First published: 1960

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social satire

Time of plot: Mid-twentieth century

Locale: London

The Story:

London is home to many bachelors, including Ronald Bridges, a thirty-seven-year-old epileptic who works as an assistant curator at a small handwriting museum. One Saturday morning, he meets his friend Martin Bowles, a thirty-five-year-old lawyer. After completing some shopping, they stop at a coffeehouse, where they spot a thin, anxious-looking man of about fifty-five talking with a young girl. Martin tells Ronald not to stare at the couple because next week he will be prosecuting the man, whose name is Patrick Seton. Patrick, a spiritualistic medium, is charged with fraudulent conversion and forgery and is under orders to report to the police daily. Ronald looks slightly ill and says that he wants to search for his newspaper, so Martin leaves. Actually, Ronald thinks he recognizes Patrick from somewhere and is trying to assure himself that his epilepsy is not causing him to lose his memory. Experimental treatment in America was not successful, but he learned to control his attacks, even to the point of being able to order a beer when his bachelor friends Walter Prett, Matthew Finch, and Ewart Thornton gather at a pub.

In addition to the legal charges, Patrick has personal problems. Alice, his girlfriend, is pregnant. Despite her friend Elsie’s admonishments, she steadfastly defends Patrick and wants him to divorce his wife and marry her before the baby is born. Alice is a dependent person and believes that Patrick, by taking charge of her insulin injections, has only her best interests in mind.

The next evening, at a meeting of the spiritualist group where he is holding a séance, Patrick encounters more difficulties. Freda Flower, the wealthy widow who charged him with bilking her out of a sum of money by forging a letter, appears for the séance. Tossing his body about and groaning, Patrick works himself into a heavy trance and succeeds in contacting the spirit of Freda’s husband despite the presence of another spiritual medium, Dr. Mike Garland, who tries to interrupt. It is a tricky situation, but with clever manipulations Patrick manages to get through the séance unscathed.

The competition between the two mediums polarizes the group members and causes quite a stir among them. Several meet over lunch to discuss the matter. Some plan to create an Inner Spiral of the most faithful members while others pursue less spiritual interests. After talking with Elsie about the beautiful Alice and her attachment to Patrick, Matthew spends the night with her. In his own rooms, Patrick thinks over his statement to the police and his plan to get rid of Alice if he is acquitted. His discussion with Ferguson, the policeman, did not reassure him. To set up a potential alibi for himself, he goes to see Dr. Lyte to get advice about giving insulin to Alice. At Alice’s apartment, he convinces her of his solicitous nature.

To solidify the prosecution’s case against Patrick, Martin elicits Ronald’s handwriting expertise on the allegedly forged letter. He gives the letter to Ronald, who hides it in his apartment. In the coffeehouse later, Ronald and Matthew discuss the evidence with Alice, but she continues to believe Patrick innocent of everything, despite some suspicious information on his background. Matthew, who loves Alice, is ready to sacrifice his longtime bachelor status to marry her. Ronald promises to get more information on the case to relieve her worries. All the talk about marriage appears to trigger an epileptic fit. Luckily, Ronald has his medication with him and quickly recovers.

While these various people discuss his case, Patrick is not idle. He returns to Dr. Lyte’s office and reminds the doctor about a forgotten incident involving spiritualism and séances. He then demands that the doctor lend him his chalet in the Alps so that he and Alice can go there for a secluded honeymoon. That is where he plans to implement his plan for Alice’s demise. The doctor agrees and, feeling secure in his escape plans, Patrick confidently makes his daily report to the police. He even gives Ferguson some details about the appearance and background of his rival, Garland.

When Ronald returns home, he discovers that the letter he is examining for forgery is stolen from his apartment. Later, at a party, members of the group discuss the matter. Feelings run high both for and against Patrick. Ronald suspects that Elsie, pretending to be a cleaning lady, stole the letter. Elsie sometimes does secretarial work for the Reverend T. W. Sockett, another of Patrick’s rival spiritualists, and she believes that he will fall in love with her if she has something valuable to offer him. When she brings the letter to his apartment, however, she sees Garland there dressed in women’s clothes. Realizing that there is something going on between the two men, she takes the letter and runs out. When she fails to appear at the café, Matthew, who is hanging around Alice, begins to understand what happened. The next day, he tells Ronald that Elsie does in fact have the letter but will give it to him only if he sleeps with her that night. At her apartment, Ronald manages to convince her to return the letter and to tell Alice what she did. Alice, however, remains convinced of Patrick’s spiritual claims and of his intentions to make a life for her and the baby. Meanwhile at the spiritualist group’s meetings, gossip continues. Some think Freda and Patrick are lovers and that maybe she wrote the letter. Sockett, learning that Garland is a fake clairvoyant, goes over to Patrick’s side. At one meeting the group closely monitors Patrick’s writhing to make sure he is really in a trance. The next day, when the court case is to begin, several witnesses against him leave town, but the experts are ready with their testimony.

In court, Ronald, the star witness for the prosecution, as well as Freda and others, give testimony about Patrick’s capabilities as a medium and a forger. In the middle of a debate over what constitutes a genuine trance, Ronald has an epileptic attack in the courtroom. The defense brings in another graphologist, but Ronald takes his medication and recovers. The surprise comes when Sockett testifies in favor of Patrick. The trial proceeds, with one witness discrediting the other. Through it all, Matthew stays by Alice’s side.

At the end of all the testimony, Patrick believes himself to be safe and envisions himself away from London, giving Alice the fatal insulin injection in a remote region of the Alps. When the judge sentences Patrick to no less than five years, even after he pleads that he is about to become a father, the prosecution reveals his past as a con man. The next morning, as the sun rises over London and all the sleeping bachelors, Ronald ponders it all and wonders when Matthew will marry Alice.

