Mountain Devil

Recommend: No (but do read The Driver’s Seat)

Living squashed together with others in a big city is a stressful affair. An hour ago, the neighbours with two smallish kids (somewhere between the ages of crying and loudly yelling) finally left the building. Two children and two parents in a two-bedroom apartment? Too much.. With the screeching admonishment “Thomas get off the table” still ringing in my ears, now the two Irish ladies downstairs prepare for a time of sombre cultural significance: getting an Uber to a party at 5pm on a Saturday afternoon. The throaty hurl of Irish Lady One’s voice crashes into my apartment, “I don’t know Jonno that well but he’ll be there tonight.” Never has a blossoming romance between Irish twenty-somethings gone undocumented in the streets of Randwick. With Irish Lady One and Two now nestled in the comfort of an Uber Pool, the sound of their wedge heels on concrete fading into the engine rev of a Toyota Yarris, the apartment heaves a sigh of relief. The next disturbance is surely building in another corner of this ugly red brick building but it is yet to surface. Quiet descends again.

Perhaps it won’t surprise that I didn’t cope well in college. And I can say with confidence that I would not have fitted in well at the May of Teck Club in London in 1945.

The Girls of Slender Means is my second Muriel Spark novel. I began with what my bookseller Steven later declared her best: The Driver’s Seat. I am saddened to learn The Driver’s Seat was her best. How am I to recover its thrill? Will I always be prisoner to my memories of that initial book, trying and failing to hold them back as I plough through the rest of the back catalogue? Steven, did you have to inform me of this while I was nursing four of her other, purportedly less superior, books in my arms, freshly purchased only moments ago?

Despite my hesitations starting the book, this was still a good read by a very talented author. Parts are funny. Scenes are well structured. The narrative techniques that allow us to dash back and forth between decades is technically impressive. The characterisation is fantastic. But it just doesn’t have the same striking pulse as The Driver’s Seat, and its 1945 setting sags under its age, so it’s not a recommend “yes”.

Without further ado, let me introduce you to these girls of slender means. These girls are all tenants of a women’s hostel, the May of Teck Club, in London during the wind-up of World War Two. You can think of the May of Teck Club as college-style living for ladies working in London who can’t afford their own flat.

• We’ve got the house hottie, Selina, who repeats daily the mantra “Poise is perfect balance, an equanimity of body and mind, complete composure whatever the social scene.”
• There’s the babbling brook, Dorothy, whose “waterfall of chatter gave the impression that on any occasion between talking, eating and sleeping, she did not think, except in terms of these phrase-ripples of hers: ‘Filthy lunch.’ ‘The most gorgeous wedding.’ ‘He actually raped her, she was amazed.’ ‘Ghastly film.’ ‘I’m desperately well, thanks, how are you?’”
• There’s the weird but honourable (and surprisingly beautiful) Joanna, who is very religious. She piously quotes prayers in common rooms.
• The three older woman who probably shouldn’t be there, two of which feud happily with each other about matters as large and small as religion, wallpaper and coffee.
• All of whom are observed dreamily by the outsider Nicholas Farringdon.
• Who is himself observed shrewdly by our narrator and resident bookworm, Jane Wright, “a fat girl who worked for a publisher and who was considered to be brainy but somewhat below standard, socially, at the May of Teck.” Jane is deliciously relatable, always holding herself at a friendly remove from the confined chaos of the Club.

The Girls of Slender Means is a stylish novel, cleanly moving between two time periods. Most of the ‘story’ is set in the May of Teck Club in 1945. I use quotation marks around ‘story’ because it is not a very plot driven novel. Really, we just move between a few endearing scenes that unfold in and around the club.  Rather early on, however, you do learn that Jane is calling all these characters about 15 years later, after they’ve all long moved out of the May of Teck Club, because Nicholas Farringdon is dead. This adds enough aforementioned narrative style to keep the book fresh. As the main 1945 story line progresses, you sporadically get these very small glimpses of how the lives of the characters we met ‘back then’ have played out over the intervening years into the 1960s. Even though it is a death that is the catalyst for Jane Wright to reconnect with her previous flatmates, it’s not a tense novel. There’s not a ‘thriller’ aspect. Nicholas’ death is merely a plot device employed by Spark to add a ‘present day’ perspective to old events and relationships. It is used sparingly (roughly less than a quarter of the small 120-page novel is told from this perspective) and it works.

The ’looking back’ narrative device also adds a subtle tinge of nostalgia to the Club. When we meet characters in the 1960s, they are hardened versions of themselves. When they lived in the Club, they had no money or steady careers, but they were free and friendly. Later in life, personality traits that made them individuals in the Club have calcified, becoming abrasive, and there is more hostility and wariness in relationships that were remarkably easy in youth.

I wish I had more time with these characters. Each one is so lovingly crafted. Even side characters present only for a paragraph get these great backstories. Take Ernest Claymore, for example, a random poet that we meet on page 48 and never hear from again:

One of these young poets, Ernest Claymore, later became a mystical stockbroker of the 1960s, spending his weekdays urgently in the City, three weekends each month at his country cottage – an establishment of fourteen rooms, where he ignored his wife and, alone in his study, wrote Thought – and one weekend a month in a retreat at a monastery.

Spark excellence is also on show in how she threads the characters together. I really liked this moment between Jane and Nicholas. In their interaction, you get a better sense of each character individually, while also revealing the texture of their joint relationship. Again, it benefits from that all-knowing eye of hindsight that looks over the characters of 1945 from the perspective of the 1960s.

She might have gone further with Nicholas without her literary leanings. This was a mistake she continued to make in her relations with men, inferring from her own preference for men of books and literature their preference of women of the same business. And it never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.

This is a novel filled with funny scenes, poignant moments and great character interaction. Clearly this is a skilled author at play. While the 1945s setting was too specifically war-torn for me to relate to, the depth provided by Spark is a delight. Few modern authors would be able to capture nostalgia and age and youth as subtly as she does. The Girls of Slender Means is not a must read, but it is still a very good read.