Bad People

...a man of sixty-two, with settled, sophisticated tastes and few doubts " Curran is a mysterious figure with a hint of homosexuality about him, and he knows a lot more about the two sisters running the pension—who are given to wrangling over its garden—than he lets on He also knows his way around the city remarkably well for an American who "headquarters" in Pans, because Vemce "had been his territory for the best part of his life, in the late thirties and after the War onwards when he had become a settled expatriate " Robert's mother initiates the action of the novel when she hires Global-Equip Security Services, gess, to chase down her missing husband The agency contacts its Venice agent, Violet de Winter—who happens to be the onetime mistress of Lina's aristocratic father—and cautions, "We have no territorial rights in that area " But Miss de Winter is feeling "the pinch of modern immorality" (her business, discreet blackmail, has deteriorated now that "unmarried lovers no longer chose Venice as the most desirable place to be together and, moreover, the lovers' husbands and wives no longer seemed to care if they did") So she falls in with a scam mounted by Robert to fleece Curran of his money On the surface, the book might pass for a comedy of decaying manners Robert's mother fumes "at the thought of everyone having a good time, seeing the palace of the Doges and sleeping with each other in Italy while she was carrying on, keeping the home tidy, watching the electricity so that the bill wouldn't be too high, thinking of the cost of living here in the British Isles where people ought to be " Yet underneath the deftly paced plot and the gleaming prose there lurks a disconcerting darkness that goes beyond black humor The trouble, I think, is that the characters are dishkable to a degree that is fatal to the novel True, other writers have given us obnoxious characters —Evelyn Waugh, for one—who share some of the nastiness of Spark's creatures But one does not recall them with the same kind of distaste one feels on putting down Territorial Rights A comparison with Spark's earlier work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, may help to clarify the point Miss Brodie, not a likable person to say the least, loses her teaching job when an affair of hers is revealed by a student, Sandy, who later becomes a nun and wins fame for a "strange" book on psychology At the end, Sandy is asked about the influences on her work Clutching the bars of her grille at the nunnery, she replies, "There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime " We are left, then, with a grudging admiration of the difficult Miss Brodie and the recognition that to have been one of her girls was no bad thing The people of Territorial Rights, by contrast, are empty of the human ingredient that made Miss Jean Brodie worthy of respect Robert's mother is told by a friend, "You're mistaken if you think wrong-doers are always unhappy The really professional evil-doers love it They're as happy as larks in the sky " That neatly sums up the ironic point Spark has been trying to make, but the facts of her characters' lives belie this Robert and his new girl, Anna, for example, become crooks and then terrorists, truly professional evil-doers The reader does not question that they "love it," but he is not persuaded that they are "happy as larks " The best that can be said for this book, therefore, is that the ultimate failure of Spark's design for her characters—doing evil joyfully—is an affirmation of the moral order...

...Bad People Territorial Rights By Muriel Spark Coward, McCann & Geoghegan 240 pp $9 95 Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Clint A Biography of Clinton S Golden" Edmund Wilson once remarked that "the English do not insist on having the women in their fiction made attractive " Muriel Spark's readers on both sides of the Atlantic do not seem to insist on any of her fictional characters being appealing And her 15th novel, Territorial Rights, is populated by as rum a lot as you will find between hard covers, even in these disenchanted times The territory of the title is Venice, a city of befouled waters and crumbling facades that nevertheless still possesses an elusive, somber beauty Robert Leaver, eager to escape an entanglement with an older man named Cur-ran, arrives at the Pension Sofia in search of his former girl friend, Lina Pancev, a Bulgarian exile She is in Venice looking for the grave of her father, whom we later discover was murdered in the pension and may be buried in its garden Next, Robert's father, the proper ex-headmaster of an English public school, checks into the Sofia with his mistress Soon Curran arrives, too...