First published in 1992, The Children of Men was P D James’s first non-crime novel, written when she was 71 and recently made a life peer. It was sparked off by her reading an article about a drop in male fertility, which led to her wondering what the world would be like if children simply stopped being born. I decided to read it thinking of it as part of the British tradition of post-apocalyptic fiction—“cosy catastrophes”, even—along the lines of John Wyndham and John Christopher. (And, of course, Brian Aldiss, who not only coined the term “cosy catastrophe”, but wrote Greybeard, a 1964 novel about, well, a future in which children stopped being born…)

The Children of Men is set in the year 2021, 25 years after the last human birth. Since then, men have produced no fertile sperm—and, oddly, all the sperm stored in fertility banks has been found to be infertile, too. (A detail that may have been added simply because someone pointed it out as a loophole in James’s set-up, but it actually has quite an implication for what sort of novel this is. Without it, if men had simply become infertile from one date onwards, this would be SF. But with that detail, it implies a sort supernatural—even divine—cause to the infertility, backdated as it is. This is, then, perhaps a religious fantasy.)

The sometime narrator (via his occasional diary), otherwise protagonist, Theo Faron, is a lecturer on Victorian history at Oxford. (His pupils, now, aren’t young undergraduates, but adults taking evening classes. There aren’t any young to teach, anymore.)

He’s divorced, his wife having left him after the death of their 18-month-old daughter, whom he killed, not realising she was behind him when he reversed their car. But that death, devastating though it was, just seems to have confirmed the general air of emotional distance and lovelessness in his life: his mother was distant, his father was ill, and died when Theo was 12, and Theo has since come to admit that he never really loved his wife. Now, he’s perhaps one of the few people to be glad there are no children around to act as a reminder of what he lost.

Although the human race basically knows it’s heading for extinction, things are, in general (in England, anyway), pottering along much the same, or at least putting up with the slow erosion of a way of life—with resignation and a quiet sort of despair, rather than the rushing around and violence associated with your more dramatic apocalypse. Slowly, and mostly by their own volition, the populace is moving into the cities, as outlying villages become harder to maintain and supply with power. The old and infirm are encouraged to end their own lives (their partners receive an enhanced pension), and there are even mass events known as the Quietus, in which coach-loads of the elderly are sent out into the ocean on boats that are then sunk. Elsewhere, there’s a fashion among some women for pushing expensive dolls about in prams—dolls which can be updated every six months, to provide some illusion of growth—and the social convention is to treat these dolls as real babies, with people stopping to coo at them in their prams. (Though one early shocking incident in the novel has a woman snatch such a doll and dash it to pieces, leaving its owner as distraught as if it had been real.) Others treat their pets a little more like human babies, with Christening ceremonies and kittens in prams.

There are darker aspects, too. The last generation of humans to be born have become known as the Omegas. Now in their mid-twenties, they have a marked psychopathic character. Often handsome and intelligent, they’re also “cruel, arrogant and violent”. Some abandon society to form gangs. One such, known as the Painted Faces, attack travellers in an oddly ritualistic way, dancing round their cars and chanting, before burning the vehicle and sometimes killing one or more of the passengers, while the others are allowed to go. They are, in a sense, the ultimate lost generation: “Their unspoken question, ‘What is the point of all this?’”

And then there’s the government. While the majority of the ageing populace do their best to get on with a slowly failing normality (“the small domestic concerns of a shrinking world”), the Warden of England, Xan Lyppiatt, keeps things in check through a subtly tightening totalitarian grip. The SSP—the State Security Police—are able to make dissenters disappear, while criminals are sent to the (Isle of) Man Penal Colony, which seems to have been left to run wild. Foreign workers (known euphemistically as “Sojourners”) are imported to do manual labour, but are given no right to stay in the country once their stint is over, and are kept in camps.

Xan, as it happens, is Theo’s cousin, and the two spent a deal of time together growing up, though only enough to recognise a certain shared emotional coldness in one another. Theo was, for a time, on the Council of England as Xan’s advisor, but gave the position up, as he knew his advice was never followed.

