YOU SHOULD READ THIS!!!!!!!
For over a year I have been doing some heavy research on this very topic as well as its author Dame Muriel Spark and her other works. Folks Ive found my "AHA!" moment.
Muriel Spark: The Only Problem (1984)
This novella deals heavily with the book of Job, terrorism, and a little acronym
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The Only Problem is a short novel (about 130 pages) about Harvey, a wealthy, self-proclaimed student (as opposed to 'scholar') who is writing a treatise on Job. He has abandoned his wife, Effie, about a year before the narrative begins, and can't be persuaded by either his brother-in-law Edward or sister-in-law Ruth to provide a cash settlement in a divorce that both he & his wife want. Ruth travels to France with Effie's illegitimate child Clara to convince Harvey to do the moral thing, but, instead, separates from Edward and becomes Harvey's lover. Soon, all are caught up in events beyond their control when Effie joins a terrorist group that incites violence throughout the region where Harvey & Ruth are living. Harvey can't reconcile the idea of the wife he used to love with the terrorist she has become; nor can he admit that while he doesn't want to live with Effie, he loves her and while he doesn't love Ruth, he wants to live with her.
Ruth flees the police surveillance and media-frenzy and returns to live with Clara's father. Retreating from the scholarly, intellectual discussions common in her life with Harvey, Ruth adapts to the environment of her new lover, Ernie, even taking on his distinctive lower-class accent. Without Ruth or Effie, Harvey's thoughts about Job become more obsessive, his perception of being tortured more pronounced. In the end, Ruth, about to give birth to Harvey's child, moves back to France to raise Clara and the new child with Harvey. A year after the narrative begins, Edward comes to visit them, Harvey has finished his work on Job, a sense of harmony in the lives of all seemingly has been restored. With his writing on Job completed and his acceptance of Effie's political actions having resulted in her death, he states he will live a 140 years with his 3 daughters -- just like Job.
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Harvey does not 'suffer' in the same way that Job suffers, but he is a 'tortured soul'. Harvey is very wealthy, yet chooses to live with only basic comforts. While he sees injustice in the world, he doesn't take action to prevent it. He regrets losing his wife, yet he is the one who walked away -- literally, on the autobahn -- from his marriage. He doesn't want people to be around him, yet cannot live completely as a hermit. He seeks to control others -- telling Edward to cut his hair; telling a maid that it is her fault that he will not bring his guest to the lunch she has prepared; wanting to be alone, but unable to tell Nathan, an unexpected guest and unknown conspirator of Effie's, to leave. Yet, the more Harvey seeks to control, the more the situation with Effie -- a situation he has no power to control at all - gets out of hand. The fallout from Effie's terrorist activities take over his life with everything from property searches, suspicions of wiretapping, constant police surveillance, lengthy interrogations, and a treatment by the media that makes him look more villainous than his terrorist-wife.
Effie is indeed the reason for all the visitors (or comforters; This is a title of yet another important novella in my theory) who descend on him: Effie wants a divorce, Effie takes a lover, Effie has a baby. All of this provokes discussion of the rights and wrongs of the case. But finally Effie's high spirits erupt in a manner particularly favored by Mrs. Spark. From stealing chocolate bars, Effie has graduated to planting terrorist bombs in supermarkets and department stores. Effie has joined the F.L.E., the Front de la Liberation de l'Europe. A policeman is killed in Montmartre, and Effie's group is responsible. Finally Effie herself lies dead in a Paris morgue, her turbaned head lying bent at the same inquiring angle as that of Job's wife in the La Tour picture in Epinal.
Could this have been part of a script for staging and the writing of RN's? Could this have played a roll in the mind set of a mentally ill woman? If I play Perry Mason, could the acronym of the terrorist group be a hint? S.B.T.C Spark's Book The Comforters (1957) be a confession from Patsy?
The typing ghost
The Comforters, Muriel Spark's first novel, was a brilliant blast against the realist fashion of its day. It treats madness and evil with the mirthful lightness that would become the hallmark of her fiction, writes Ali Smith
The novel's heroine rents a flat in Kensington, where other tenants knock on the wall if she's too noisy; in other words, she lives a life not unlike those of lots of heroines in
British realist literary fiction. But Caroline, who is working on a book about 20th-century fiction called "Form in the Modern Novel" ("I'm having difficulty with the chapter on realism"), is about to be subjected directly to the mystery of reality, when she starts being plagued by regular visits from an invisible being she names the Typing Ghost. The Typing Ghost interrupts her with sounds only Caroline can hear, of tapping typewriter keys and a voice that's both singular and plural, "like one person speaking in several tones at once". The voice insists on her fictionality, and that of everyone she knows.
"They speak in the past tense. They mock me." Caroline is, understandably, a bit hurt to be told that her present-tense life is already a foregone conclusion, and that she isn't real.
