A review by grubstlodger
The Bachelors by Muriel Spark

3.0

I’m not sure why a book about 30-50 year old bachelors living in North and West London appealed to me, might be something to do with my age, location and marital status. I was especially intrigued because this was by Muriel Spark who managed to create a wonderfully enticing and repelling character in ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’.

The blurb promised this was a satirical book, possible a stinging attack that threw back “every malicious comment that men have ever made on women.” The blurb also promised that the said bachelors are “all sucked in, summed up, devised by two, and mercilessly demolished by the author’s satire.” Perhaps it was satire, but I didn’t find it particularly funny. (Though does satire have to be funny?)

I was amused at first, we are introduced to a set of fussy men, stuck in their habits and routines. There’s the one that hates his loose lifestyle, the one who pretends authority, the one shy because of his epilepsy, the gay ones and the old one who could never get married because his own ego in the way. They all have older women they cling to as small islands of domesticity, sisters, aunts, possible lovers. It’s simply that the book didn’t really end up being about them.

Ronald, bachelor prime, is set up to be the main character. He’s introduced first and we meet other characters after he has met them - but it’s not his story, it’s the story of Patrick Seaton the bogus spiritualist. He’s quashed fraud cases before as he’s been a police informant but now he is accused of swindling an old woman out of her money. What’s more, he has a diabetic pregnant girlfriend which threatens to end his bachelor existence and tie him down.

If anything, I thought the jokes in the book were more levelled at spiritualism, both the silly bachelors but also the silly widows that support it. Having the trial of the medium as the climax of the book put this first and foremost, and it was a far more interesting story than drippy men leaving humdrum lives.

Even more interesting is the fact that Patrick Seaton is a psychopath. He stirs the bachelors for and against him and if he is acquitted, plans to take his pregnant girlfriend into the Alps and leave her in a diabetic coma. Was the point here that bachelors were so attached to their non-attachments that they would kill to keep them? Perhaps that was the point, but it also raised the stakes of the trial, putting the spiritualist stuff even further forward. If anything, Muriel Spark loves the irony of the girlfriend hoping, praying and doing all she can to get him acquitted when it spells a certain doom. How that all ends up, I don’t wish to spoil.

Ultimately, I think that bachelors might have been too boring for her sharp pen and the spiritualist/psycho stuff took her away from it. It was an enjoyable book but not quite the one I was expecting.