Then one day Theo is contacted by a group of five people who ask him to take their message to his cousin. They want certain political changes—a proper oversight of the Man Penal Colony (as it’s pretty much run by internal gangs), an end to the Quietus, and rights for Sojourners. Theo does as he’s asked, more because he likes the young woman who first approached him, Julian (the spelling she insists on, rather than Julianne). Xan and the Council patiently explain to Theo that they’re doing the best they can in a changing world. “I’m not a tyrant, but I can’t afford to be merciful,” Xan says. Which is probably what all tyrants say.

But then, some time later, the group contacts Theo again. They had been blowing up the platforms used in the Quietus, and one of their group has been caught. Knowing it’s only a matter of time before he’s forced to reveal the names of the rest of the group, they have to go into hiding, and need Theo’s help. The clincher is that Julian is pregnant, and does not want her baby to be handed over to Xan, as will surely happen if they’re caught. Theo at first believes they’re deluding themselves, but Julian has him lay his hand on her belly and he feels the baby kick…

The Children of Men is, in a way, the cosiest of catastrophes: it allows everyone to continue their middle-class lives pretty much as before, only with the added knowledge that with them, the human race will die out. The likes of Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and Christopher’s Death of Grass are about the fragility of civilisation, and how easily it can descend into barbarism and amoral chaos—written by a generation who had survived the Second World War and walked the precipice beside such a descent. James’s slow apocalypse, on the other hand, is a slip into despondency and resignation—it’s “a world overcome with ennui”, “a world with no future”—while a totalitarian dystopia takes hold. With its promises of “security, comfort, pleasure”, the Warden provides:

“…the illusion of democracy to people who no longer have the energy to care how or by whom they are governed as long as they get what the Warden has promised: freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom.”

It’s perhaps notable that the world of Children of Men is wholly middle-class. Physical labour in the England of 2021 is carried out, it seems, entirely by the “Sojourners”, who are basically treated as temporary slaves. (We only glimpse them once in the book, and no mention is made of any working classes among the English.) In a way, then, the novel could be seen as a sort of exaggerated view of England from an over-anxious middle-class viewpoint, where physical labour is invisible, conformity is assured, foreigners are used but kept out of sight, and the rebellious element among the youth are a sort of nightmare of what frightened pensioners think punk rockers must be: barely rational murderous savages loose in the wilds. (The Omegas even feel a little like grown-up versions of the children from The Midwich Cuckoos: alien, and more than slightly inhuman.)

Perhaps it’s a telling remark when James said, in an interview from the time of the book’s publication: “I didn’t want it to be science fiction. I accept that there is some excellent writing in science fiction … but it’s not a genre I personally enjoy. I like to be in a world I know.” The Children of Men is, perhaps then, a picture not of a possible future, but of the world she knew. I don’t know if the point she was making, back then, was that middle-class life in the Britain of the 1990s was unsustainable in the face of increasingly harsh global and economic realities (which would be odd, considering she was a Conservative peer). She doesn’t really provide a glimpse outside her characters’ class bubble to really bring that home (making me wonder if she herself didn’t consider it, either). But, reading the novel today, that’s what it feels to me that it’s about. (It’s certainly the direction the film adaptation takes.)

There is a religious strand to the novel, though mostly in Theo’s worrying about whether other characters believe in God, in a world where most people (including him) don’t. Julian, though, does, as does the father of her baby—a significant detail? Is the mass infertility an equivalent of the Biblical flood, and this new birth a miracle? The novel ends before that can be decided.

In fact, the ending is even ambiguous about what will happen politically now hope might just have returned to this dying world. There is a regime change, but how much is it a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”? Any remotely SF or fantasy writer would no doubt turn this book into the first of a trilogy; P D James returned to her detective novels, so there’s no way of telling where things in her version of 2021 would have headed.

