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A review by grubstlodger
Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark
3.0
Aiding and Abetting was Muriel Spark’s penultimate novel and deals with a phoney psychiatrist who finds herself with two Lord Lucans on her books. She’s concerned and decides to skip town. Meanwhile two people full on love going on a Lord Lucan hunt and the two Lord Lucan’s consider bumping the other off.
I hope Lord Lucan died before he had a chance to read this book, it’s not very flattering. Other than calling him an inhuman out-of-touch murderer, it repeatedly says that he is a very boring man with very limited charm and a peculiar obsession with smoked salmon and lamb chops. Certainly for their cunning, they have nothing on Hildegard, who was a very interesting and fun character.
This was unlike the other Muriel Spark novels I’ve read, it wasn’t a relaxed look at a group of eccentrics (like The Bachelors or Momento Mori) nor was it a tense and tightly plotted look at one character in particular (like The Driving Seat or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) it’s a fun but fairly lightweight caper. It kept me invested, being a lot of fun for its 200 pages, but there wasn’t much that will linger, except that Lord Lucan was a prat with a fondness for lamb chops.
I hope Lord Lucan died before he had a chance to read this book, it’s not very flattering. Other than calling him an inhuman out-of-touch murderer, it repeatedly says that he is a very boring man with very limited charm and a peculiar obsession with smoked salmon and lamb chops. Certainly for their cunning, they have nothing on Hildegard, who was a very interesting and fun character.
This was unlike the other Muriel Spark novels I’ve read, it wasn’t a relaxed look at a group of eccentrics (like The Bachelors or Momento Mori) nor was it a tense and tightly plotted look at one character in particular (like The Driving Seat or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) it’s a fun but fairly lightweight caper. It kept me invested, being a lot of fun for its 200 pages, but there wasn’t much that will linger, except that Lord Lucan was a prat with a fondness for lamb chops.