Book Review: "Memento Mori" by Muriel Spark

I have not really read a lot of Muriel Spark, I've read the regular and popular ones: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Driver's Seat, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and obviously the Complete Short Stories of Muriel Spark. But when it comes to her lesser known work, I really feel like I've been missing out. Farcical situations with cyclical structures that include satirical representations of the anxieties of modern living. Both funny and dark, Muriel Spark's writing has often entertained me quite a bit when I've been down. So, now we review her book Memento Mori with great anticipation. It's actually really good for its simplistic storyline.

About a family who suffers a weird phone call in which people are told to remember death is just around the corner, the present is brought out in terrifying truthfulness as they try to find out who has been calling them about this. The phone call is obviously the memento mori and I'm honestly quite impressed that the phone call situation worked. I'm not going to lie, when I read the blurb I wasn't sure that this was going to pull through as strong as it did. It was not only quite dark and tense, but it was also absolutely hilarious because it would send everyone into a frenzy when it happened. You'd feel like someone was about to scream or something and as the phone calls went on and more stuff started coming out, you could tell that people were simply beginning to find it annoying.

Apart from that, there are fairly dark thoughts that litter the novel throughout with quotations about life and death that you simply don't expect in a 'comedic' novel and are more suited to perhaps Brideshead Revisited in its nature. Take a look at this:

“If I had my life to live over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is not another practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life.”

Maybe the phone calls are working after all, but this quotation also shows that there really are only two things certain of life: death and taxes. (laughs uncontrollably at my own joke). Another thing we can say about this quotation is that it doesn't fit the farce, it's trying to throw us off. That's the whole point though and if you read other books by Muriel Spark, in moments of tense comedy or feverish suspense, she often interjects these quotations, possibly for the impact of making the reader not only wait for the end result but hyper-focus on the situation at hand.

This has to be one of my personal favourites though:

“Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.”

The ending of the book is brilliant, it is like a list which I don't want to go into too much depth about because I don't want you to know the ending without reading it first. But there is a continuous list-like chapter and I cannot express enough how much this links to absolutely everything in the novel. There really is a sense of an ending here but also, it leaves some of the questions open-ended, such as: did they remember the phone calls at that time and their messages? Maybe we will never really know.

In conclusion, there is a great amount of energy in this novel, considering the storyline is so simplistic. There was a lot of room for expansion and Muriel Spark used it all to her advantage. If there was an advert of why you should read Muriel Spark, this book would be the entire thing.