The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

Patience, pallor, and deep anxiety: there goes suffering, Harvey reflected. And I found him interesting. Is it only by recognizing how flat would be the world without the sufferings of others that we know how desperately becalmed our own lives would be without suffering? Do I suffer on Effie's account? Yes, and perhaps I can live by that experience. We all need something to suffer about. But Job , my work on Job, all interrupted and neglected, probed into and interfered with: that is experience, to; real experience, not vicarious, as is often assumed. To study, to think, is to live and suffer painfully.

Harvey Gotham is studying Job. It represents, he says, the "only problem": why is it that God lets us suffer? The question to him is, perhaps at first, mostly academic; he's rich enough to be inured from most suffering. That is, until his estranged wife Effie is suspected of terrorist activity, and Harvey finds himself under intense suspicion by the police, who think he may be funding her terrorist cell. In truth, Harvey hasn't seen Effie in years; he left her in the middle of an excursion to the Italian countryside when she stole a chocolate bar from a gas station, claiming that she acted out of solidarity with the working class. But Harvey is still enmeshed with Effie's world, and even lives for a time with her sister Ruth, who has left her husband Edgar, an actor who makes up the final point in the foursquare drama.

I have fond memories of this one, and often list it among my favorite Spark novels. Re-reading it now, I'm struck by how unusual it is among Spark's works because of how unified it is. I often find that Spark's novels have one or two extraneous details that throw the whole thing into whack, forcing you to wonder how it is they fit in. Here, maybe it's the student-cum-housekeeper Nathan, who may or may not be mixed up in Effie's activities, but for the most part, The Only Problem is remarkable in how it tells a single story: Harvey, trying desperately to work on his book about Job, being pestered and interrupted by the police. It's remarkable, too, because of the sense that it is telling a story where all the events are happening somewhere else, off screen. Spark has no interest in the bloody details of Effie's terrorist cell, or the policeman they kill (you can practically see her sneering at the cop who interviews Harvey, begging him to take his colleague's death seriously), or their justification for their actions. It's a thriller with no thrills, a shoot-em-up with no shooting.

Is that the way with suffering, especially in the developed West? Are we not always thinking about suffering as something that is happening somewhere else, far away? Harvey insists that his work being interrupted is a kind of suffering, and maybe he's right. He's certainly suffering more than he otherwise would be, but is suffering that must be measured at a certain minimum level, or does it have its various shades? When we are but slightly put upon or annoyed, are we, too, partaking in some sense the story in the story of Job? After all, does an omnipotent God not have the ability to keep us from waiting in lines or having minor toothaches? What is funny, though, is the way that Harvey is always talking about Job. In a letter written to his lawyer, Harvey interrupts his refusal to offer Effie any alimony with speculation about the date of Job's composition; he just can't help himself. In one really funny scene, he forces a gaggle of reporters who want to know about his relationship with Effie to listen to an hour of rambling about Job and the nature of suffering. Harvey thinks endlessly about suffering, but it isn't at all clear he ever experiences it, or truly understands it.

Having read all of Spark's books now, I would probably rate The Only Problem a little lower than I had first thought. But it may be one of her books with the most singular vision, and one of the most thematically interesting.

The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

Effie Gotham steals two chocolate bars from a roadside gas station on a trip to Italy and defends it as an act of protest against globalization. For her husband Harvey, this is something of a last straw, and he leaves her on the spot, hitching a ride with a passing truck driver. Later on, he retires to the French countryside around Epinal to write a book about Job.

The Book of Job presents a moral seriousness that Harvey probably found lacking in Effie. "The only problem" of the title is the problem of suffering, that is, why a loving God would allow suffering to happen. It is the only problem that matters. Job is a strange book, and Harvey explains that God comes off very badly:

'...Thunder and bluster and I'm Me, who are you? Putting on an act. Behold now Leviathan. Behold now Behemoth. Ha, ha among the trumpets. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? And Job, insincerely and wrongly, says, "I am vile."'

But Harvey is not permitted the peace he needs to finish his book. At first, he is merely subjected to a series of visitors--most of whom are eager enough to discuss Job with Harvey, so that Spark might have a mouthpiece for her own ideas--but suddenly he is mobbed by the French police, who suspect that Effie has been working with a group of domestic terrorists that may be financed by Harvey's wealth.

What are we to make of all this? Clearly we are expected to ask to what extent Harvey himself inhabits the role of Job, which he first forswears but later seems to take upon himself. Certainly the policemen who interrogate him are like Job's comforters, who insist that Job must be at fault for his suffering, but as Harvey's lawyer notes, he doesn't suffer much. Certainly he doesn't suffer like the family of the policeman who is killed by Effie's terrorist cell, and even less does he suffer like Job. But perhaps this is a question with no meaningful answer. After all, Job epitomizes suffering, and there is no story to match his. Either we are all Job because it is the human lot to suffer, and Harvey too, or none of us are because Job's suffering transcends all others.

In his biography of Spark, Martin Stannard tells us that this inscrutable book really is about inscrutability. Spark's own opinion was that our need to understand God's motivation is a fallacy because God cannot be anthropomorphized; he is not a man. As Effie is the cause of Harvey's suffering she is a God-figure, and it is telling when Harvey admits that, in spite of all, he still loves her, though he can never understand her. Perhaps his love is even inextricable from his suffering at her hands.

Spark, as she always does, treats all of this as a brusque farce, and The Book of Job sits at the middle of it, its tragedy starker still by comparison, weighing the story down like a stone. Our own suffering is indicted too, and we are made to be slightly embarrassed when we realize how much more like Harvey we are than Job. It is like Spark to find the notes of farce that tragedy leaves in its wake, and one of her favorite details to repeat here is that after his ordeal Job named one of his new daughters Keren-happuch, meaning "Box of Eye-Paint."

Job was a life-long obsession for Spark, who had written a response to Jung's analysis of it, and most of the ideas about Job expressed here are taken wholesale from that response. There is an added element, a painting by Georges de la Tour called Job visite par sa femme that is what draws Harvey to Epinal:

Job's wife, tall, sweet-faced, with the intimation of a beautiful body inside the large tent-like case of her firm clothes, bending, long-necked, solicitous over Job. In her hand is a lighted candle. It is night, it is winter. Job's wife wears a glorious red tunic over her dress. Job sits on a plain cube-shaped block. He might be in front of a fire, for the light of the candle alone cannot explain the amount of light that is cast on the two figures. Job is naked except for a loin-cloth. He clasps his hands above his knees. His body seems to shrink, but it is the shrunkenness of pathos rather than want. Beside him is the piece of pottery that he has taken to scrape his wounds. His beard is thick. He is not an old man. Both are in their early prime, a couple in their thirties. (Indeed, their recently-dead children were not yet married.) His face looks up at this wife, sensitive, imploring some favour, urging some cause. What is his wife trying to tell him as she bends her sweet face towards him? What does he beg, this stricken man, so serene in his faith, so accomplished in argument?

We know from Job that the words his wife utters are "Curse God, and die." In her face Harvey sees his own wife. The painting provides no answers to the problem Harvey toils over, but it deepens his understanding by showing his life in Job's. Art is a way of coming to terms with the divine. So Spark too, once having toiled like Harvey over her response to Jung, has recast those thoughts in art that they might illuminate a little more of our human darkness.