Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #330078 in Books
• Published on: 1995-08-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 106 pages

Customer Reviews

'That woman has a bad mind'
(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.

Poetry deleted
Sharp as a knife and crackling with wit, wickedness and delight, and just over a hundred pages long, The Abbess of Crewe is an essential read. The austere and beautiful Alexandra is set upon becoming Abbess when the present incumbent dies - and just how far she is prepared to go to get her wish is demonstrated forthwith. She has a rival, but the esteemed Alexandra and her allies have weapons of surveillance that make Watergate look like child's play.

This is, in fact, Watergate with nuns as the subtitle suggests (A wicked satire on Watergate), with, on the tapes, `poetry deleted' in place of Nixon's `expletive deleted'. The media is much titillated when a nun is expelled after being accused of dallying with a Jesuit priest, and from there on this clever little farce unfolds. This artfully constructed novella is an exercise in spiteful charm from beginning to end. Four stars only, however, because as satire it only goes so far and Watergate is too large and complex a phenomenon to be addressed solely by artful flippancy.