I’ve been on a bit of a Muriel Spark binge, and Memento Mori is a great classic one to read! It’s a thriller that examines death and ageing, but in a way that’s surprising, messy, and eccentrically iconic.
The book revolves around a small, entangled community of friends, lovers, ex-lovers, and family members, all in their seventies and eighties. These are people shaped by long, complicated lives, and they’re still living messy, interesting ones. What gets thrown into the middle of this group like a bomb is a series of anonymous phone calls. Someone answers the phone, and a voice calmly tells them: Remember you must die.
A retired police officer becomes involved and attempts to identify the caller. People do die, some in ways that are unsettling, but this isn’t really a straightforward crime novel, or at least not one that operates according to the usual rules. It’s meandering.
One of the book’s great pleasures is its focus on older characters, something still relatively rare in fiction. The prose is very dialogue-heavy, which I personally love. The characters are vain, cruel, funny, and occasionally tender, often all at once.
The premise itself is striking, but I don’t think it’s where the novel’s real charm lies. Spark balances between being nasty and being deeply insightful. She exposes her characters without quite condemning them, and the result is a novel that’s funny, bleak, and strangely invigorating.
Memento Mori is one of those books that’s hard to fully describe; you really have to read it to get it. But once you do, it’s hard to forget. Read if you’re in the mood for peak Spark.
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