really than the fact that Sir Quentin ends up dead and various members of the Autobiographical Association end up dead, is the fact that their group and their lives begin to mirror the manuscript that Fleur is working on Warrender Chase. And there is that bleed of reality into fiction or even the question of which comes first, whether it’s-

James Walton:
And I’d like to come back to that.

Jo Hamya:
…. a predestination. Yes, whether it’s a predestination, or. And so the reason you really hang around to read this book is I suppose not to find out what, but to find out, or not even to find out how, because that’s given to you in the Warrender Chase manuscript. But to find out, I suppose why.

James Walton:
There are thriller elements. So Warrender Chase starts to predict what’s happening or reflect what’s happening within the group. But at the same time, Sir Quentin at one point threatens to sue the publisher of Warrender Chase if it ever gets published. And so it has to be withdrawn because it says it’s drawing on their lives. Meanwhile, he then steals the manuscript of Warrender Chase partly to make sure it’s never published and partly to insert parts of it into the autobiographies that these people have bought.
So which way round… Who’s making up what, is very difficult to know. It’s an endlessly slippery book. There’s one bit where someone asks Fleur, is it true you’re writing a novel about us? Now the answer to that within the book is no. But the answer outside the book is, “Well, I’m not, but Muriel Spark is.” And there is that question of whether Fleur is making stuff happen simply by imagining it and writing it down or whether she is seeing that happening because she’s written it down. I think we do that a bit in our own lives as well, isn’t it? We remember our past in a certain way, and then that becomes… Yeah. Exactly. So which way round it is, is quite complicated I think.

Jo Hamya:
Well Fleur is quite clear on which way around it is, at least at the beginning of the book. In the same way that I think Muriel Spark is, whenever people press her on her books being autobiographical, she says, “Well, they’re not.” And people go, “The characters do what you did in life.” And she says, “Well, they sort of do.” And the sort of is important.

James Walton:
Is that rather weird bit, where she says sometimes I only meet characters-

Jo Hamya:
After I’ve written them.

James Walton:
After I’ve written them. But again, that’s not unique to novelist is it? I mean we might say that bloke’s just like David Brent or something. Once there’s a character being created, then you start to see people like that character. But Sir Quentin does start to use phrases that Warrender Chase says in the book.

Jo Hamya:
Which is just so deliciously nasty.

James Walton:
But again, there’s that, if you step back further, it’s not a coincidence to be using phrases that were in the novel. It’s because Muriel Spark wrote both of those novels. So that endless twistiness, is it too twisty? I mean, is it possible to? As I say, there’s a pretty good story with stolen manuscripts and she has to get it back and then she steals the autobiographies and then there’s a lot of stuff that would just be a basic thriller with a MacGuffin, the MacGuffin being the manuscript and so on. But at the same time it’s so constantly twisted that…

Jo Hamya:
But I love that. I think if it was a straightforward thriller, we wouldn’t really be here talking about it now, the material would exhaust itself.

James Walton:
No. Okay. I mean I take your point, and I think this might be… Sorry to say this in a podcast, but in a way it’s when you stop to really talk about it that it sounds a lot less fun than it is to read. Take this bit for a minute. So this is Dottie, her friend whose husband she’s sleeping with and she’s very cold about that. She says about Dottie early on, “She had confronted me with my affair with her husband, which I thought tiresome of her.”
Anyway, so they… Hang on. And she says, “I don’t know why I thought of Dottie as my friend, but I did. I believe she thought the same about me, although she didn’t really like me. In those days among the people I mixed with, one had friends almost by predestination,” is a big Muriel Spark word, I might come back to. “There they were like your winter coat and your meagre luggage. You didn’t think of discarding them just because you didn’t altogether like them.” So the idea is you’ve got these friends by predestination, but the predestination again is because Muriel Spark has given you these friends in this novel.

Jo Hamya:
I think it probably is that famous Muriel Spark principle of nevertheless, you are never going to settle on one distinct side of the coin. You’re always going to be going, nevertheless.

James Walton:
Do you want to say a bit about the nevertheless?

Jo Hamya:
No.

