Robinson by Muriel Spark

The more I pondered the murder the more did I come to think of Robinson as a kind of legendary figure since it was hard to believe that only a few weeks had passed since he had led me on my first visit to the Furnace. Perhaps, even at that time, he had assumed near-mythical dimensions my eyes. I saw him now as an austere sea-bound hero, a noble heretic, who to follow his mystical destiny, had hidden himself away from the world with only a child-disciple for company. I supposed he had recognized in Miguel a strong unformed religious potentiality. Robinson himself was essentially a religious man. Jimmie had once, in the manner of one who had a relative bitten with an eccentric ambition, referred to Robinson's desire for spiritual advancement. In thinking of Robinson, I had to perform an act of imaginative distortion in that I could not think of him as part of the present tense, a human creature who had been born into a particular age and at a particular point of developed doctrine--I vaguely thought of him as having no proper station in life like the rest of us. I thought of his rescue work at the time of the crash, his nursing us to health, the burial of the dead, and his patience with our ungrateful intrusion into his elected solitude. That he could have met his ends at the hands of one of his beneficiaries seemed to me the essence of his tragedy. And in this interesting light he took on the heroic character of a pagan pre-Christian victim of expiation.

January Marlow is one of three survivors of a plane crash that strikes a small island off the coast of the Azores. The others are Jimmie Waterford, a charming foreigner who speaks in a strangely affected English, and Tom Wells, a boorish grifter with a suitcase full of cheap charms to be sold for luck. They have found themselves on the island of Robinson, named after its proprietor, a mercurial loner who has chosen the island as his refuge from the world--and who happens to be Jimmie's uncle. As they wait for the yearly pomegranate to arrive in two month's time, the only other companionship they have is Miguel, Robinson's impressionable young ward, and a cat that can play ping-pong. Robinson runs the island with a strict hand, set in his ways as hermits often are, until one day, he disappears. A trail of bloody clothes leads up to the "Furnace," an active volcanic crater. Their caretaker, January reasons, has been murdered, and the only possible suspects are her two fellow survivors.

I'd like to reread all of Spark's books, now that I've exhausted them. I had vaguely planned on reading them in the order I first read them, but I have given away my copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, so here's the second book I read, years ago, which happens also to be her second novel. It has a kind of richness or fullness that her later books mostly abandon, but much of what makes Spark Spark is fully present in Robinson: Robinson, for example, stands out as the divine stand-in, who arranges the lives of his wards, whom he has saved and protected, and yet cannot be truly known, or even spoken with. Robinson the island is roughly laid out in the shape of a man; January and the others find themselves in a manner inside of him. And when he disappears, is that any less than the frightening disappearance of God from modern life?

What to do, then, with Robinson's hatred of the Catholic veneration for Mary? Maybe it's not too much to think of Robinson as the jealous God who hates to share his acclaim with someone else, a woman especially. And maybe it's not too much to read January's sudden arrival on the island as a kind of imposition of womanhood on the bachelor Robinson's life, as Mary amends the traditional masculinity of God. Robinson lumps Marianism in with the good luck charms Tom Wells sells to unsuspecting travelers: luck, perhaps even providence, are the province of suckers, but if that's true, what to make of the incredible fortune that they crashed on just this island? Or that one of the survivors is Robinson's own nephew? Could the mysterious Robinson have arranged even that?

Or maybe there's nothing to all of that. Maybe the man-shaped island represents the way that January, after Robinson's disappearance, must investigate the house and determine the shape of his character in order to understand what happened to him. Maybe she must explore him as she explores the island, with its molten heart and secret passageways. Maybe it's a metaphor for the detective story.

Who knows. At her best, Spark, though she often pares her novels to the "essentials," provides no easy symbols of readings. Her images and details are slippery, and there always seems to be one detail too many, or perhaps one detail too few. Robinson is all those things, but it's a tremendously fun send-up of "desert island" literature--I mean, you've got Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe right there. Her books are always fun, I think, but Robinson is fun in that specific way that lots of people mean when they say a book is "fun." It's an adventure, and that's enough. I'm impressed, actually, by how well it holds up: if it's not quite the quality of Jean Brodie or Loitering with Intent, it's in an (only slightly) lower tier.