Alfonso Cuarón’s film version, released in 2006, is a world apart from the novel, much more hard-hitting and unquestionably dystopian. A small detail—it’s women who are infertile in this future, not men—does away with that awkwardly supernatural-feeling point about sperm banks, and the focus is far more on the “fugees”, the refugees who flock to Britain, and how they’re treated (not just camps but cages). It’s a very powerful film, and certainly no cosy catastrophe.

I started this read-through of Barker’s fiction wondering why it was I’d stopped reading him the first time round, and I’m pretty sure I’ve found it. I think I’d have bought and started reading Galilee (1999) when it first came out in paperback, but I can’t remember finishing it. Reading it this time, I came to a point where I was absolutely ready to give up (as I’m sure I actually did, back then), and it was only my determination not to bail out on this Barker read-through that meant I broke through to the later (better) parts of the book. Maybe this one just isn’t for me—it certainly had mixed reactions among its initial reviewers—but I think there are parts of it that just aren’t up to Barker’s usual standards. And, this being a long book (his second-longest, after Imajica; in some pre-interviews, he talks about it being a two book series) those parts are as long as other people’s actual novels.

Galilee is also the furthest Barker has got from the Books of Blood-style horror that initially made his name. Even in the novels that followed, where he took pains to point out that what he was writing was fantasy, not horror, the darkness was still there, and was still weird, demonic, and grandiose in that very Barkerish way. Galilee is subtitled “a romance”, and although it’s a romance tinged with fantasy, it’s not, to my tastes, tinged enough. (For me, romance needs something else to make it work—Jane Austen levels of wit and social satire, for instance—or should boil along in a subplot alongside adventure, mystery, horror, or whatever.)

Galilee is the tale of two families whose destinies became entwined in the dying days of the American Civil War. On the one hand, we have the Barbarossas, whose roots lie in Africa, but whose generations are few, because their central line are immortal divinities. As the titular Galilee explains, he has no grandparents, because his parents weren’t born. (There are “those creatures God made, but also those who made themselves by force of will or appetite”, and Cesaria and Nicodemus Barbarossa are two such. Though, it has to be said, Nicodemus has managed to get himself killed over a century ago, leaving only the fearsome matriarch Cesaria to preside over the family.)

The Barbarossas live hidden away in their house called L’Enfant des Carolinas (designed for Cesaria by her one-time lover Thomas Jefferson), and it’s there that one of Nicodemus’s bastard sons (the half-divine, half-human Maddox) sets out to write this book, the history of his family. But he realises he can’t write about the Barbarossas without also writing about the Gearys.

The Geary clan are, we’re told, “American royalty”, “As rich as the Rockerfellers and as influential as the Kennedys”. Where the Barbarossas have magical power, the Gearys have worldly power—and a dark heart, for they are “fierce in love, and fierce still in hatred… iron-willed and long-lived… casually cruel and just as casually charismatic”:

“There was a dark, bloody spirit in their collective soul, a Geary daemon if you will, who invested them with an authority out of all proportion to their secular rights.”

Although it starts out sounding as though it’s going to be a dynastic history, chock-full of events from the past, Galilee really just focuses on one event from the present, the marriage of Rachel Pallenberg and Mitchell Geary. Mitchell—rich, handsome and single—is the most eligible bachelor in the USA; Rachel is just an ordinary (but beautiful) girl from an ordinary background, who catches Mitch’s eye while working in a jeweller’s shop. He asks her out, they go on dates, they get engaged and married—it all sounds like a fairy tale. Then Rachel realises how shallow Mitch is—charming, but shallow—and how loveless their relationship is. But the Geary women are used to this, and have a solution. Rachel is told to go for a stay at a certain house on the island of Kaua’i, which only the Geary women are allowed into. There, she’s visited by Galilee Barbarossa, who, it turns out, provides a certain service for all the Geary women when their marriages prove empty. One night with him gives them “A taste of an emotion that struck deep into their being, and offered them a glimpse of what their souls needed to stay bright.” After which they can return to their empty lives. Only, Rachel doesn’t want to return. She and Galilee fall in love, and that love will destroy the delicate balance of hatred and power that exists between the Gearys and the Barbarossas.

