Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark

The other servants fall silent as Lister enters the room.

'Their life,' says Lister, 'a general mist of error. Their deaeth, a hideous storm of terror.--I quote from The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, an English dramatist of old.'

'When you say a thing is not impossible, that isn't quite to say it's possible,' says Eleanor, who, though younger than Lister, is his aunt. She is taking off her outdoor clothes. 'Only technically is the not impossible, possible.'

'We are not discussing possibilities today,' Lister says. 'Today we speak of facts. This is not the time for inconsequential talk.'

"And Alexander wept, for there were no more Sparks to conquer." That's right: after 22 books, I have officially read every novel Muriel Spark ever wrote. I have loved reading them, these tight little performances of control. They are all quite different, but no author could be more unmistakable; each and every one is a meditation in some way on predestination and power. They are frequently cruel and often funny, usually blackly or bloodily so. They are somehow simultaneously undercooked and overstuffed, drawn down to what seems like their most essential details, and yet why each detail is essential often remains elusive, like an extra piece of a completed puzzle. They are full of surprises, and I'm sorry that I'll never be surprised by another one.

What kind of Spark was this to end on? Not to Disturb is certainly not the worst of her books (that's The Finishing School), but it is probably the slightest. It takes place over the course of a single night, in the "backstairs" of a grand English manor, among a group of servants awaiting for their masters, the Baron and Baroness. The head servant, Lister, seems to know exactly what will go down: the Baron and the Baroness will arrive separately, and so will their secretary, Victor Passerat, and they will convene inside the library, where the Baron will give orders that they are not to be disturbed. The Baron will shoot the Baroness and the secretary, who, it is suggested, is her lover. The photographer and writer the servants have hired for the occasion will write it all down in a manner that is salacious, yet flattering to the servants themselves. They will option the story as books and films, in which they will play themselves, or perhaps each other.

All this is more or less what happens. The reader waits on a conflict, some unpredictable wrench, that never comes. There are complications, yes, as when the Reverend arrives to check on the Baron's mad brother, who is kept hidden away in the attic. Quick-thinking Lister has the dotty Reverend marry the brother with pregnant Heloise (who is hilariously unashamed of her inability to determine which of a dozen men is the father), ensuring that she will inherit the Baron's vast fortune. But this is ingenuity, or perhaps luck, and not conflict; everything happens as Lister says it will, and the characters are shuffled happily off the stage at the end of this very short book, having encountered nothing to stop them on the way to riches and fame.

I think what I liked best about Not to Disturb is the canny inversion of wealth and power the servants represent. In this book, it is Lister and the others who hold the Godlike power of predestination. It's almost beside the point to ask how Lister knows the evening will go exactly as he says it does. He's Spark's co-writer; and the pieces fall into place like he says they will because she's the one that places them. Like I said, all of Spark's books are about predestination in way or another, figured in the power of the author herself, but instead of writing about a character who fights against it, like the suicide of The Driver's Seat, Not to Disturb is about someone who happily collaborates in the arrangement. This works because of Lister's social station; the idea of a servant dictating the life of his master is one that provides the pleasure of busted social hierarchies. It's nice to see the lowly get their way.

As brief as it is, Not to Disturb has its share of the extraneous elements that make Spark's novels so enduringly fascinating and slippery. What are we to make of the fact that Lister has a flirtatious and semi-incestuous relationship with his younger aunt, Eleanor? Or the fact that the walls of the great house are lined with hundreds of only the smallest paintings? Looking back now, I've come to see these details as reminders that power doesn't need justification; if God can construct a world that is so paradoxical and strange, Muriel Spark can fill the wall with miniatures; to say that our lives are predestined is not to say they make sense, or have a purpose, or anything like that. The strangest detail in Not to Disturb, actually, is a literal act of God: a lightning bolt that kills the secretary Passerat's two friends, who've been skulking around the house all night, locked inside the gate but barred from the house. Lister describes them as minor characters, irrelevant to the plot he's either created or described, and Spark's lightning bolt proves him right. And that's the scary thing: who can say whether they are a minor character in real life?