More Muriel Spark. At some point there won't be any more Muriel Spark, and then what will I do? Perhaps by then generative AI will have really got into the swing of it, and I'll be able to survive on a diet of necrophilic Sparkalikes, old blood and bones in new configurations. Or perhaps I'll reread The Driver's Seat for the thousandth time.
The Public Image came out in 1968, two years before The Driver's Seat, but works as a kind of companion piece. I won't spoil why here, but if you've read them both you'll see what I mean. I don't think The Public Image quite has the "oh, oh no, oh fucking hell" gutpunch of The Driver's Seat, but then I don't think anything else has either.
Annabel Christopher, it says here in the blurb, is "every inch the star: a glamorous actress with a devoted, handsome husband." That's the public image, carefully maintained. Privately, he hates her, and is planning an excitingly complicated revenge. He will die, you see, and she will be framed: not as a murderer, not directly, but as something much worse. As a party animal, as a negligent mother, as an unfaithful, uncaring wife. As a fraud. He'll be dead, but she'll be destroyed.
A victory of sorts, I suppose. Death not as tragedy, or even really as sacrifice, but as something like a bleak prank. The plan doesn't quite come off as intended, but Annabel does find herself in a delicate position, with her carefully built career and reputation in danger of collapsing around her.
But who is Annabel? Well, in her early days in the theatre she was "always being cast as a little chit of a thing, as she was." And then, later, once she starts working in films, "she was called for wherever a little slip of a thing was needed." Commonplaces, those: "chit" and "slip". I'm not sure I'd even have noticed them had they not popped up on consecutive pages, and so made a kind of clanking sound.
Isn't it weird, that two words for 'small young woman' are also words for 'receipt'? And of course both must come with "of a thing" attached: the woman in question is not just an object, but an object bought and paid for. She is the proof of her own purchase, stamped and counterfoiled; she can be exchanged for the number written there on the dotted line. It's a cute place to hide the foreshadowing.
But who is Annabel? Well,
in those earlier times when she began to be in demand in English films, she had no means of knowing that she was, in fact, stupid, for, after all, it is the deep core of stupidity that it thrives on the absence of a looking-glass. Her husband [...] tolerantly and quite affectionately insinuated the fact of her stupidity, and she accepted this without resentment for as long as it did not convey to her any sense of contempt.
A couple of pages later Spark notes that "her stupidity had begun to melt", that she "had not in the least attempted to overcome her stupidity [but] that she had somehow circumvented it." It's a sharp contrast to her oh so clever husband, who writes occasionally, spends long mornings at home reading, and doesn't do any acting; by his own calculation,
a random collision of the natal genes had determined in him a bent for acting only substantial parts in plays by Strindberg, Ibsen, Marlowe and Chekhov (but not Shakespeare) … his decision about what parts he was suited to perform on the stage of the theatre did not matter; he was never considered for any parts in the plays he wanted to act in.
Frederick, the husband, is one bright warning sign: cleverness, or perhaps more properly clever-cleverness, can be highly toxic, if exposed to dangerously high levels of self-regard and frustration. As her stupidity melts, his cleverness curdles, then rots, then seeps out all over the place and makes a nasty mess.
Another line from the early part of the book, from the establishing sketches. "Billy was like a worn-out something that one had bought years ago on the hire-purchase system, and was still paying up with no end in sight." It's a little jarring, that imprecise "something". I don't know what particular object should best go in there, what would be most appropriate and funniest, because I'm a little hazy on hire-purchasing in the late 60s. I'll bet Spark knew, however, which means she's deliberately fluffed the joke.
But of course it has to be a something, because this is Annabel thinking, and Annabel doesn't have the particular kind of precise, writerly cleverness that can polish every line to its best and brightest form. Frederick would certainly have picked the wrong object, but been convinced nevertheless of his own hilarity. Annabel's "something" is correct for Annabel, and so we end up with a highly pleasing display of writerly modesty. A well-turned character is worth a hundred times more than a well-turned joke.
Which is not to say that she doesn’t get any good lines. "Out in the suburbs, she thought, with that dreary little tart. This has got to come to an end, she thought. I ought to be married to somebody worth thinking about." I realised on re-reading that this thought might come at the precise moment that Frederick’s plan ticks from ‘in progress’ to ‘complete’, which is just delightful.