Quoted in Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds (by Phil & Sarah Stokes), Barker says, of this novel:

“What I tried to do is take what I learned about writing about the real world in Sacrament and marry it to what I learned about writing a sort of poetic, almost religious fantasy in Imajica. I wanted those to be put side by side.”

He goes on to add: “it’s much easier to relate to some of the chief characters, because there they are, living in our world”.

It’s always been an archetypal situation for Barker—and one of his strengths as a writer—presenting the effect on ordinary people of encountering the fantastic, and having it transform their lives. It was only while reading Galilee that I realised this “encounter with the fantastic” occurs in other ways in Barker’s fiction, too: people are also transformed in his stories by encounters with super-heated passion (think of Julia’s one-night-stand with her husband’s brother Frank in The Hellbound Heart). That’s what happens in this novel, too—Galilee is, in a sense, the novel-length version of novella-length Frank—but Rachel’s life is also transformed by her encounter with another sort of the unordinary, the world of the incredibly wealthy. (Only, that’s not a positive transformation.)

And it’s here where one of my complaints about the book lies. Barker says this is a novel where it will be easier to relate to the characters because they’re living recognisable lives, but, aside from a couple of minor back-story characters, none of these characters is living a life that could be described as normal. Even Rachel, who comes from an ordinary background, is obviously beautiful enough to attract the country’s most eligible bachelor, so she’s already out of the ordinary. And once she’s swept up into the world of the ultra-rich (which doesn’t take long) her life is not ordinary, and nor are the people around her. That wouldn’t matter, but these characters are all so uninteresting. They are what I imagine the ultra-rich to be: spoiled, festering in their own insecurities, hang-ups and (this being Barker) perversities, but so very shallow, and I just don’t care about them or, sadly, Rachel. Compared to them, the plainly dysfunctional but gleefully Bohemian Barbarossas are by far the more “normal” people, despite being semi-divine. (Though, for all but the fearsome force of nature that is Cesaria, that divinity extends to nothing more than being long-lived. And being long-lived hasn’t exactly imparted wisdom on these messed-up beings.)

This wouldn’t matter, perhaps, if it wasn’t for my other complaint about Rachel’s story (which takes up most of this book). The non-fantastic parts—dealing with Rachel’s wooing, her marriage, the breakdown of that marriage—are boring. Nothing surprising happens, and the dialogue is just platitudes and clichés. Perhaps this is an expression of the emptiness of the Geary family, but the limpness of the dialogue extends to Rachel herself, and even to the most lively of the Geary wives, the down-to-earth and frankly alcoholic Margie, who becomes Rachel’s closest ally. This section of the book just had nothing to offer me, as a reader—no wit, no character, no surprises, no ideas. It’s certainly where I’d have stopped reading on my first go at this novel.

But this time I pushed on through, and things got a little better. If nothing else, I was driven by my interest in the themes Barker has developed throughout his fiction, and how they play out in this book. (Though I have to say, I found Galilee the most devoid of the sort of metaphysical and philosophical ideas that can usually be found in his work.)

Fictionally, the stand-out moments for me were two background stories. Both, notably, are about genuinely ordinary people encountering the fantastic. The first was the tale of the fisherman Zelim who meets Cesaria and Nicodemus as they’re baptising their first-born, Galilee. This one moment is enough to upend his life, and he eventually becomes a renowned storyteller. (Which echoes Sacrament’s tale of an encounter with a fantastic couple leading to a life driven by imagination and creativity, making me think this may be Barker’s own version of the artistic initiation story.)

The other is the story of Captain Holt, who meets Galilee in the final days of the American Civil War, a moment which recalls another Barker trope, this one from his first novel, The Damnation Game: the Faustian pact made in the aftermath of a war. There, it was a deal made in the ruins of WWII-era Warsaw that led to a man becoming fabulously wealthy; here, it’s a deal made in the Civil War-ravaged south that leads to the Geary clan becoming fabulously wealthy. In both cases the deal turns toxic, as Faustian pacts do.

