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The Bachelors

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The Bachelors

By: Muriel Spark
Narrated by: Nadia May
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A barrister, a "priest," a detective, a lovelorn Irishman, a handwriting expert, a heinous spiritual medium...the very British bachelors of Muriel Spark's supreme 1960 novel come in every stripe.

First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs and shopping at Fortnum's, the cozy bachelors are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented - defrauded, stolen from, blackmailed, or pressed to attend horrid séances - and then plunged, all together, into the nastiest of lawsuits. At the center of that suit hovers pale, blank Patrick Seton, the medium.

Meanwhile, horrors of every size plague the poor bachelors - from epileptic fits to forgeries, spiritualists foaming with protoplasm, and murder - and each horror delights, lit up by Spark's uncanny wit, at once malicious, funny, and deadly serious.

©1960 Muriel Spark (P)1999 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction Crime Cosy Scary
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Critic reviews

"Completely, searingly original." ( The Independent)
"One of the most decisive and unmistakable voices in contemporary fiction....Spark concocts a present-tense deadpan that is at once lyrical, extravagant, and gruesomely funny." ( The New Yorker)
"Incomparable reader May's gentle British accent perfectly animates The Bachelors, a novel of sophisticated wit." ( Booklist)
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This was my fourth of fifth Muriel Spark audiobook, and this was as good as the others.

The stories are so straightforward and engrossing you can easily imagine them, and this one, as superior TV dramas.

You feel a bit of an eavesdropper nosey parker getting so interested in these characters’ lives and where the author decides to take them.

Very entertaining light listening.

I loved it

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The world of Bachelors is set in London in late 50s ( published in 1960) among a number of friends and acquaintances. The men hold positions of relative power; the two young women who hold a preeminent role work at a cafe, the older ladies are widows with money, engaged in spiritualism, attracting freud, with some social skills.
The dialogues and the description of gestures mirror successfully the idiosyncrasy of the characters, creating realistic “scenes” - probably making Spark’s novels ideal for film adaptation. I see this element repeating in seven of her novels I have read. Here the shifts in time and space, like change of “scenes” in a script is done in the most masterful way.
Spark knows how to weave a web of relations and interactions among characters who are far from one-dimensional; their darker sides are exposed in rather non-judgemental, sort of factual way, that does not miss to show the consequences of their deeds or agendas.
Humour is vital in her novels.

To hear the voices I love to listen to Audible too.

Muriel Spark’s fictional worlds at its best

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My third MS in a row. Undoubtedly a very superior author and the narration does it justice. I was appalled at the treatment of epilepsy but that’s how it was. Some quite modern themes. Re reading her after forty years I still appreciate her wit but also find it crueller than before. Obviously some political incorrectness too.

BRIGHT SPARK

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I enjoyed this short but pithy as always nicely read without undue emphases interesting and entertaining

A good listen

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First I must say what an absolutely brilliant reader Ms Nadia May is. I am quite certain that without her extraordinary talent for differentiating character and mining the text for nuance and clues, I should have been irrevocably lost amongst all the ‘bachelors’ and their early postulations.
Muriel Spark was a literary titan in the mid to late 20c, but I wonder if she is already losing ground, perhaps chiefly (only?) remembered outside of literary circles for her superlative work ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’, and that because of its brilliant and faithful film adaptation.
In this comparatively short novel she dissects the moral ambiguity of a class of person whose world was already fading away when she wrote the novel.
Her careful plotting towards verdicts (both real and metaphorical) on spiritualism and justice, and on men and women, is far more insightful and interesting than the cliched blurb that was the primary review on audible (‘misogynistic bachelors’).
Be under no illusion, Ms Spark is as brutal in her unmasking of women’s peculiarities as she is when she unravels the delusions of her male characters.
The plotting is so clever that as the court case denouement approaches, Ms Spark draws all the threads together to clear a path to truth that was hard to predict but seems to suggest that despite their (our) flaws, Ms Spark cares for her characters and by extension people generally.
Though a ‘grey’ world of generally cool emotions and little real joy (felt or expressed), I was ultimately very involved and comforted by the acknowledgment of the breadth of humanity’s feelings and experience. No cliches here.

Clever plotting of the real and the metaphorical

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