“The Bachelors” by Muriel Spark  (1960) –  202 pages

“People say my novels are cruel because cruel things happen in them and I keep this even tone. I’m often very deadpan, but there’s a moral statement too, and what it’s saying is that there’s a life beyond this, and these events are not the most important things. They’re not important in the long run. “

                                          Muriel Spark

 Like so many other bloggers, I am a huge fan of the novels of Muriel Spark.  She had a long career as a novelist, and unlike many writers, there is an evenness of quality in her work from her very earliest novels in the 1950s all the way to her last works in the 2000s.  Her short sharp novels have always been a real treat for me. 

 “The Bachelors” is a dark comedy like several of Spark’s novels. As always she brings a lot of attitude to this novel.  The conceit here is as the title suggests, a group of bachelors who live in London and run into each other on a regular basis.  They discuss their girlfriends, their efforts to get girlfriends, and their attempts to avoid entanglements with these girlfriends.  The girlfriends and potential girlfriends play a large role in “The Bachelors”. 

 Much of the novel is taken up with con-man spiritualist Patrick Seton.  a bachelor himself, who always seems to have a girlfriend who will give him money.  The last part of the novel is about his trial for defrauding a woman out of two thousand pounds.  There are even dark hints that he might commit murder.  The other bachelors in the novel are all proper respectable English gentlemen.

 “The Bachelors” is less successful than many other Muriel Spark novels.  For one thing the cast of characters is just too large.  I don’t think the average reader can follow and care about more than five or six main characters, yet here there must be about 20 or so characters which cause an overload.  In the two novels Spark wrote immediately after this novel, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and “The Girls of Slender Means”, she handles a smaller group of characters much more successfully. 

 The main subjects of the novel are the spiritualist seances and the trial which in 1960 might have been considered original topics, but by now they have become overworked and overused.  The big fraud trial takes up a lot of the novel which could probably have been better spent with more individual scenes of interaction between the main characters. 

 Finally the framing device of the novel, that these are a group of bachelors interacting with each other,  doesn’t really work.   Early on, Spark makes some references to these guys’ life as bachelors, but since these guys don’t interact that closely, the idea that they are all bachelors doesn’t set them apart as a distinct group.  Somehow the concept of bachelors seems almost out-of-date now.   

 “The Bachelors” is not a bad novel.  It did sustain my interest, and some of you are sure to like it better than I did.  However there are so many Muriel Spark novels I liked better than this one.  Since I still haven’t read all of Spark’s novels, the following is my own selective list in no particular order of her novels that I have read and are my favorites. 

     “Loitering With Intent”

     “A Far Cry from Kensington”

     “The Girls of Slender Means”

     “The Public Image”

     “Symposium”

     “Aiding and Abetting”

     “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”

     “The Ballad of Peckham Rye”