The Abbess of Crewe

"Yes. This was a novel written as events were unfolding. Another thing people forget about Muriel Spark is how politically savvy she was. She was an avid reader of newspapers, as many novelists are, and a great follower of international news. She always kept up with current affairs. She was fascinated by the unfolding story of the break-in at the Watergate building, and the downfall of Richard Nixon. She has an essay, ‘The Desegregation of Art’, in which she talks about how we need to move away from the idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art. There’s this idea that people go to the cinema and watch a film about racism in the south or something, and then they come out feeling good, thinking, ‘Yes, we’ve nailed it. Let’s get rid of racism.’ But that’s the point at which their concern stops. She thought that the only response to bad things happening was satire, and by sending them up and mocking them and pillorying them you could probably deal with them, and that’s what she does in The Abbess of Crewe . I love the setting, a convent where things have gone completely awry. The only nun who can sort out the mess is touring the world, sorting out other people’s problems. That nun is modelled on Henry Kissinger. They’re always phoning her saying: ‘Come back! We need you to come back!’ and she says, ‘I will come back, just when I’ve sorted this out… when I’ve sorted that out.’ It’s a brilliant, brilliant satire. And again: it’s a closed society. I know, but they’re not. Even the slightest acquaintance with what we might call ‘divines’ will tell you that that is just an absurdity. I met my fair share of priests and ministers – not nuns – and anyone who says that these are stable, sane human beings, whose minds are on higher things all the time, is living in cloud-cuckoo-land. They’re as venal and guilt-laden as the rest of us, perhaps more so. And I think especially in the case of nuns and priests, because they’ve taken this mad vow of celibacy, where it confines their lives to one of denial. It’s fantastic. The convent’s completely bugged. The trees are bugged. Everything’s bugged. In a way, this is what it’s meant to be like in a religious world. Everything you or I say do being bugged – God is listening. If you say something now, then when you get to those gates, He’ll say: ‘I remember you said X, on such-and-such a date.’ No. My take on that is that she felt betrayed by several people – principally men – who had said she’d done things or said things or been somewhere on a particular date at a particular time. And she was fed up of these lies. She wanted to put a stop to it, and did it in the most paranoiac way – by keeping all these pieces of paper. When I stayed at the house, the files marched across the walls. There were hundreds of them, all carefully sorted and labelled. This was her way of keeping track of things. It was to a level that most of us would find untenable. But then… if you’ve had any dealings with the income tax people, you get to thinking, maybe I should keep them. She had all these problems with income tax people, landlords, publishers, you name it. If she needed to, she could go to the file and say no: here’s the proof."