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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780399509520
ISBN: 0399509526
Label: Perigee Trade
Manufacturer: Perigee Trade
Book Pages: 116
Publication Date: 1984-02-07
Publisher: Perigee Trade
Studio: Perigee Trade

Published in 1974 and inspired by Watergate, Muriel Spark's Abbess of Crewe is much more amusing and infinitely drier. It transpires that Alexandra, the title character, has bugged and videotaped the Abbey--except for the confessionals and chapel--with electronic "devices fearfully and wonderfully beyond the reach of a humane vocabulary." After her only rival decamps for London and the arms of a Jesuit, police and newspapers swoop in. All the while, the Abbess (an adherent of Machiavelli, The Art of War, and the Modernist poets) keeps her cool, sacrificing her confederates as necessary and trying to assure herself of helicopter-hopping Gertrude's loyalty. (Gertrude is off curing cannibals of their customs and calls in occasionally from places whose unpronounceable names will soon be replaced by other equally unpronounceable names.) Spark's nuns on the run are more than stand-ins for the sweaty American President and his operatives; the satire extends to Anglo-snobbism and -Catholicism. The Abbess explains to the Pope that "electronic surveillance (even if a convent were one day to practise it) does not differ from any other type of watchfulness, the which is a necessity of a Religious Community; we are told in the Scriptures 'to watch and to pray,' which is itself a paradox."

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: About Nixon-- Or Bush??
Review: Spark said this was a dig at the Bush Administration, but read it now for a new perspective. The line-tapping nuns of Crewe feel just as much like Bush's NSA as Nixon's plumbers.

Who's Alexandra? Personally, I think Bush is the model for Winifrede... Read this for some laughs and some razor-sharp cuts at the "paranoid style" of government that Richard Hofstadter warned us of 40 years ago-- boy oh boy, did he know what he was talking about....

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Scandal Urbi Et Orbi
Review: Muriel Spark's The Abbess Of Crewe (1973) is a brief comic meditation on the forms and abuses of power in the Anglo Saxon world. Partially inspired by the events and the political repercussions of Watergate, The Abbess of Crewe transposes the narrative to a Catholic convent in England, where a small cabal of elitist nuns, blinded by power and a foolish faith in their own impervious superiority, has seized control of the abbey through a startling and inventive series of Machiavellian maneuvers. The novel is complexly shaded, and thus mischievous Alexandra, the abbess of the title, and her scheming cohorts, Walburga and Mildred, are the novel's protagonists despite their gross cruelty and self-centeredness.

Looking forward to today's world of continuous public video surveillance, Alexandra and her inner circle have, regardless of the fact that the convent observes medieval standards, wired the entire facility so that there is no place in which the other nuns cannot be eavesdropped upon or monitored. Hilariously, the abbess and her inner circle enjoy pate and champagne in their sumptuously decorated observation room, while the rank and file members of the order, whom they privately hold in gleeful contempt, endure meals of hot water, boiled nettles, and cat food without complaint or awareness. Spark is unsparing in her depiction of both Alexandra's sense of superiority, which approaches the predestined, and the mindless idiocy and gullibility of the common nuns in the pew, who clearly represent the average man, ripe for manipulation, exploitation, and programming.

Like Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) and The Takeover (1976) among others, The Abbess of Crewe is another extraordinarily deft examination of political and personal power struggles and the methods in which politics really operate within ostensibly gentile, mannered, and "correct" hierarchies. Alexandra and her confidantes are blissfully aware that they are capable of the very vices they publicly decry in the "vulgar" "common" nuns; but serene deportment, assured speech, personal charisma, and effortless presentation are, in their eyes, inherent manifestations of individual and spiritual nobility, and not only take precedence in all situations, but firmly override the possibilities of sin and wrongdoing in the elect. Alexandra's outrageously barbed and salty language behind closed doors--"A Jesuit, or any priest for that matter, would be the last man I would elect to be laid by. A man who undresses, maybe; but one who unfrocks, no"--is one of the highlights of The Abbess of Crewe.

Interestingly, the corrupt and delusional Abbess appears to lose control of both "history and mythology" as the narrative winds to a close, going so far as to throw her co-conspirators to the wolves when the need to do so arises. But Alexandra never loses her regal bearing or quiet sense of self-justifying divine grace and privilege, and, Spark hints, probably never will.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: 'That woman has a bad mind'
Review: -- unquote the most formidable of my university tutors, declining to follow up my recommendation that he should see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie).

I had the presence of mind to answer 'Well so have I' but not the gall to say to him 'How about you?' Really she only has a 'bad' mind in the sense we all have bad minds -- there are thoughts we do not lightly own up to. What makes Spark so unique is that the thoughts are so diverse and fanciful. She is all over the place in the best sense, she is as light-footed as a Mendelssohn scherzo, and there is never a demeaning touch in all her writing. I never really know where I am with her. She deals with senility (Memento Mori), satanism (The Ballad of Peckham Rye), fascism (Brodie), epilepsy (The Bachelors) and sexual situations too various to list (passim) like the shallop flitting silken-sailed in The Lady of Shalott. They never become issues, they never become themes and there is often an overlay of the outright fantastic, as when Mrs Georgina Hogg in The Comforters, who has no private life, disappears when she closes her bedroom door behind her.

The Abbess gets 4 stars from me because it is one of her slighter efforts compared with the novels mentioned above and certain others. Anyone getting to know Spark's work could start as well with this as with those, or indeed as well with those as with this. If you can get her wavelength at all this book will not 'lose' you as The Hothouse by the East River might do. I have seen it described as 'a wicked satire on Watergate', a plonking, insensitive characterisation -- you do not pin Spark down like that. Any fool can see what might have suggested the election campaign for Abbess between the sewing nun and the electronics nun, and the repeated question to the foreign missionary nun when she rings in from various parts of the globe 'Gertrude, do you have a cold?' is an obvious reference to Kissinger but fantasy not satire. Dame Muriel was Jewish by birth and a convert to Catholicism, with which she is obviously fixated in her own strange way. I have never understood what its special attraction was for an author who has an affair going on between one of the nuns and a local Jesuit, but I don't think this author allows us that kind of insight into her thinking. This book is even more of a gossamer effort than usual and you will get to the end before you know it, at which point you will be hit out of the blue by the sudden and startling poetry of the last sentence.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: a fable to keep you laughing
Review: If this book were written in a serious tone, I fear it could be taken as very offensive slander. Instead, it is a brilliant send-up of Watergate and similar abuses of power. It centers on the election of a new abbess.

Candidate 1 recites her favorite (Protestant) English poetry rather than the Psalms, supports a strong sense of societial class, and uses electronic eavesdropping as a mere extention of listening to convent gossip as a way to maintain proper order.

Candidate 2 is compulsive regarding order in her sewing box, maintains an all-too-public liaison with a young Jesuit (outdoors rather than linen closets), and leads the sewing nuns to dreams of freedom.

Add to this a missionary nun using Machivelli to deal with cannibal and vegetarian tribes, young Jesuits bungling break-ins, a nun cross-dressing to deliver hush money ... and you have an absolutely hilarious study in justification of means to insure one's "destiny".

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Witty and relevant
Review: I was about nine years old when the Watergate scandal broke, and I must confess that I don't know much about it beyond our national mythology of bugging, break-ins, erased tapes and G. Gordon Liddy. Is this satire fair to Nixon and his gang? I don't know, but I suspect that it is. At any rate, it remains a witty parable of hypocrisy in high places and, given the rate at which our technology is improving, its comments on surveillance are bound to keep this book topical for quite some time to come.

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