The Comforters by Muriel Spark

First published: 1957

Type of work: Satire

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: London and the surrounding countryside

Principal Characters:

• Caroline Rose, the protagonist, a woman newly converted to Catholicism and a writer experiencing her first literary success
• Laurence Manders, Caroline’s fiance
• Louisa Jepp, Laurence’s seventy-eight-year-old grandmother
• Georgina Hogg, a onetime nursery-governess, a moral blackmailer
• Willi Stock (The Baron), the owner of a bookshop and one of Louisa Jepp’s contacts
• Mervyn Hogarth, the bigamous husband of Georgina and Eleanor, and a diamond smuggler
• Eleanor Hogarth, the Baron’s mistress and Mervyn’s exwife

The Novel

The Comforters contains two broad plot lines: Laurence Manders’ discovery of his grandmother’s involvement in a diamond-smuggling operation, and Caroline Rose’s persecution by an invisible consciousness, a “Typing Ghost” that repeats and remarks upon her thoughts and actions. Much of what happens in The Comforters is connected to the attempts of Laurence and Caroline to solve these mysteries and to prove to each other that their perceptions are grounded in a reality external to themselves.

At the beginning of the novel, Laurence has gone to his grandmother’s house in Sussex, and Caroline, a recent convert to Catholicism, is in retreat from her home in London. While Laurence is excited and intrigued by his suspicions about his grandmother, Caroline’s awareness of the Typing Ghost leads her to fear that she is going mad. With little help from Laurence, her friends, and her priest, Caroline realizes that “a writer on another plane of existence” is writing a story about her and that in believing this she has “hit on the truth.” Since the attempts of Laurence to tape the Typing Ghost’s remarks fail and her friends think her mad, Caroline’s suffering is an “isolation by ordeal” filled with a private incomprehension not unlike that experienced by the biblical Job.

At the beginning of book 2, however, the focus of the novel shifts from Caroline’s Typing Ghost to Laurence’s grandmother and her entanglement with a diamond-smuggling ring. Book 2 is organized around suspicions: the Baron’s belief that Mervyn Hogarth is a diabolist, Mervyn Hogarth’s fear that Georgina Hogg will denounce him for bigamy, Helena Manders’ conviction that her son Laurence is right about her mother. In due course, the mystery of Louisa Jepp’s gang is solved, and the characters of Mervyn Hogarth, Georgina Hogg, and Louisa herself are fully revealed. Resolving one plot line, however, only resolves half the novel.

The larger mystery involving Caroline’s Typing Ghost is only partially explained, and that only in the last pages of The Comforters. Although the reader does not observe the process by which this happens, there is no doubt that Caroline’s suffering leaves her “light-hearted,” “amused,” and secure in her acceptance of the Typing Ghost. Oddly, Caroline has begun to share the Typing Ghost’s point of view. When she tells the characters that she is going to write a novel whose theme is “characters in a novel,” Laurence’s father, Edwin, suggests that she “make it a straight old-fashioned story, no modern mystifications. End with the death of the villain and the marriage of the heroine.” Caroline’s response is “yes, it would end that way.” In fact, by the end of The Comforters, Georgina Hogg (the villain) has drowned and Caroline Rose (the heroine) is “waiting for Laurence to return to the Church” so that they can be married. That Laurence will return is suggested in the last paragraph, when he is presented with evidence that allows him to accept with “wonder” and “rejoicing” that the Typing Ghost is both inexplicable and real.

The Characters

There are many parallels between Muriel Spark and her protagonist, Caroline Rose. Both are half-Jewish converts to Catholicism, and both are writers concerned not only with the form of the modern novel but also with the problems of good and evil in the modern world. Like Muriel Spark, Caroline Rose is an “intellectual” Catholic whose faith enables her to see the world from the vantage point of satire. Both women are observers, and both maintain a healthy distance from the worlds they observe.

Muriel Spark has the great gift of conveying the whole of a character in a very few strokes. Louisa Jepp, for example, “is short, and seen from the side especially, her form resembles a neat double potato just turned up from the soil with its small round head, its body from which hang the roots, her two thin legs below her full brown skirt and corpulence.” In the following description of Georgina Hogg, Spark suggests that she is as beastly physically as she is spiritually: “an angular face, cropped white hair, no eyelashes, rimless glasses, a small flat nose of which the tip was twitching as she ate, a very thin neck, a colossal bosom.”

Secondary characters are described equally effectively by what is omitted rather than what is stated. Caroline’s comforters—Willi Stock, who belongs to “one of the half-worlds of Caroline’s past,” Laurence Manders, a believer in “sheer literal truths,” and Helena Manders, with her “peculiar faith that no evil could touch her”— are kept shadowy and indistinct while “whitehaired young-faced Ernest Manders” and his wife Eleanor, “indistinct, in need of some touching-up,” are “almost not there at all.”

Spark similarly omits more than she reveals about her protagonist. Instead of physical descriptions, the reader is given momentary insights into her thoughts, which are “fine as teeth.” Caroline’s relationship to the novel is paradoxical: “. . . of her constant influence on its course she remained unaware and now she was impatient for the story to come to an end, knowing that the narrative could never become coherent to her until she was at last outside it, and at the same time consummately inside it.”

Critical Context

The Comforters was Spark’s first novel and is still regarded as one of her finest. A critical success, it outlined the themes and ideas with which she is still concerned: the problems of evil and human suffering, and the question of form in the modern novel.

Spark’s conversion to Catholicism gave her the security to write fiction, and her novels are primarily satires. Her point of view, like that of her protagonist, is distanced and objective. To the satirist, the visible world is a world of illusion, a truth toward which the narrator of The Comforters points when she reveals that “as soon as Mrs. Hogg stepped into her room she disappeared, she simply disappeared.” Spark has said that fiction is a “pack of lies,” a mockery. By refusing to let her readers get too close to her characters, Spark reinforces her belief that for the satirist as well as the Catholic, absolute truth is to be found outside the pages of novels.

Bibliography

Bold, Alan, ed. Muriel Spark: An Odd Capacity for Vision, 1984.

Stanford, Derek. Muriel Spark: A Biographical and Critical Study, 1963.

Stubbs, Patricia. Muriel Spark, 1973.