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Rating: 
Summary: 'That woman has a bad mind'
Review: -- unquote the most formidable of my university tutors, declining to follow up my recommendation that he should see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie).I had the presence of mind to answer 'Well so have I' but not the gall to say to him 'How about you?' Really she only has a 'bad' mind in the sense we all have bad minds -- there are thoughts we do not lightly own up to. What makes Spark so unique is that the thoughts are so diverse and fanciful. She is all over the place in the best sense, she is as light-footed as a Mendelssohn scherzo, and there is never a demeaning touch in all her writing. I never really know where I am with her. She deals with senility (Memento Mori), satanism (The Ballad of Peckham Rye), fascism (Brodie), epilepsy (The Bachelors) and sexual situations too various to list (passim) like the shallop flitting silken-sailed in The Lady of Shalott. They never become issues, they never become themes and there is often an overlay of the outright fantastic, as when Mrs Georgina Hogg in The Comforters, who has no private life, disappears when she closes her bedroom door behind her. The Abbess gets 4 stars from me because it is one of her slighter efforts compared with the novels mentioned above and certain others. Anyone getting to know Spark's work could start as well with this as with those, or indeed as well with those as with this. If you can get her wavelength at all this book will not 'lose' you as The Hothouse by the East River might do. I have seen it described as 'a wicked satire on Watergate', a plonking, insensitive characterisation -- you do not pin Spark down like that. Any fool can see what might have suggested the election campaign for Abbess between the sewing nun and the electronics nun, and the repeated question to the foreign missionary nun when she rings in from various parts of the globe 'Gertrude, do you have a cold?' is an obvious reference to Kissinger but fantasy not satire. Dame Muriel was Jewish by birth and a convert to Catholicism, with which she is obviously fixated in her own strange way. I have never understood what its special attraction was for an author who has an affair going on between one of the nuns and a local Jesuit, but I don't think this author allows us that kind of insight into her thinking. This book is even more of a gossamer effort than usual and you will get to the end before you know it, at which point you will be hit out of the blue by the sudden and startling poetry of the last sentence.
Rating: 
Summary: "Beware the ire of the calm."
Review: Electronic surveillance equipment, bugging devices, rigged elections and a secret love affair--yes, these are all elements of daily life at the Abbey of Crewe. Following the death of Abbess Hildegarde, a battle for power takes place. In one corner--Alexandra and her henchnuns, Wallburga, the Prioress and Mildred, the Novice Mistress. In the other corner is Sister Felicity--a popular nun who campaigns on the platform of an "open audit of all dowries" and she also (according to her enemies) "advocates indiscreet sex." Felicity, you see, is actually embroiled in a sordid love affair with a "lax and leaky Jesuit." Felicity's popularity is growing as "a result of her nauseating propaganda." The stately and perpetually calm Alexandra feels that it's her "destiny" to serve as the next Abbess, but she's not taking any chances on Divine Providence. Armed with a copy of "The Art of War" she sets to work to rig the election and solve "this crisis of leadership." Muriel Spark's books are always entertaining, well written and full of perverse characters. 'Nice' fictional characters with morally superior motivations are for other authors to explore--Spark prefers the dark regions of human nature. Ambition, power, and pride are pervasive in the abbey--an institution in which those particular elements of human nature are supposed to be non-existent. "The Abbess of Crewe" takes a cynical look at the political network within a convent and skewers religion unmercifully. As the squabble in the Abbey rages, the ever-faithful nuns do not for a moment forget their around-the-clock prayers. The nuns are all delightfully naughty characters--dim-witted Winifrede, wily Gertrude, and ever-loyal Mildred and Wallburga. Muriel Spark fans will be delighted with this clever novella--it's wicked, saucy fun. Five stars for sheer unabashed cheek and making me laugh out loud into the bargain--displacedhuman
Rating:
Summary: Witty and relevant
Review: I was about nine years old when the Watergate scandal broke, and I must confess that I don't know much about it beyond our national mythology of bugging, break-ins, erased tapes and G. Gordon Liddy. Is this satire fair to Nixon and his gang? I don't know, but I suspect that it is. At any rate, it remains a witty parable of hypocrisy in high places and, given the rate at which our technology is improving, its comments on surveillance are bound to keep this book topical for quite some time to come.
Rating:
Summary: a fable to keep you laughing
Review: If this book were written in a serious tone, I fear it could be taken as very offensive slander. Instead, it is a brilliant send-up of Watergate and similar abuses of power. It centers on the election of a new abbess. Candidate 1 recites her favorite (Protestant) English poetry rather than the Psalms, supports a strong sense of societial class, and uses electronic eavesdropping as a mere extention of listening to convent gossip as a way to maintain proper order. Candidate 2 is compulsive regarding order in her sewing box, maintains an all-too-public liaison with a young Jesuit (outdoors rather than linen closets), and leads the sewing nuns to dreams of freedom. Add to this a missionary nun using Machivelli to deal with cannibal and vegetarian tribes, young Jesuits bungling break-ins, a nun cross-dressing to deliver hush money ... and you have an absolutely hilarious study in justification of means to insure one's "destiny".
