A Far Cry from Kensington

Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington is narrated by a very sympathetic woman. Mrs. Hawkins is a heavy woman who, as we learn from the beginning, loses half her weight over the course of the novel. She is a widow who is considered to be a great listener, but whose real self is an advice-giver. It's a coming of age novel of a woman in her late twenties (in this respect, it's not unlike The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). To mark this change, at the end of the novel, Mrs. Hawkins starts to go by Nancy.

The novel follows Mrs. Hawkins' work at two very different publishing firms. She loses her job at both due to her hate for a man whom she calls pisseur de copie--one who urinates prose--who is, unfortunately, well connected. She denounces him repeatedly. In fact, the book itself is Mrs. Hawkins' denunciation of him.

The pisseur de copie is into radionics. I looked it up on Wikipedia and it seems that that was really a thing--it's a pseudo-science that purports to heal people based on samples of a person's hair and a strange box. Throughout the novel, we see Sparks treating characters who are obsessive and mentally unstable; using radionics is part of this. Something that I love about Spark is her comments about religion. She's Catholic, but she's also sarcastic about it. And profound at the same time, I think. She writes:

"That it is a totally irrational method of healing is not to discount it and certainly the claims of 'radionics' (the word is not in the dictionary) are no more a subject for mockery than the claims of all our religions. ... And I daresay from the point of view of a visitor from outer space the Box is no more ridiculous than a Catholic catechism or the Mass."

She just sprinkles a little bit of religion into the novel. And doesn't take herself too seriously. But while Mrs. Hawkins does not espouse radionics herself, she takes seriously, by the end, its affect on the novel's other characters.

Sparks' writing/Hawkins' narration is very frank. It is sympathetic, because she's a sympathetic character, but she's also a little dry, a little reticent with personal information (even when she gives personal information to us, it's very unemotionally told), a little even and plodding. For instance, Sparks writes:

"'Hate can turn to love,' [Emma] said.
I gave this a moment's thought. 'Maybe on the Continent,' I said, 'Or in Latin America. But you know very well, Miss Loy, that here in England love and hate are two entirely different things. They are not even opposites. According to my outlook, love comes in the first place from the heart and hate arises basically from principle.'
'You're being very insular,' she said. ... no doubt I was insular, not surprising since I had been born and brought up on an island."

It is the plot that Sparks does really well here--all the pieces tying together with a great, unexpected turn at the end. The narrator has lots of information that she lets out in spurts throughout the novel, like all of her novels that I've ever read. I think that this is the most unique characteristic of Sparks' writing--her narrators talk from the future and from the past; time is very fluid. Regardless of all of the future sneaking into the present, however, Sparks manages in this book to surprise you with what happens.


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