James Walton:
Okay. Well funny you should say that about nevertheless, unfortunately I did some swatting up on this idea of, nevertheless in her book, it’s from an essay she wrote in 1970 called, “What Images Return.” And she says, “My whole education in and out of school seemed even then to pivot around this word, nevertheless. My teachers used it a great deal. I find that much of my literary composition is based on the nevertheless idea.”
So I think this links to… Listeners might be most famous with Miss Jean Brodie who is on the one hand, charismatic and fantastic, nevertheless a fascist, nevertheless an inspirational teacher, nevertheless a corrupting teacher, nevertheless- 

Jo Hamya:
Rest in peace, Muriel Spark. You would’ve loved Twitter.

James Walton:
Yeah, that’s right. Nevertheless is not a very popular concept these days.

Jo Hamya:
I feel it is a how to write a Muriel Spark novel in the sense that there’s this… I’m sure it went viral on Twitter two or three years ago, but now famous also BBC Archive clip where Spark sets out how she writes a novel and it’s marvellous and she takes out this… She’s sitting at her desk and she takes out a very slim jotter notebook and she opens it up and she grabs a pen and she goes…

Muriel Spark:
I begin at the beginning, I write my name on the first page, I write my name and then I write… I write the title, then I write my name, then I turn over and I write the title of the book. I write chapter one and then I write on and when it’s… I leave a space so I can make alterations as I go along, but I don’t revise it afterwards and then it goes to the typist and she types it and I revise that. And that’s the book. That’s finished.

James Walton:
Is that how you write your books, Jo?

Jo Hamya:
Absolutely, yes. Not a serious person, but I get the sense that there are little Sparkian parts of that in Loitering with Intent. As Fleur at some point says, I’m quoting here, “I remember as a young child being obliged to write out in my copy book, necessity is the mother of invention. And then another maxim was, all is not gold that glisters and honesty is the best policy.” All these moral sayings that she’s copying into her jotter as a child to improve her handwriting, but which actually come to hand when she’s writing her novel.
And there is a parallel between Spark using the same jotters as when she was at school to then write her 22 books with. And this idea that… I think there are a lot of maxims in this book on what makes a good novel. You’ve got some to hand some quotes-

James Walton:
My swotty notes. Okay, I’ll give you some of my swotty notes. So she’s reading Warrender Chase to her friend Dottie or friend that she doesn’t like, nevertheless her friend and she explains things. So at one point Dottie says, “This seems very cold. There’s not much emotion in it.” And she’s very pleased about that because that’s what she wants to write. She will say things like, to make a character ring true, it needs to be contradictory somewhere, a paradox. And at one point Dottie says, “But readers like to know where they stand,” and Fleur doesn’t agree. You never know where you’re standing in a Muriel Spark book. Do you like Miss Jean Brodie? We don’t know where we stand. And then I think almost most crucially, she points out, “I’m not writing so that the reader would think me a nice person.”

Jo Hamya:
Which is a very, I think, evolved thing to do actually. I think a lot of contemporary novels are written with the author hoping that their reader will think that they’re a good and moral person. But I guess what I really enjoy more than the sentence by sentence maxims that occur, the thing that I found really relatable about Fleur’s process of writing a novel was just how much mess there was around it. Of course, this is the mess of Sir Quentin stealing her manuscript or Dottie stealing her manuscript for Sir Quentin or her publisher suddenly giving up on her and her having to find a new publisher. But there are these great moments of, I guess emotional mess where she does feel a lot of vanity and almost pride around this book. Well she says she does at the time. Of course she’s writing as an older woman and she goes on to say, Warrender Chase was not going to be my best novel of course. But she recognises even as a young woman that particularly around the stage where it comes to editing, she just wants to move on to the next book.

James Walton:
I was going to say, I think maybe I’ve gone down a bit of a chin stroking route with this book. And to the extent that it’s beginning to sound less fun to read than it is, do you want to speak to the fun?

Jo Hamya:
The fun for me is in the dialogue and I think it’s so difficult to write dialogue. I’ll very rarely… It’s difficult to read dialogue as well. As I get older, the more books I read, the less I believe in character speaking in novels. But Muriel Spark handles dialogue beautifully. And my favourite is always, again, I love Edwina because she’ll just say the most outrageous stuff. I found myself doing voices. I was reading this book, I won’t do them for this podcast.

