Memento Mori

I have mixed feelings about Memento Mori.  I’ve loved everything else that I’ve read by Muriel Spark- she’s gloriously harsh to her characters and I like that.  Reading her is a bit like reading a post-World War Two version of Game of Thrones- no-one’s safe and there’s a lot of social climbing.  Unlike Game of Thrones, however, my enjoyment of the book was patchy at best.

The plot, such as it is, centres on the aged Dame Lettie Coulson and her circle of friends- or frenemies, to be more accurate.  (I feel I need to take a moment here to be fully appalled that my version of Word recognises “frenemies” as a real word.  Good one Bill Gates.)  Anyway, the old women spend their time updating and cutting people from their wills for imagined slights the way teenagers do their top MySpace friends.  Teenagers still use MySpace, right?  So, the plot: Dame Lettie is receiving phone calls from an unknown party reminding her that she will die.  The rest of the ensemble flitters between treating it as a prank and believing that Dame Lettie is hallucinating, or attention seeking.  This is part of the reason I was disappointed in the book.  Death threats make far better fiction than old ladies chatting.

I think that another reason I couldn’t get on with Memento Mori is the fact that there are so many characters.  The ensemble cast is funny, but each person is so idiosyncratic that it is a bit difficult to connect with them properly.  Especially given that we don’t spend that much time in each character’s company.  It’s really frustrating because some of them- Jean Taylor for example- are fantastically interesting.  Or at least they have the potential to be.  This kind of thing makes Dame Lettie’s very interesting story so annoying.  I want so much more of it.  This is one of Spark’s earliest novels and it shows.  Some of her later books, like The Girls of Slender Means also have ensemble casts of characters but Spark keeps those under control.  By the time these characters die, it seems like a footnote.  Most of the deaths are reported in a list near the end of the book.  None are tragic or special and we don’t care enough about them for their deaths to mean much.

Another of my qualms with my book is the death of the fantastically named Tempest Sidebottome.  She is one of the few characters who are given a death with consequences.  The problem is that the consequence of her death is to pretty effectively end a plot strand.  She and Dame Lettie are contesting a will and, with Tempest dead, Dame Lettie can march on unopposed.  I know this is how real life actually goes, but it is underwhelming fiction.

I’m left with not much to say about Memento Mori.  It’s been a book that I tried to find for months and was so looking forward to and then it just left me completely disappointed.  It’s such a shame.  I know I keep saying that the trick to enjoying a book is to go into it without expectations, but realistically that is impossible.  And I had great expectations for this book.  Unfortunately, this is the last of Spark’s books on The List.  I’m just left wishing I’d saved one of the better ones for last.

Next up is Under The Skin by Michel Faber.  I saw the film earlier in the year and it raised a lot of questions.