Aiding and Abetting: A Novel - Hardcover

Spark, Muriel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385501536 ISBN 13: 9780385501538

Publisher: Doubleday, 2001

Synopsis

Muriel Spark, one of Britain's greatest living novelists, returns to the literary stage with her most wickedly amusing and subversive novel in years, a savagely witty tale of murder and escape based on the notorious real-life case of Lord Lucan.

A dissolute member of the British aristocracy, "Lucky" Lucan has been missing since he accidentally murdered his children's nanny in an abortive attempt on his wife's life. His puzzling disappearance in the mid-seventies created a sensation in Britain and a tantalizing mystery as yet unsolved. In Muriel Spark's daring and sophisticated fictional version of Lucan's flight, his adversary is Beate Pappenheim, a fake Bavarian stigmatic who embezzled millions from devout followers before assuming a new identity as a celebrated psychiatrist. These two inhabitants of the farther shores of morality collide memorably in Spark's brilliant new novel, where "aiding and abetting" Lord Lucan's well-padded fugitive life is the name of the beastly upper-class game, and a duel of wits plays out with potentially mortal consequences. The artful murderer meets the master con-woman, but who will emerge victorious?

In part a rumination on the nature of evil, in part a damning indictment of upper-class mores, Aiding and Abetting is a dark and dazzling entertainment from a writer whose clear-eyed judgments never intrude upon her narrative legerdemain. Here is proof beyond doubt that Muriel Spark retains her crown as the most distinguished and entertaining moral satirist of her day.

About this title

Review

First, a bit of history: The seventh Earl of Lucan disappeared on November 7, 1974, leaving behind the battered body of his children's nanny and a beaten wife. Widely covered in the press, his sensational story has had a surprisingly long half-life, and the speculation about his whereabouts has never quite died out. In this book, Muriel Spark toys with several provocative issues arising out of the case: identity, class, blood ("it is not purifying, it is sticky"), and the dynamics of psychiatry ("most of the money wasted on psychoanalysis goes on time spent unraveling the lies of the patient").

Aiding and Abetting opens sometime late in the 20th century, when an Englishman in his 60s walks into the Paris practice of famed Bavarian psychiatrist Dr Hildegard Wolf and announces that he is the missing Lord Lucan. Yet Hildegrad is already treating one self-confessed Lord Lucan. And what's more, both patients seem to have dirt on her--for isn't she really Beate Pappenheim, a notorious fraud who used her menstrual blood to fake her stigmata? Fearing for her safety, Hildegard flees to London, where her path inevitably crosses that of two British Lucan hunters.

Aiding and Abetting contains more than its share of broad farce and bitter irony. But it remains a strange, slight affair, its unspoken tenet being that the Lucan case still preys on the communal mind of the British public, its details (like the perpetrator's penchant for smoked salmon and lamb chops) indelibly printed there. For anyone under 30, that's a difficult argument to swallow. As one wise character puts it: "Few people today would take Lucan and his pretensions seriously, as they rather tended to do in the 70s." Times have changed indeed--and perhaps that's Spark's point after all, that the "psychological paralysis" of the not-quite-swinging '70s is long gone. --Alan Stewart

From the Back Cover

British Praise for Aiding and Abetting:

"Spark has enterprisingly liberated this squalid Belgravian tale from the annals of criminal history and transformed it into a serious comedy of manners and errors." —The Sunday Times

"Aiding and Abetting is quintessential SparkŪso elegantly pared down, indeed, that it reminds one of a society beauty whose fine bones last on to general admiration." —The Sunday Telegraph

"Spark's economical, elliptical prose is alive with understated comedy; one has a sense that her talent for farce is constantly held in check by the seriousness of her ideas . . . [an] exceptionally intelligent book." --The Guardian

"Muriel Spark is herself something of a true miracle-worker, with her electrifying opus, her riveting narrative tangles of moral ambiguities, satirically sinister incidents and unusually forceful pronouncements, delivered with aplomb."—The Times Literary Supplement

"Spark treats this true crime story with her characteristic wit, and the result is a darkly comic mystery adventure which will keep you enthralled until the end."—The List

"That Spark has managed to create such an astonishingly ambitious work in her eighties shows, more than anything else, the enduring power of her artistic gifts. Let us hope that there are many more books to come from this remarkable novelist."—The Independent

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0385501536
• ISBN 13: 9780385501538
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176