Book 40 - Muriel Spark "The Girls Of Slender Means"

[jazzy_dave]

Muriel Spark "The Girls Of Slender Means" (Penguin)






This is the second book I have read of hers. The first was The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie which was adapted to a movie.

But back to this novelette. It appears to be a simple story about a group of women who live in The May of Teck Club, a rather shabby but genteel boarding house in central London. It’s 1945 and the war in Europe is over but the girls who live in the club still struggle to suffer from clothing rationing and shortages of basic food items like tea. Jane is the brainy one, forever using her work in a publishing house as an excuse for eating; the elocution teacher Joanna is the cultured voice of the community, whose voice can be heard throughout the house as she recites poetry with her pupils, while Selina is the beautiful, wilful inhabitant who cares little for the men she sleeps with beyond the fact they give her entry to parties.

There is much larking about; swapping of lipsticks and dresses and merry escapades including smearing their naked bodies with butter in order to squeeze through a narrow bathroom window and get onto the roof to sunbathe (inevitably one of them gets stuck). But as we get to know them and their eccentricities, the darker sides of their lives become more apparent. Joanna’s devotion to her work is the product of unrequited love for a curate while Jane’s much-vaunted ‘brainwork’ involves writing letters to famous authors to try and wheedle money out of them.

While there is a darker side to the novel (particularly in the ending), the pain and violence are masqued by the way that Sparks uses the omniscient narrator to constantly undermine any pretensions these girls have about themselves. Jane, for example, becomes attracted to Nicholas Farrington (a man who seems to be something in British Intelligence yet professes to be an anarchist).

"She felt she had a certain something to offer Nicholas, this being her literary and brain-work side. 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 for 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."

The difficulty I experienced was that the novel was too short to really see the main characters developed fully so by the end I didn’t feel particularly engaged with their lives and experiences. The novel structure also worked against my engagement – it’s comprised of very short scenes which switch the focus of attention quickly from one girl to another in a mix of dialogue with prose and snatches of poems and told in a nonlinear chronology.

Overall, I enjoyed reading it but wouldn’t consider it a particularly remarkable book.