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The seventh earl of Lucan disappeared on 7 November 1974, leaving behind him the battered body of his children's nanny Sandra Rivett and a beaten wife. Lucan´s sensational story and the possibilities of his whereabouts over the past quarter century provide Spark with several issues with which wittily to play: identity, blood ("it is not purifying, it is sticky"), class (working class nannies bleed more than the aristocracy), the dynamics of psychiatry ("most of the money wasted on psychoanalysis goes on time spent unravelling the lies of the patient"). 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 his penchant for smoked salmon and lamp chops) indelibly printed there. For anyone under 30 that's a difficult argument to swallow, and for good reason. 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--and perhaps that's Spark's point, that the "psychological paralysis" that allowed Lucan to escape is now long gone. --Alan Stewart --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Satiric and mordantly critical of aristocratic pretension, this is vintage Spark. Her plot is very tight, with no loose ends and no digressions, and her selection of details is exquisitely careful and controlled. Her themes and motifs, especially those of blood as it relates to both crime and breeding, are so intricately connected to all the characters and the plot, that it is difficult to discuss them without giving away the clever plot twists. And Spark does all this in less than two hundred pages! It's impossible not to read this at a gallop to find out what happens--while smiling the whole time at Spark's wry wit. Mary Whipple
Resumes of this novel can't help but sound fantastic and more than a little distasteful. After all, those who suffered from Lucan's crime are still living. However, the disappearance of Lucan remains as enigmatic today as it ever was. The rumours of what happened to him, and what actually happened on the night he killed Sandra Rivett are numerous. All these are discussed in Spark's novel, although the common belief amongst Lucan's former friends that he must have killed himself is arbitrarily dismissed. The question is how could such a dull man ever have evaded capture for so long? One of the most improbable stories about Lucan, printed in the Guardian at the time of the murder, was that he was once considered for the film role of James Bond.
It seems that Muriel Spark has borrowed the name of Robert Walker (the alias of one of the Lucans), from Hitchcock's film 'Strangers on a Train'. This fits her story since both Lucans are presumed to be in collusion with one another for some reason. In Hitchcock's film, Robert Walker kills Farley Granger's wife, and then blackmails Granger to murder his business tycoon father. Both Lucans blackmail Hildegard about her shady past. I couldn't find any reference to the fake stigmatic Spark based this part of her story upon, but there is another stigmatic of Bavaria in history, who was called Teresa Neumann. All in all, the magic of Spark's prose and characterisation draws you in. The only moment that you may have trouble trying to believe is when the young Lacey and the aged Joseph Murray fall in love when searching for Lucan. Maybe this will draw the attentions of Hollywood to this novel! This intriguing story is composed in a tasteful, elegant way, and there are moments when you can't help but burst into laughter, such is Muriel Spark's great wit. I haven't given this novella full marks though, because it does have quite limited ambitions. I think it could also have gone straight into paperback - it doesn't seem good value at a hardcover price.
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