Critical Evaluation:

There are times when the novels of Muriel Spark suggest a mildly hallucinatory card game in which the dealer declares the trump suit only after the last card has been played and then proceeds to take all the tricks. This is not to say that Spark cheats or ignores the rules of the fictional game she is playing; however, she does add to her picture of the world some element of unearthly surprise, and she presents her people from an odd angle of vision, throwing an oblique light on the troubled condition of human beings—and, since she is a Christian writer, on their relation to God or the devil. All of her novels deal in one degree or another with the problem of faith: the grace with which people accept it or the ways by which they try to evade it. The result is an original body of work that cannot be mistaken for that of anyone else.

Satire is the literary climate in which her lively art appears to flourish best. Nevertheless, satire, touched with fantasy or the supernatural, is always a risky business. It demands, among other things, a sharp wit and a spirited style. The reader must also be sufficiently involved in order to go along with the game of pretense, and the story must make its point if the reader is to accept the satire as an insightful comment on the absurdities of the material world or the mysteries of the soul.

Spark takes on the risks deliberately. Her first novel, The Comforters (1957), relied for much of its effect on ghostly presences and double identities. In one scene, a character hears the clatter of the author’s typewriter at work on the book. Robinson (1958) brought into congruous relationship such disparate elements as a desert island, a murder, and a spiritual dilemma resolved in a rather bizarre fashion. Memento Mori (1959) was the novel in which Spark revealed to the fullest that audacity, altogether her own, which became the guiding principle of her fiction. In this book, Death is a disembodied voice on the telephone making calls to a group of old people and reminding them that they must die; what this chilling fable offers is a contrast between the selfish, trivial concerns of these people’s lives and the inescapable fact of their mortality. The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) brings to the pubs and rooming houses of a London suburb a devil incarnate who provides the people of Peckham with opportunities to display humankind’s natural capacity for error and evil. By means of devices such as these, Spark shows a critical and moral imagination at work among observations of the clutter and waste of the contemporary scene.

The Bachelors is more restrained. It contains no open struggle with otherworldly forces, whether of God or of the devil. The only touch of the supernatural comes when a quack spiritualistic medium does, apparently, establish communication with the dead in an episode so briefly presented that it gives little weight to Spark’s swiftly paced and crowded narrative. In this novel, her focus is on bachelordom, the noncommunity of the unattached, uncommitted male. The bachelor state is viewed as damnation, and for the ten examples presented, the writer provides an atmosphere of fearful reality. The lodgings in which they live, the pubs they frequent, the stores where they shop, their problems with meals, mothers, and women—all are images of the private hells of loneliness and trivial self-preoccupation in which each separately revolves. This vision is one that the more discerning of her bachelors share with their creator. Matthew Finch, who is Irish, Catholic, and plagued by sex, says that one’s duty is to marry, to choose between Holy Orders and Holy Matrimony. Anything else—and he speaks from experience—is an unnatural life for a Christian. Ronald Bridges, a graphologist who is unable to fulfill his desire to become a priest because he is an epileptic, claims that he is a confirmed bachelor, but at the end of the novel he experiences a vision of the bachelor’s selfish and uneasy life on the fringes of society: He imagines 17.1 bachelors in each of London’s 38,500 streets, restless, awake, active with their bed partners, or asleep.

In this noncommunity, the solitary individuals try to find substitutes for solidarity and faith. Some, such as Ronald, find another vocation. Others, such as Martin Bowles, become social and moral hypocrites. Still others, such as Walter Prett, revile the world out of drunken self-pity. A few, such as Patrick Seton, prey on human credulity. Most, like Matthew, simply struggle; his predicament, trapped between spirit and flesh, is amusing and nevertheless real.

The uses to which Spark puts her social outsiders are crafty and entertaining. Patrick, the fraudulent medium, is charged with converting to his own needs two thousand pounds that Freda Flower, a rich widow, gives him for the work of The Wider Community, a spiritualistic group. Freda and another patron of the circle, Mrs. Marlene Cooper, are already rivals for the place of leadership within the group, and the charge against Patrick further widens the split. Marlene sees in the division an opportunity to direct the Inner Spiral, a secret group within The Wider Community; Freda hopes to bring the members under the influence of Mike Garland, a clairvoyant of notorious reputation, and of his friend Father Sockett. Ronald becomes involved because he is the friend of Tim Raymond, Marlene’s nephew, and because, as a handwriting expert, he is asked to testify to the authenticity of a letter forged by Patrick. Other complications include the fact that Martin, who is also Ronald’s friend, is the prosecuting counsel against Patrick, and that Matthew falls deeply in love with Alice. Through information innocently supplied by Matthew, Elsie Forrest, Alice’s friend, is able to steal the letter from Ronald’s lodgings. Meanwhile, Mike and Sockett are also after the letter for reasons of their own.

Spark handles this complicated material with skill and dash. After Patrick is convicted and sentenced, Matthew will marry Alice, and Ronald will continue to suffer from the nightmares of his epileptic seizures. They are his cross, but because of them he achieves a kind of wisdom and insight into the need of faith and the grace of compassion. This, the reader senses, is the meaning of Spark’s conclusion, but she is too much an artist to flog a thesis or to point to a moral. Her characters are good, foolish, sinister, and kind. They exist larger than life and are illuminative of life, because they are self-contained in a world where sin and salvation coexist in precarious balance. It is a world where a man must earn the right to share commitment to his fellows or to God. This writer handles serious matters with a light but sure touch.

Spark’s novels create an effect of wild improvisation, but actually the opposite is true. These works have been carefully planned and are cleanly structured and lucidly styled. Few writers have had a surer hold on the comic convention of the English novel, which brings the fantastic and the real together in a coherent whole.

Further Reading