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sembled near-genius, but was youth merely." The evocation of the past
is triggered by a report of the martyrdom in Haiti of the missionary
Nicholas Farringdon, an ex-writer, ex-anarchist, and ex-bisexual, who
had been involved both professionally and amorously with the girls at
the May of Teck. It is with the intricacies of this involvement and with
Nicholas's visionary, almost totally mistaken idealization of this female
sub-culture, that the novel is largely concerned.
But, as we learn, the past, which contains the bulk of the novel and
all of its dramatic action, is evoked to explain the present. Nicholas's
dream of the golden age and ideal society, symbolized by the girls of
slender means, is shattered in the denouement of the book, and he con–
verts
to
Catholicism. A bomb, buried in the Club's garden for three
years, explodes, and Nicholas's beautiful lover, Selina Redwood, goes
back into the burning house not, as he first thinks, to help rescue some
girls trapped in the upper floor, but to save for herself the Schiaparelli
taffeta evening dress belonging to another girl but "shared by all the top
floor on special occasions." This vision of savagery and evil where he had
imagined only loveliness involuntarily causes Nicholas to sign himself
with the cross.
There are two voices telling this lustrous, amusing, and poignant
tale: the voice of sophistication and the voice of sanctity, neither willing
to sacrifice to the other the particular virtues of its own experiential
terrain. The result is
not
chaos: the book in no sense is "confused" or
myopic. On the contrary, it has an all too studied clarity, it is extra–
ordinarily economical, well-wrought, and lucid. Confusion is avoided
by a neat division of artistic labors between the two voices. The
tone
of
the novel-amused, ironic, skeptical, poised somewhere between de–
tached condescension and casual involvement-is exclusively that of
the
femme du monde,
mingling in comfortable reciprocity with the
world, flesh, and devil. But the novel's form-the structuring and pat–
terning of events into that cold, closed circle whereby the present (Far–
ringdon's martyrdom) is used to invoke the past in order
to
explain
and celebrate the present-is determined by the voice of the proselyte.
The result is a conflict of artistic objectives, a clash between the
ideology of renunciation and the relish of ironic participation. It makes
the book, finally, a piece of moral nonsense. Lacking the passionate
commitment of a Hopkins (whom she is fond of quoting) and whose
intense celebration of the wonder and terror of life is its own justifica–
tion, no matter which side of the religious Divide one is on, Miss
Spark seeks to persuade (and I suppose to be praised) through the
rhetoric not of feeling but of plot manipulation. But though she seeks