James Walton:
She’s a real scene stealer Edwina, that’s-

Jo Hamya:
She’s an incredible presence.

James Walton:
And you’re right, Fleur does love her. And also her friend called Solly, an old guy, but both of whom helped to get her published, both of whom she in a way uses. There is a certain ruthlessness to her, which most people identify about Muriel Spark. That was absolutely all about the writing. There was nothing really that got between her and her art. And that’s the way she liked it and-

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, I think Spark does address this kind of sideways, that ruthlessness. I actually don’t take it for ruthlessness so much as I guess just being a really great woman. There are loads of whiny English rose characters like Dottie in this book, but equally so Fleur and Edwina, I guess that’s why I love them so much. Perhaps they’re only ruthless in comparison to the much more conservative, preserved very pretty soft young women who otherwise populate this book. And the first time that Fleur meets Sir Quentin, he has a bit of an argument with Miss Beryl Tims as to how she should say her name. And it goes, “The first morning Sir Quentin introduced her to me as Beryl, Miss Tims, which she in a top people’s accent corrected to Miss Beryl Tims. And while I stood waiting with my coat on, they had an altercation over this.” “He maintaining politely that before her divorce she had been Miss Thomas Tims and now she was to be precise Beryl Miss Tims. But in no circumstances was Miss Beryl Tims accepted usage. Miss Tims then announced that she could produce her national insurance card, her ration book and her identity card to prove her name was Miss Beryl Tims. Sir Quentin held that the clerks employed in the ministries which issued these documents were ill-informed. Later he said he would show her what he meant under correct forms of address in one of his reference books.” “After that he turned to me, ‘I hope you’re not argumentative,’ he said, ‘An argumentative woman is like water coming through the roof. It says so in the Holy Scriptures, either Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, I forget which. I hope you don’t talk too much.’” And this idea that it is really rare to have a woman who will correct a man like Sir Quentin about what her name is, what she wants her name to be. This idea that Sir Quentin is the kind of guy who turns to a young woman like Fleur Talbot and says, “Oh God, I hope you’re not going to nater away at me.” They’re perhaps only ruthless in the face of that.

James Walton:
Yeah. No, and I think that might be… I was saying it’s quite hard because she says straight up in Curriculum Vitae, “I fed my experiences of The Poetry Society into Loitering with Intent.” But she says it in, “I transferred a number of my experiences in The Poetry Society as I usually do into a fictional background in my novel, Loitering with Intent.” But really transforms, but I’m sure that’s the thing that the patronising so-and-so’s of The Poetry Society would say to her, just… Jo, can I just introduce a mildly controversial note, I was reading-

Jo Hamya:
Always, always.

James Walton:
Okay, here’s John Updike talking about Muriel Spark, talks about particularly her later novels as having unmistakable power rather carelessly applied.

Jo Hamya:
Right.

James Walton:
And I think in Loitering with Intent, for example, he says, “We don’t ever find out…” Sir Quentin’s up to no good, he’s a, as you say, a sort of Jack the Ripper, psychological Jack the Ripper, was it?

Jo Hamya:
Psychological Jack the Ripper.

James Walton:
Yeah. But quite what he’s up to. There’s some hint that he’s going to use the autobiographies to blackmail them, but then we don’t really know what he’s up to. We don’t really care whether he gets away with it or not.

Jo Hamya:
We just know that he’s feeding them amphetamines.

James Walton:
Yeah. He’s feeding them amphetamine to lose some weight. He seems to be setting up some… We don’t quite know what’s going on and we don’t really mind. Is it a bit… Okay, I would suggest that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is by far her best book. But you could think of that Joseph Heller quote when people used to say to him, “You haven’t written a book as good as Catch-22 since.” And he would say, “Who has?” Well, I think Muriel Spark would be within her rights to say the same thing about Miss Jean Brodie.

Jo Hamya:
Right.

