Reading Muriel Spark’s seventies novels (The Takeover was published in 1976) it becomes increasingly apparent that she was, in her idiosyncratic manner, a crime novelist. Violence has always been just beneath the surface in her work (take, for example, The Ballad of Peckham Rye), but her Italian novels in particular seethe with criminality and corruption. Rather than a cast of characters who may be guilty – the task of the reader (and the detective) being to discover which one is indeed to blame – we can assume all her characters are guilty, the only question being, of what?
Three houses in Nemi dominate The Takeover, all built by Maggie Radcliffe: in one live her son, Michael, and daughter-in-law, Mary; another is rented to an Italian family; and the third is the home of Hubert Mallindaine, a one-time friend of Maggie’s whose rent-free residence has become an irritant to her since her second marriage. Hubert refuses to leave and Maggie seems unable to remove him. As Mary says:
“She wants Hubert to go. He says he won’t and he can’t pay rent. She’s going to put him out. The furniture belongs to Maggie as well. But my, she’s finding it difficult. The laws in this country… Hubert might get around them forever.”
(One can’t help feel that the lack of recourse to law – Maggie also fears a ‘scandal’ – is part of the attraction of the Italian setting as in Spark’s world a belief in earthly justice is seen as foolish). Hubert also feels he has a personal claim on the property:
“More Italian in origin than me you could not be…a direct descendent of a union between the Roman Emperor Caligula and the goddess Diana, here at Nemi.”
It is this belief that will lead Hubert to later create his own cult as a way of ensuring a continuing income now that Maggie is no longer supporting him. He is also planning for his future by having her Louis XIV chairs and valuable paintings forged so that he can sell the originals, a process that Maggie is paying for under the belief that the items are being maintained. Hubert is taking over her house, literally piece by piece, but also fears he is vulnerable:
“We mustn’t leave the house unguarded in case they suddenly swoop and stage a takeover.”
For Letizia, the Italian neighbour, “with her youth dedicated to an ideal plan of territorial nationalism”, the takeover is rich foreigners like Maggie buying Italian land. If all this seems almost playful, Spark ensures we understand what is at stake by referencing The Golden Bough, quoting Frazer’s description of the priest at Nemi being replaced when a challenger kills him – “if he slew him he reigned in his stead.” Frazer, like Spark, was acutely aware of the violence which lies beneath our stories.
Attempts to oust Hubert, and Hubert’s plans to outwit them, represent only a fraction of the plotting and deception which occurs in the novel. Maggie’s Italian lawyer, for example, sides with Hubert, going so far as to arrange a false medical certificate for him. She is also duped into losing her fortune to a fraudster, but retaliates by arranging to have him kidnapped so she can be repaid via a ransom. Her jewellery, despite elaborate attempts to hide it in a kitchen step, is stolen, not once, but twice, and Berto, her husband, unwittingly invites a pair of art thieves to lunch only for Mary to spot her Gauguin (which Hubert has replaced with a fake) in their catalogue. Infidelity is also rife, with Lauro, previously Hubert’s secretary and lover, now servant in Mary’s house, sleeping with both her and Maggie.
It is Lauro who ultimately comes out on top by marrying into the family who, in fact, own the lands on which the houses are built – Maggie has been fooled yet again. This should not be read as a victory for the workers – Lauro is just as scheming and mercenary as any other character. There is an argument to be made that Maggie ends the novel happier. Her final transformation may be superficial – she dresses herself “so like a tramp that the chauffeur failed to recognise her at first”:
“My clothes are a symbol of my new poverty, of course. And then, dressed like this, one hopes to avoid being kidnapped.”
But, without the need to remove Hubert from her house, they are able to talk to each other again. When Hubert is told, regarding the house, “It does not exist. How can it exist? It is not on the records.” Spark is reminding us that material possessions are transitory and only the spiritual is real:
“Truth… is not literally true. The literal truth is a common little concept, born of the materialistic mind.”
We cannot look to Spark to provide justice, or even guilt, but there is always a suggestion that redemption is possible.
Tags: muriel spark, the takeover
1streading's Blog 
November 24, 2018 at 8:27 am |
The more I hear about Spark’s ’70s novels, the more I feel I need to read one or two of them. So far, I seemed to have jumped from the 1960s (Memento Mori, Brodie and Slender Means) to the ’80s (Loitering and Kensington). Definitely something to remedy in the future.
Your opening paragraph on Spark’s use of criminality in her novels reminded me of Memento Mori. In the hands of another writer, the premise of those strangely threatening phone calls could have been a platform for a crime novel, but Spark does something much more interesting than that by touching on issues of human behaviour and mortality.
December 1, 2018 at 12:31 pm |
Some of her seventies novels are my favourites! I’m looking forward to re-reading the eighties though, to see if there is any difference. I’m planning to continue next year (I never get anything done in a year!) I’m also thinking I might re-read some Doris Lessing as it’s her centenary.