As I say, there’s a lot of another Barker archetype—Uncle Frank from Hellraiser—in the character of Galilee. Not only does he spice up the lives of the Geary women, and Rachel in particular, with his skills in the bedroom, but he goes through something of Frank’s painful reconstruction when Rachel nurses him back from near-death following a shipwreck. (This makes me start to see this painful-return-to-life trope in Barker’s fiction as something almost shamanic. In some traditions, the shaman’s visionary initiation sees them being torn apart, stripped to the bones or cooked in a big pot, then reconstituted before their return to the world.)

Just to tick off another Barker theme I’ve noted in his fiction since The Books of Blood, here we also have the situation where women are allied to fantastic males or monsters, as opposed to human males, who are presented, in this trio, as murderous and toxically powerful. It’s been there since “Skins of the Fathers”; the Geary women and Galilee versus the nasty Geary men (most of whom are murderers and abusers of women) are just the latest version of it.

It may be that Galilee just isn’t my type of book. Contemporary reviews I’ve been able to find have certainly been polarised. Kirkus Reviews said it was “Overheated and intermittently risible, but the thing is entertaining”; The Birmingham Mail said “This is Barker’s greatest achievement—an addictive read that is nigh-impossible to put down.” But The Bookseller said, “We’ve all been waiting for another Weaveworld, but sadly this isn’t it… It’s a fan’s book, I feel—not one to expand his readership.” And Maxim magazine (not one I’d usually go to for literary analysis) called it “well-written Jackie Collins with a dose of X-Men,” but went on to note that “Loyal Barker fans will feel cheated.”

Barker himself was certainly in a happy place when he wrote it (the character of Galilee was based on his new partner at the time, and the house on Kaua’i was inspired by Barker’s holiday home on the same island). And he deliberately chose to make the book narrated—in fact, written—so he could freely comment on his own creative process. So, we get some glimpses of how he feels when he’s writing:

“Nothing is beyond my ambition right now, and nothing is beneath my notice. I will attempt to conjure common divinities and show you the loveliness of filth.”

As well as perhaps his most explicit echo of William Blake:

“I suspect, by the way, that in the creation of divinities we see the most revealing work of the human imagination. And of course in the life of that imagination, the most compelling evidence of the divine in man.”

My own reading of Galilee was more powered by my interest in Barker’s work as a whole than the book itself, but I’ve found my enthusiasm for this Barker read-through undampened. For some reason I’ve got my heart set on reading Coldheart Canyon no matter what, perhaps because I bought it but never read it when it first came out. Here’s hoping it’s a return to the sort of Barker I like.

Muriel Spark’s 1970 novel The Driver’s Seat is one of those books I kept coming across intriguing mentions of, giving an air of inevitability to my finally caving in and reading it. (Helped no end by the fact it’s been published in one of those natty little Penguin Archive mini-editions.) And such a term as “inevitability” is apt for a novel about a woman who not only rushes headlong into what she has evidently decided is her certain fate, but takes charge of arranging it at every step. (And is it still fate when you arrange it yourself with such determination? Or is it like taking the diver’s seat on an already one-way road?)

The novel follows the last day in the life of 34-year-old Lise, who has spent the 16 years of her working life in an accountants’, achieving an exactly middling position in the office hierarchy. As we join her, she is off on holiday (to an unnamed southern destination, from an unnamed northern one). Throughout, she acts strangely, and often inconsistently, though some of her actions prove to have an ultimate aim behind them. Early on, for instance, she seems to have settled on a new (garish) dress, only to react suddenly against it when the sales assistant tells her it’s made of a new stain-proof material. Lise acts as though this were an insult—the implication that she’s likely to stain her dress—and storms out of the shop. By the end of the novel, we know that staining the dress is, in a way, part of the plan.