James Walton:
But there is a finishedness that everything… Whereas, in quite a lot of her books, there’s this sense of, as I say, well as I say, as a bloke says, a rather carelessly applied. The closing… And I think she slightly makes a justification of that. There’s one bit where she says, “You know I don’t like to load…” “It’s bad manners to load too much emotional involvement onto your readers. Just be quite funny and get out of there.” But is that fair? And the very last image, this is not a giveaway at all, Fleur is in France, isn’t she? She says, “Some small boys were playing football and the ball came flying straight towards me. I kicked it with a chance grace, which if I had studied the affair and tried hard, I never could have done.” So she’s sort of saying, actually if you try too hard, it doesn’t have the same gracefulness. And that might be true, but it does mean that it’s careless I think. “Away into the air…” This is the football, “Away into the air it went and landed in the small boy’s waiting hands, the boy grinned. And so having entered the fullness of my years, from there by the grace of God, I go on my way rejoicing.”

Jo Hamya:
That’s gorgeous. I think it depends what you want out of your novels, whether you want a sense of closure or everything’s neatly plotted out and explained or at least halfway done. So, I-

James Walton:
No, that’s what I mean. I’m being like Dottie saying to Fleur, “What am I supposed to think?” Readers like to know where they stand.

Jo Hamya:
Well, I’ll tell you where I stand because I really did love the experience of reading this book. And it’s because that final line of Fleur going on her way rejoicing I think is, and by the grace of God as well, is the animus of the novel. It’s joyful. It’s a really effervescent book and it’s really rare to… I mean it’s got some fairly dark subject matter in it. Sir Quentin is, as we said, drugging these people until they go insane. There are a few suicides, a car crash, the conditions in which Fleur lives, if you think about them properly, at the beginning she’s negotiating her salary with Sir Quentin and he offers her a rate that works for 1936, but of course it’s 1949 in the novel. Her circumstances are grim, but everything is handled so lightly and so joyfully and it’s so rare now that I read a book that not only makes me laugh, but I guess makes me take stock of the everyday in a warm and in a way that makes me quite frankly want to go to a party. This book made me feel so happy to be 26. It’s the only way I can describe it. I just looked around and I was like, oh my God, life is like this. I lived in a studio flat in North London that was similarly cramped and packed and shabby in the way that Fleur lives in her bedsit now. But when she has guests over and she throws dinner parties in it, they all look around admiringly and they say, “God, you’ve really made something for yourself here, even though you have meagre circumstances.”

James Walton:
That sort of sense. Yes, no, there is a sense of joy of a woman hitting her stride, isn’t there? A young woman just hitting her stride and she’s off. Then she goes on her way rejoicing. Yes. No, that is terrific.

Jo Hamya:
James, who would you recommend this novel to?

James Walton:
Again, most wildly bookish people, people who don’t… But I would advise them to do less what I did, just breeze your way through it. Enjoy it, enjoy the laughs and enjoy the little coincidences and don’t try unnecessarily work it all out. A, because it slightly spoils the fun and B, because you won’t be able to anyway.

Jo Hamya:
Well, I think it’s an incredibly slim book. That’s a great thing about Muriel Spark, it bears re-reading. You can always get back to it in an afternoon and just go through a scan.

James Walton:
And yes, there’s so many great scenes and that picture of post-war London, as I say, is very sharp. 

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, it’s striking, with all the black market goods-

James Walton:
And the bedsits and the gas rings and the eking out food. I imagine that on the whole, most people listening to this are pretty bookish or mildly bookish or at least interested in books, in which case I would recommend Loitering with Intent. We should also say a little bit about, because it’s a book of the month… I’m afraid, that gives our listeners certain-

Jo Hamya:
Don’t call it homework.

James Walton:
No, duties will be overstating it. Opportunities, choices. I didn’t say what those duties-

Jo Hamya:
Experience and exposure.

James Walton:
Do you want to say what those opportunities are.

Jo Hamya:
So on our website you will find extracts, discussion points and reading guides.

James Walton:
Yeah, to send the entire country into a frenzy of discussing Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark over the next month. And we do look forward to hearing what you thought of it and-

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, come back to us. Thank you so much for listening. To find out more about Loitering with Intent, the Booker Prize book of the month visit our website, thebookerprizes.com, where you can find essays, reading guides and extracts. You can let us know what you think by leaving a comment on our Substack and find us on all social media platforms on at the Booker Prizes. So with that, I’m Jo Hamya…

James Walton:
…And I’m James Walton.

Jo Hamya:
And it’s been very nice talking to you. Bye.

James Walton:
Bye.