Loitering With Intent (Virago Modern Classics Book 346)

This account of writing a first novel is so compelling that it makes one want to try. Very clever and well paced, full of inventive characters.

This is a poor review because I could make little sense of the book, although it was written by a celebrated author and has had several five-star Amazon reviews.Set in 1949 and 1950, the book is narrated by Fleur Talbot, who is writing poetry and a novel, "Warrender Chase" (the name of its principal character). She got a job with Sir Quentin Oliver, who was running the Autobiographical Association, which consisted of six people who, controlled by Sir Quentin, were in the process of writing their memoirs – none had as yet got beyond their first chapter. Fleur was to type them up, rectifying any stylistic infelicities in the process. But she also added material of her own.In Fleur’s novel, Charlotte is partially inspired by Sir Quentin’s housekeeper, Beryl Tims, and Prudence is inspired by his incontinent mother, Lady Edwina, who is in her nineties, frail in body but still alert in mind. As for Sir Quentin, he was, in real life, “conforming more and more to the character of Warrender Chase”. The real Lady Edwina, whom Fleur befriends, is vividly portrayed in the book. The real Sir Quentin is a somewhat enigmatic figure, with controlling and manipulative intentions.The point of the book - as I understand it! - is the uncanny overlap between the events described in Fleur’s novel and the events that subsequently happen to those characters in real life. For example, in the first chapter of her novel, Warrender is killed in a car crash. That fate befalls Sir Quentin. There is also a suicide in real life, following one in the novel.Somehow, the manuscript of “Warrender Chase” disappeared for a while: had they been stolen or destroyed by one or other of the characters portrayed in Fleur’s novel? Or had the prrofs been “lost” by the publisher to whom it was originally submitted and who had cancelled the contract because the book might be libellous? But Fleur managed to get access to a friend’s flat in the latter’s absence – and found the manuscript there. Back at home, she typed it out with two carbon copies.Fleur’s book was eventually published, to great acclaim, as subsequently were several other books of hers.

Fleur Talbot, a well-known author, looks back on her earlier life to a time in 1949-1950 when she'd not yet had her first novel published and was living in a small bedsit paid with by wages earned from temporary secretarial work. Needing to earn some extra money to support her whilst she works on her novel, Fleur takes a job working for the eccentric Sir Quentin Oliver, who is the president of the Autobiographical Association, and who Fleur soon begins to realize is not quite the harmless eccentric he first appears. Lording it over a group of bizarre individuals who have joined the association in order to write their own biographies, Sir Quentin's agenda is not immediately clear to Fleur, but when she is typing up the members' manuscripts and he encourages her embellishments of their memories, Fleur begins to have doubts about his motives. As Fleur juggles her job with writing her novel and trying to avoid the mostly unwelcome visits of her lover's wife, she becomes very good friends with Sir Quentin's elderly and rather outlandish mother, Lady Edwina, who takes every opportunity possible to aggravate her son and to deflate his exaggerated opinion of himself. When Fleur's manuscript of her novel disappears, she has the uncomfortable feeling that its disappearance has something to do with the manipulative Sir Quentin, and when one of the association members dies in a manner similar to that of one of the characters in Fleur's novel, she begins to wonder if Sir Quentin's motives are more sinister than she'd imagined...Full of unusual characters living unconventional lives, Muriel Spark's sharply-observed 'Loitering with Intent' is a quirky and entertaining story with a touch of the gothic to it. Although partly autobiographical and the author's cast of off-beat characters are oddly believable, it's not a story to be taken too seriously (though there are deeper and darker layers here if you look for them) and if you take it in the spirit with which is was written then there is quite a lot to enjoy in this unusual little novel.4 Stars.

There is a sense of the autobiographical in this novel which in fact is quite appropriate when one considers the actual pivot around which the whole plot revolves. As a note of caution however I must add that I make this statement without having any knowledge at all of Muriel Spark’s actual life. As the author spins out the plot she manages to capture the essence of the main character’s experience as a secretary for a group of people organized by an individual with the sole aim of writing their biographies so that they may be put away in a safe place for seventy years and their contents not actually revealed until all the people mentioned in these sets of memoirs are actually no longer alive. The idea is that this will be of interest to the historian of the future. Not that the novel itself concentrates unduly on the efforts of this group but rather on the intellectual and emotional reactions of the novel’s main character, a young writer whose main concurrent aim in life is to get her first novel published. She is quite a likeable and attractive character and in fact she seems to be the only normal person amongst the rest of the characters portrayed in the novel, even though this impression may in fact be subconsciously and gradually formed in the reader’s mind by the first-person point of view of the novel since everything is seen and judged through the eyes of the novel’s main character. Even though this is a rather short book it is rather rich with experience and latent meaning well beyond the mere surface of the mostly humorous type of entertainment that pervades it from beginning to end.