In very Muriel Spark fashion, after having us follow this oddly-behaved woman for a short while, wondering why she’s acting this way and where this is going, Spark breaks the narrative tension in her usual throwaway manner at the start of chapter 3, by telling us Lise will be found the next day, violently stabbed to death. (Any other author would either tell us this straightaway, or leave it to a twist at the end. Spark tells us as though we should have known anyway.) What Spark doesn’t tell us, but which emerges as we follow Lise, is that it is Lise’s intent that this is exactly what should happen. Death is inevitable; Lise has taken over the driver’s seat, and is arranging her own death as she wants it to occur.

Her random, attention-grabbing antics start to make sense as we’re told, while Lise is interacting with a series of hapless bystanders, that these people will recall this strange woman the next day, when they hear of her death, and in many cases report their interaction to the police. If so, Lise is evidently not intending that the police will be able to build up any sort of picture that makes sense. She tells one person she’s a teacher from Iowa and a widow, when she’s neither; to another she says she’s here to meet a certain young man, but it’s evident she doesn’t know who he is or what he looks like, only that he has to be of a certain type. (That type, it turns out, being a murderer of women, which Lise can evidently detect.) It’s as though she wants to create around herself an air of mystery, perhaps (I can’t help thinking) because she detects, within herself, none of that natural core of mystery we know as the self. In the same way that Wolfgang Pauli once declared another scientist’s idea to be “not even wrong”, Lise is, in my opinion, as a character, not even shallow—she is entirely a fictional performance, with no human depth (unless that depth can be found in her desire to be murdered in a very specific way). Try fitting her to EM Forster’s definition of flatness as opposed to three-dimensionality in a fictional character, and she’s neither.

As a novel, it’s full of possible readings. I have a few, but they’re by no means meant to be final. It’s one of those books that grows into multiple interpretations.

For instance, Lise as a feminist statement about taking control of one’s life in a world where women have so few avenues for doing so. Lise seems to have calculated that, as a woman, her fate, as an unmarried early-middle-aged woman, is to be the victim of a violent death at the hands of a man, so she gets in the driver’s seat and sets about arranging it. The death itself is not her choice, but the manner of it is: “Well you won’t have sex with me,” she tells her murderer, then goes on to provide him with the materials to tie her up and stab her, as well as precise instructions on how to do these things. To add to this feminist reading, a lot of the novel is taken up with shopping—another area where women are, culturally, allowed some limited range of self-determination (what to buy, or at least which brand to buy). Lise, then, makes her purchases, or rejects potential purchases, with no seeming sense of reason, this being the maximal way to defy the fate of being a consumer when being a consumer itself can’t be escaped.

Looking at some contemporary reviews for the novel, I wondered if another reading of it is that, here, Spark is goading her critics. A Scotsman review (by Derek Stanford, from 26 Sep 1970) is headed “Back to the Batty Woman”—this referring to a character-type Spark was perceived to have focused on, though it comes with the implication that it’s Spark herself who’s the “Batty Woman”:

“Muriel Spark, in her time, has performed some impressively giddy gyrations, leaving us to wonder, as we watched her cut these capers, just how long she could keep it up. Myself, I thought, from The Mandelbaum Gate, that a downward spiral was setting in… and I am accordingly glad to see that with her latest fiction The Driver’s Seat her capricious levitations have started anew.”

If Spark, then, saw herself as being pigeonholed as “the Batty Woman”, The Driver’s Seat could be seen as her deliberately taking it on. Lise is the batty woman and acts battily, but it’s the batty woman novelist who’s clearly perceptible behind this depthless character: Lise is just a plastic game-piece Spark is pushing around this particular board, so the author must be as batty as her protagonist. The death that this Lise-as-Spark invites isn’t physical death, but a critical writing off as finally being batty beyond the pale. “Do your worst,” Spark seems to be saying to her potential critics, “after all, it’s what I’m goading you into doing.” (She’s certainly taking a gibe at critics when she has Lise describe the paperback she keeps brandishing—and hasn’t read—as “a whydunnit in q-sharp minor”, knowing they—like me—will surely try and fail to categorise her latest novel as being in some sort of genre. My own categorisation is coming up, not in the next paragraph but the one after that. But, no—Sparkian flash-forward—it’s an absurdist comedy.)

