There aren’t many likeable characters in Memento Mori. I counted three. But death comes for the likeable, the despicable and everyone in between, and the way aging adults cope with (or try to deny) that grim reality drives the plot of this book. Some try to shore up treasure in this life, some cling to relationships, some maintain a scientist’s neutrality, while others let their pain bring them closer to their God.
In the introduction to my Virago edition, A.L. Kennedy writes that the book “shows perhaps the world’s greatest crime, the avoidable wrong, the human fault, the death of mercy.” We see that absence of compassion in some of the young characters, but also in the predatory instincts of some of the older characters.
But the book also asks us to think about our own sense of mercy. Can we feel compassion for characters who lack all of the qualities we tend to find appealing in a protagonist? These people aren’t in a bildungsroman; they won’t experience and eventually triumph over trials to become worthy adults. Their growing infirmity is short-circuiting their ability to exert control over their own lives and it’s uncomfortable to identify with them. Doing so means that the reader, like the characters, is also confronted with the Job-like situation of aging, ill-health and death. We have no choice but to walk beside characters whose power has waned, and the effect is instructive. The ego will not triumph and life’s absurdity will get the upper hand. It’s our own memento mori. As with many of Spark’s novels, what seems like superficial satire works behind the curtains of our minds in a much deeper way.
Spark was intrigued by the Book of Job, in particular its central question: how can the benevolence ascribed to God be reconciled with human suffering? The twilight years brim with suffering. As Jean Taylor, who’s bedridden in a nursing home, says, “Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.” Spark offers no balm for this universal predicament.
In a review, Spark wrote that spiritual “surrender is shown as an act of will, not a reluctant consent forced upon an exhausted spirit.” Very few characters in Memento Mori will themselves to surrender to the inevitable, but the ones who do are the likable ones. These are the characters who accept that death is coming and so make what they can of the time they have left, each according to his or her nature.
Spark recommends we “ever remember” Death, even when we’re in our prime. It lends piquancy to life. As Detective Mortimer suggests, “Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
Peter Schjeldahl offers one of the most heartening answers to the question of how to live with the presence of death. In the introduction to his book of essays, The Art of Dying, Schjeldahl, who’s facing his own mortality, says, “I want to do everything I would do anyway with more appreciation. I was thinking, What do I want from the world now? I can’t think of a single thing. You know, it’s pure gratitude - gratitude defined as wanting what you have. I see no gaps.”
Sources:
Schjeldahl, Peter. The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019 - 2022.
Spark, Muriel. Memento Mori.
Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark: The Biography.
Comments