Rating:
Summary: a fable to keep you laughing
Review: If this book were written in a serious tone, I fear it could be taken as very offensive slander. Instead, it is a brilliant send-up of Watergate and similar abuses of power. It centers on the election of a new abbess. Candidate 1 recites her favorite (Protestant) English poetry rather than the Psalms, supports a strong sense of societial class, and uses electronic eavesdropping as a mere extention of listening to convent gossip as a way to maintain proper order. Candidate 2 is compulsive regarding order in her sewing box, maintains an all-too-public liaison with a young Jesuit (outdoors rather than linen closets), and leads the sewing nuns to dreams of freedom. Add to this a missionary nun using Machivelli to deal with cannibal and vegetarian tribes, young Jesuits bungling break-ins, a nun cross-dressing to deliver hush money ... and you have an absolutely hilarious study in justification of means to insure one's "destiny".
Rating:
Summary: Nixon Improved
Review: Muriel Spark's "Watergate novel" transmutes the interesting but often squalid Washington scandal into something better--the Abbess is more sure-footed and considerably more charming than Nixon, imperious and impervious where Nixon was paranoid. As usual, Spark takes the material of life and, well, to put it bluntly, she improves upon it. Of course, this is the task of the true artist, but Spark doesn't soften the blow of discovering just how disordered and unsavory real-life often is--as when she is dispatching her characters to their various fates, she is sharp, sympathetic, and economical. The perfect necessity of every word is the key, I think to Spark's novels. Literary blathering aside, this is also one of Muriel Spark's funniest books, which makes it doubly wonderful.
Rating:
Summary: Scandal Urbi Et Orbi
Review: Muriel Spark's The Abbess Of Crewe (1973) is a brief comic meditation on the forms and abuses of power in the Anglo Saxon world. Partially inspired by the events and the political repercussions of Watergate, The Abbess of Crewe transposes the narrative to a Catholic convent in England, where a small cabal of elitist nuns, blinded by power and a foolish faith in their own impervious superiority, has seized control of the abbey through a startling and inventive series of Machiavellian maneuvers. The novel is complexly shaded, and thus mischievous Alexandra, the abbess of the title, and her scheming cohorts, Walburga and Mildred, are the novel's protagonists despite their gross cruelty and self-centeredness.
Looking forward to today's world of continuous public video surveillance, Alexandra and her inner circle have, regardless of the fact that the convent observes medieval standards, wired the entire facility so that there is no place in which the other nuns cannot be eavesdropped upon or monitored. Hilariously, the abbess and her inner circle enjoy pate and champagne in their sumptuously decorated observation room, while the rank and file members of the order, whom they privately hold in gleeful contempt, endure meals of hot water, boiled nettles, and cat food without complaint or awareness. Spark is unsparing in her depiction of both Alexandra's sense of superiority, which approaches the predestined, and the mindless idiocy and gullibility of the common nuns in the pew, who clearly represent the average man, ripe for manipulation, exploitation, and programming.
Like Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) and The Takeover (1976) among others, The Abbess of Crewe is another extraordinarily deft examination of political and personal power struggles and the methods in which politics really operate within ostensibly gentile, mannered, and "correct" hierarchies. Alexandra and her confidantes are blissfully aware that they are capable of the very vices they publicly decry in the "vulgar" "common" nuns; but serene deportment, assured speech, personal charisma, and effortless presentation are, in their eyes, inherent manifestations of individual and spiritual nobility, and not only take precedence in all situations, but firmly override the possibilities of sin and wrongdoing in the elect. Alexandra's outrageously barbed and salty language behind closed doors--"A Jesuit, or any priest for that matter, would be the last man I would elect to be laid by. A man who undresses, maybe; but one who unfrocks, no"--is one of the highlights of The Abbess of Crewe.
Interestingly, the corrupt and delusional Abbess appears to lose control of both "history and mythology" as the narrative winds to a close, going so far as to throw her co-conspirators to the wolves when the need to do so arises. But Alexandra never loses her regal bearing or quiet sense of self-justifying divine grace and privilege, and, Spark hints, probably never will.
Rating:
Summary: This novel hilariously plays on the Watergate scandal
Review: Spark sets the modern-day morality tale of Watergate in a Benedictine convent. Alexandra, the newly-elected abbess of nuns has come under fire because she has rigged her own election and bugged the whole convent. A truly great read, because the characters are so well fleshed-out and interesting to get to know. Alexandra's contradictions in character are supremely funny. I would highly recommend this novel.
Rating:
Summary: Deftly Written & Wickedly Sly
Review: This novel, an ingenious re-working of the Watergate episode in American politics, is a gem. Spark is at her devilish best here, transplanting the Nixon White House to a nunnery. It is a difficult balancing act pulling this off. But the author scales every mountain she builds. I recommend this book without reservation.
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