On Satire: 'A Far Cry from Kensington' by Muriel Spark

In the final episode of their series, Colin and Clare arrive at Muriel Spark, who would never have considered herself a satirist though her writing was as bitingly satirical as any 20th-century novelist's. A Far Cry from Kensington has a deceptively simple plot: Agnes Hawkins, working for a publisher in London in the 1950s, insults Hector Bartlett, a would-be author, by calling him a ‘pisseur de copie’. Bartlett seeks revenge with the help of Hawkins’s fellow lodger, Wanda, with tragic results. Yet the true plot of any Spark novel is difficult to pin down, not least when the word ‘plot’ is deployed so frequently by her characters to imply conspiracy and misinformation. Colin and Clare discuss Spark’s kaleidoscopic view of reality and the ways in which both Catholicism and Calvinism play through her work.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsyt
ABOUT CLOSE READINGS
Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books exploring different periods and themes of literature through selections of key works..
Find more episodes here: kzbin.info/aero/PLT6dL0t3N1uwntdebUCvXl_JD7K9J8B0K
Running in 2024:
ON SATIRE with Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell
HUMAN CONDITIONS with Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards
AMONG THE ANCIENTS II with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones
MEDIEVAL LOLS with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley
POLITICAL POEMS with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford
Also included in the Close Readings subscription, the full series of:
AMONG THE ANCIENTS I with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones
MEDIEVAL BEGINNINGS with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley
THE LONG AND SHORT with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry
MODERN-ISH POETS: SERIES 1 with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail - from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.

[@4-dman464]

All Satire has south-of-midlands BBC accents, I've learned. Just as I learned from the British Film Institute that even the British New Wave was a south-of-midlands BBC-accented sensibility. Nothing new there, except the south-of-midlands BBC-accented sensibility has colours & genders now, very his 'n' hairs.