Books of Faith

Muriel Spark, 1974

Muriel Spark was a favourite of his. He liked her sparing use of words, her short sentences.

He had assumed this was the reason that Spark was so beloved of Edinburgh’s literary establishment, indeed Edinburgh as a whole. It was a surprise therefore, when mentioning this during a discussion of writers’ style at a creative writing class, he was met with fourteen blank stares and merely a polite thank you from the tutor.

Sometime in his past he had set about reading all 22 of the Dame’s novels from The Comforters (novelist recently converted to Catholicism starts hearing voices from her typewriter) to The Finishing School (novelist enrols in a creative writing class to finish his novel about the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots). Sidetracked by his own thoughts of converting to the Church of Rome, he had failed in this simple task, but failed by the narrowest of margins; there were two he hadn’t read. Nevertheless, failure was failure.

Just as he had struggled with his faith, he had struggled with The Abbess of Crewe (an allegorical treatment of the Watergate scandal set in the Catholic convent of Crewe). Twice he had got as far as page 25 and given up. And for some reason he hadn’t read The Hothouse by the East River, an omission he was currently correcting.

If it were only true that all’s well that ends well, if only it were true.

She stamps her right foot.
She says, ‘I’ll try the other one,’ sitting down to let the salesman lift her left foot and nicely interlock it with the other shoe.
He says, ‘They fit like a glove.’ The voice is foreignly correct and dutiful.
She stands, now, and walks a little space to the mirror, watching first the shoes as she walks and then, half-turning, her leg’s reflection. It is a hot, hot day of July in hot New York. She looks next at the heel.
She looks over at the other shoes on the floor beside the chair, three of them beside the chair, three of them beside three open boxes and two worn shoes lying on their sides. Finally, she glances at the salesman.
He focuses his eyes on the shoes.

That’s glorious, he thinks. Draws you in from the off and not a word wasted.

He takes a sip of his hot, hot coffee and reads on.

Cover of UK 1st edition, 1973