A review by daja57
Memento Mori by Muriel Spark

4.0

A group of old people start getting anonymous phone calls: each one says, "Remember you will die." They attend one another's funerals. Old people in and out of geriatric wards write and rewrite their wills. A housekeeper companion, disappointed not to receive an inheritance from the woman she had been caring for, infiltrates another old household and tries to convince the elderly woman (a famous novelist) that she is losing her marbles; she blackmails her husband. Old people remember love affairs from long ago and the ramifications haunt some of them. Memoirs are written. One old man has a penchant for staring at suspenders and stockings in situ.

As John Mullan said in his 2021 Gresham College lecture, "n Muriel Spark novels, murders are common while blackmail is more or less a narrative principle." In this novel, Spark considers the issue of ageing with her trademark humour. It's a fun book but it is dated and not just by the 'geriatric ward'. Almost all of the characters are posh (not just a famous writer but also a Dame) and wealthy, employing maids and manservants, and it says something for the author's prejudices that the main villain is one of the few lower class characters.

Not only entertaining but full of acute observations regarding old age and the approach to death.