The Mandelbaum Gate

The Mandelbaum Gate, Muriel Spark’s eighth novel, has a typically Sparkian opening:

“On Saturday the 12th of August 1961 when Barbara Vaughan had last been seen, Freddy had accompanied her from the Cartwrights’ front door to Matt’s car outside in the roadway… This was the last thing he remembered until he was walking along his usual route from the Mandelbaum Gate to his hotel on the following Tuesday, which was the 15th of August.”

Containing two mysteries – Freddy’s lost weekend and the suggestion Barbara’s whereabouts are unknown – it perfectly sets up what follows, the story of Freddy’s attempt to rescue Barbara from Jordan where he feels her half-Jewish identity places her in danger. It is an opening, however, which we do not reach until chapter 5 as, of all of Spark’s novels, The Mandelbaum Gate is the most conventional. (Spark herself described it as “much more concrete and solidly rooted in a very detailed setting”). Prior to chapter 5, where it might be said the novel finally begins to progress with pace, Spark has carefully introduced her characters.

The novel, in fact, begins with Freddy composing a polite poem of thanks, as is his habit, while crossing to Israel through the Mandelbaum Gate which splits Jerusalem, something his position at the Foreign Office, which grants him diplomatic immunity, allows him to do with the minimum of fuss. He is an unusual Spark character in the sense that he is a good man, honourable and modest. Barbara, too, is an unusual characters, but for a different reason: she is probably the closest Spark came to presenting a portrait of herself, a Catholic who is half-Jewish. There is also a certain duality to her nature: she is, according to Freddy, “a pleasant English spinster”, but he also finds himself “filled with a sense of her dangerousness”. She is “afflicted by her gifts”:

“For she was gifted with an honest, analytical intelligence, a sense of fidelity in the observing of observable things, and, at the same time, with the beautiful and dangerous gift of faith…”

Barbara is on a pilgrimage, but she is also struggling with a matter of principle, a love affair with an archaeologist, Harry Clegg, having led to a proposal of marriage. Harry, however, is divorced and therefore she cannot marry him and “remain within the Church, unless his marriage was invalidated by the Church.” News of her engagement will also infuriate the headmistress at the convent school where she works, who sees their friendship threatened, and she will follow her to the Middle East. Barbara’s pilgrimage takes her to Jordan, even though Freddy warns her of the danger posed by her ‘Jewish blood’, where she falls ill.

Spark handles the slow return of Freddy’s memory with the skill one might expect. Freddy has a “premonition of bloodshed” but, though shots are fired at the border, the death he has foreseen occurs back in England. In the novel’s second half Spark immerses herself in the espionage genre with disguises, nocturnal escapes, illicit passions…and an unexpected spy.

The novel takes place during the trial of Albert Eichmann – Spark had visited Israel to observe the trial, just as Barbara does. It is tempting, therefore, to see Freddy’s early plea –“Why couldn’t people be moderate?” – as its key message, but it is Barbara who seems to identify Spark’s main concern, quoting scripture:

“I know of thy doings and find thee neither cold nor hot; cold or hot, I would thou wert one or the other. Being what thou art, lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, thou will make me vomit thee out of my mouth.”

Initially Freddy seems the epitome of lukewarm, but when his friends, the Cartwrights, attempt to dissuade Barbara from visiting Jordan he finds himself supporting her, and, indeed, quoting her:

“’The trouble with you,’ Freddy said, fully conscious he was wrecking the delightful atmosphere, ‘is that you blow neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm – What was that passage in the Bible, Miss Vaughan?’”

Freddy’s attempt to rescue Barbara and, later, Joanna Cartwright, demonstrate he is no longer ‘lukewarm’, an option Spark has dismissed in the face of Eichmann.

In some ways, The Mandelbaum Gate is Spark’s most fully rounded work, but it is not her most successful. Her brilliance seems to be diluted in the attempt to create characters with detailed back stories (not only the English characters, but the Ramdez family and Alexandros) in a three dimensional setting. It is worth noting that in the novels which immediately followed, The Public Image and The Driver’s Seat, she would leave realism entirely behind.

Advertisement

Tags: mandelbaum gate, muriel spark