Stanford, in that Scotsman review, suggests that, in The Driver’s Seat, “Mrs Spark almost gives the impression of seeking to nail down—and destroy—her batty woman once and for all.” So here’s another reading still, in which Spark takes a clear character type from her fiction and drives it to the limit, just to see what it wants, what it does. Like laying a ghost by keeping on telling it that it isn’t yet frightening enough.

I’ve seen The Driver’s Seat described as a psychological thriller. If so, it’s one without either psychology (Lise is clearly a literary character, not an attempt at a human being), or thrills (we know what’s going to happen, we never find out why). Both Stanford and Alexander Walker (in another review I’ll be coming to soon) mention the book’s humour, and I’d say, if it’s anything, The Driver’s Seat is a comedy, but an absurdist one, a comedy of extremes, and of unease. Lise acts strangely, but with a squirm-inducing in-your-faceness—that face being both of the characters she interacts with, and the reader’s.

Stanford, in his review, says, “The humour in the book is the humour of the Void, and back of the giggles and sniggers, one detects the acrid presence of near-nihilism and deep misanthropy.” Alexander Walker, writing in The Birmingham Daily Post (also 26 Sep 1970), tells us that he read the book in 82 minutes, “but it takes a lot longer to puzzle out the undeclared intentions” of the author. He continues:

“Beneath the narrative comedy—and it is often a very funny story—lurks the equivocal sense of religious convictions being worked out…”

(Is it “very funny”? Are there ”giggles and sniggers”? What book are they reading?)

The key, for Walker, is how Lise will recognise the man of her “type” that she says she’s looking for. She’ll know him because she’ll detect “Not really a presence,” but more “The lack of an absence…” Is this, then, the quest for, not the presence of God in a seemingly Godless world, but at least the lack of Godlessness…? I’m not so convinced the novel is dealing with such questions, but perhaps it takes more knowledge of Spark’s work as a whole to see it. But perhaps Lise is trying to create, through seeding her final day with moments meant to be memorable (because bizarre, and ending in her death), an element of mystery in a world that has no mystery—and a world that has no mystery is a world that has no God. But the mystery Lise injects is random, scattered, disjointed; it’s a Dada-ist reality, with Cubist leanings.

Before it was published in hardback (in September 1970), The Driver’s Seat appeared, in its entirety, in a special issue of The New Yorker (only the second time this had ever been done, apparently). It was also filmed, in 1974 (sometimes known as Identikit), starring Elizabeth Taylor. The film reveals the cinematic nature of the book: we only know the characters through what they say and do, the book’s narrative jumps-forward translate easily into filmic flash-forwards, and if you read as fast as Alexander Walker, it takes about the same time to read as to watch. The major difference is that, like Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash, actors can’t help bring a different slant to every moment, simply by the empathy a human face evokes in the viewer. (Though the redubbing customary to Italian films of the time—and this is an Italian production—does add an element of dehumanisation, in my opinion. Particularly to the male actors, so many of whom look the same. Plus, there’s Andy Warhol, who makes two appearances, and has a natural coating of whatever the emotional equivalent of teflon is.) Novels can get by presenting us with absurdist non-characters like Lise, but as soon as Lise is portrayed by a human being (and late-career Elizabeth Taylor can’t help but come with a certain faded-superstar, on-her-fifth-divorce, not-quite-right-for-arthouse fragility), the necessary distance of absurdism is lost, and it all becomes much more uncomfortable and tragic. (But wait—a film in which Elizabeth Taylor steals a car, all the while heading towards her own violent death… Get JG Ballard on the line!)

The Driver’s Seat was, apparently, Spark’s favourite of her own novels. Of the three of hers I’ve read, I think I still prefer The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which is much more the portrait of a believable, even recognisable, personality type, but this one certainly comes close, with its thought-provoking worrying quality you just know is going to keep you returning to ponder it.