The Abbess of Crewe

by Muriel Spark

Book Overview

An elegant fable about intrigue, corruption, and electronic surveillance, 'The Abbess of Crewe' (1974) is set in an English Benedictine convent. Steely and silky Abbess Alexandra has bugged the convent, and rigged her election. But the cat gets out of the bag, and--plunged into scandal--the serene Abbess faces a Vatican inquiry.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670100293
• ISBN13: 9780670100293
• Release Date: October 1974
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 116 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.

Customer Reviews

About Nixon-- Or Bush??

Spark said this was a dig at the Bush Administration, but read it now for a new perspective. The line-tapping nuns of Crewe feel just as much like Bush's NSA as Nixon's plumbers. Who's Alexandra? Personally, I think Bush is the model for Winifrede... Read this for some laughs and some razor-sharp cuts at the "paranoid style" of government that Richard Hofstadter warned us of 40 years ago-- boy oh boy, did he know what he was talking about....

'That woman has a bad mind'

-- unquote the most formidable of my university tutors, declining to follow up my recommendation that he should see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie).I had the presence of mind to answer 'Well so have I' but not the gall to say to him 'How about you?' Really she only has a 'bad' mind in the sense we all have bad minds -- there are thoughts we do not lightly own up to. What makes Spark so unique is that the thoughts are so diverse and fanciful. She is all over the place in the best sense, she is as light-footed as a Mendelssohn scherzo, and there is never a demeaning touch in all her writing. I never really know where I am with her. She deals with senility (Memento Mori), satanism (The Ballad of Peckham Rye), fascism (Brodie), epilepsy (The Bachelors) and sexual situations too various to list (passim) like the shallop flitting silken-sailed in The Lady of Shalott. They never become issues, they never become themes and there is often an overlay of the outright fantastic, as when Mrs Georgina Hogg in The Comforters, who has no private life, disappears when she closes her bedroom door behind her. The Abbess gets 4 stars from me because it is one of her slighter efforts compared with the novels mentioned above and certain others. Anyone getting to know Spark's work could start as well with this as with those, or indeed as well with those as with this. If you can get her wavelength at all this book will not 'lose' you as The Hothouse by the East River might do. I have seen it described as 'a wicked satire on Watergate', a plonking, insensitive characterisation -- you do not pin Spark down like that. Any fool can see what might have suggested the election campaign for Abbess between the sewing nun and the electronics nun, and the repeated question to the foreign missionary nun when she rings in from various parts of the globe 'Gertrude, do you have a cold?' is an obvious reference to Kissinger but fantasy not satire. Dame Muriel was Jewish by birth and a convert to Catholicism, with which she is obviously fixated in her own strange way. I have never understood what its special attraction was for an author who has an affair going on between one of the nuns and a local Jesuit, but I don't think this author allows us that kind of insight into her thinking. This book is even more of a gossamer effort than usual and you will get to the end before you know it, at which point you will be hit out of the blue by the sudden and startling poetry of the last sentence.

Nixon Improved

Muriel Spark's "Watergate novel" transmutes the interesting but often squalid Washington scandal into something better--the Abbess is more sure-footed and considerably more charming than Nixon, imperious and impervious where Nixon was paranoid. As usual, Spark takes the material of life and, well, to put it bluntly, she improves upon it. Of course, this is the task of the true artist, but Spark doesn't soften the blow of discovering just how disordered and unsavory real-life often is--as when she is dispatching her characters to their various fates, she is sharp, sympathetic, and economical. The perfect necessity of every word is the key, I think to Spark's novels.Literary blathering aside, this is also one of Muriel Spark's funniest books, which makes it doubly wonderful.

This novel hilariously plays on the Watergate scandal

Spark sets the modern-day morality tale of Watergate in a Benedictine convent. Alexandra, the newly-elected abbess of nuns has come under fire because she has rigged her own election and bugged the whole convent. A truly great read, because the characters are so well fleshed-out and interesting to get to know. Alexandra's contradictions in character are supremely funny. I would highly recommend this novel.

Deftly Written & Wickedly Sly

This novel, an ingenious re-working of the Watergate episode in American politics, is a gem. Spark is at her devilish best here, transplanting the Nixon White House to a nunnery. It is a difficult balancing act pulling this off. But the author scales every mountain she builds. I recommend this book without reservation.