Is it real, the voice? Is it a literary version of the Holy Ghost? Or, as all her supposedly helpful friends insist, is she "imagining things", suffering from a "mild nervous disorder"? The hearing of voices is an age-old manifestation of saintliness, or madness.
Caroline is no stranger to madness; she is, as it happens, piecing herself together after a breakdown, "forming ... words in her mind to keep other words, other thoughts, from crowding in ... She had devised the technique in the British Museum Reading Room almost a year ago, at a time when her brain was like Guy Fawkes night, ideas cracking off in all directions, dark idiot figures jumping around a fiery junk-heap at the centre". But we know, as readers - because we've picked up the evidence and because the Typing Ghost, since this is a novel, is every bit as "real" as Caroline herself, and has unsettled our usual acquiescence to the prerequisites of the form - that Caroline is full of good sense. We know this particularly because of the way she challenges the frightful non-character, Mrs Hogg (the first of Spark's holy devils, whose name, whose selfish pride and whose foulness are surely glittering references to James Hogg's 19th-century Scottish fable of the Calvinist elect, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner). The Comforters is, after all, a book about the (literal) formation of character, and it's typical of Caroline that she bridles at the "attempt being made to organise our lives into a convenient slick plot", wholeheartedly arguing with the Typing Ghost. "It's a matter of asserting free will."
It is all held so lightly, so playfully. But this paralleling of cheap smuggling mystery and Roman Catholic mystery, this mischievous, merry challenge to British literary realism, this blatant parody of contemporary cold-war surveillance plotting and paranoia becomes a life-and-death struggle in the end.
According to Spark, the notion of the Typing Ghost came from hallucinations she involuntarily gave herself by taking Dexedrine: "I could see that to create a character who suffered from verbal illusions on the printed page would be clumsy. So I made my main character 'hear' a typewriter with voices composing the novel itself."
"Is the world a lunatic asylum then? Are we all courteous maniacs discreetly making allowances for everyone else's derangement?" Caroline asks her friend the Baron, one of her "comforters". This novel takes its title from the useless friends who comfort Job in the long Bible poem that considers the questions of human suffering and patience, the Book of Job, a text Spark studied and wrote about in the 50s and one to which she returned in her later fiction (especially in her novel about terrorism and morality, The Only Problem, in 1984). Caroline's comforters in her suffering, like Job's, are convinced only of their own righteousness: Laurence is obsessed with the cheap smuggling plot; the Baron sees devils in the same silly way as Mrs Hogg "hears" the Virgin Mary telling her which job to take.
But the Book of Job's real formal characteristic is its dialogue, which allows human and God to address each other, and The Comforters is a dialogue, too, a raging, vibrant argument held in a perfectly disciplined matrix, and a near-impossible blend, in the process, of subjectivity and objectivity. Probably the most exciting formal subtlety of the novel, carried off with such wit on Spark's part, is the way in which Caroline and the Typing Ghost pass beyond their loggerhead positions in a dialogue between character and form itself to an admittance of something much more fluid - to what you might call a compromise, even an interplay.
The early and middle parts of the novel reveal Caroline's hurt feelings at the Typing Ghost writing off her reality - and also the Ghost's hurt feelings at Caroline's criticisms of its lack of writerly talent. When Caroline challenges the Ghost's power as author and decides to go her own way, regardless of the plot, the Typing Ghost's vanity is ruffled. "It was all very well for Caroline to hold out for what she wanted and what she didn't want in the way of a plot. All very well for her to resolve upon holding up the action. Easy enough for her to criticise." The Ghost, peeved, spins the car in which Caroline is travelling off the road and breaks her leg - which, as it happens, does hold up the plot, even splits the book in two. Only Spark could so slyly, so hilariously, bend her form so as to have, on one page, her main character criticise her author for being too unimaginative to describe a hospital, then to follow it a page later with a full and unnecessary description of a hospital. If Caroline is hearing voices, then the voice is also hearing Caroline. Their working together is the novel's creative triumph, as well as a revelation of its final benignity
The Comforters is very much a book about what books do, about language and how we use it. It takes issue with empty media and literary and society chatter, it critiques empty-voiced English cliché ("jolly good!", "absolutely perfect!"); it opens the moral ear to codified social responses and their underlying truths and shamefulnesses, the unsayable beneath what's said out loud. With objectivity, the context assumes morality. What critics have called Spark's "aesthetic of detachment" is really a Brechtian mode of connection.
Spark wants her readers to think rather than feel. A self-conscious work of aesthetic surface-tension, The Comforters involves its readers by revealing the mechanics of our involvement. It treats madness and evil with a disciplined, liberating lightness, in much the same way that Spark, throughout her career, would liberate her readers from the vicissitudes of history and reality simply by redefining, each time, the terms of this "reality".
It's worth remembering the influence on her work of the Scottish border ballad form, in which terrible things are reported with a dispassion that's almost merry; Sparkian dispassion, like Sparkian humour, is always a liberating device, and practically all of Spark's subsequent fiction has something of this novel's "curious rejoicing" in it.