Muriel Spark was 86 years old when her witty, biting novel The Finishing School was released. The novel crowned an immensely productive writing career. We meet Rowland Mahler, the young founder of a small, dubious private school in Switzerland. His growing jealousy of a clever 17-year old student drives him to madness. Rowland is an aspiring writer and teaches creative…
Christopher Adam Posts
Muriel Spark’s dark and casually brutal 1970 novel, The Driver’s Seat, throws the reader off balance. The boundary between victim and perpetrator is all but erased. Everyone seems distorted — as though we’re seeing the world through a funhouse mirror. Lise, a 34 year old multilingual office worker at an accounting firm in northern Europe, embarks on a solo vacation…
The people and places in Graham Greene’s 1973 novel The Honorary Consul are shadows of their former selves. They struggle to retain or regain their humanity. We meet the priest who becomes a kidnapper, the novelist residing in a city that doesn’t read, the alcoholic honorary consul who knows his position is a sham, the fatherless British Latin American doctor…
The city worker carried on with his duties moments before the eclipse — the one that a continent had awaited enthusiastically. A dozen people and their dogs gathered in Ottawa’s Richelieu Park with sunglasses, eclipse glasses, and phones. The worker rode in on his tractor, singularly focused on his task at hand. One by one he removed the buckets from…
Essayist Shirley Hazzard’s memoir on her friendship with Graham Greene and the expatriate colony on the Italian island of Capri is a substantive and reflective read, in spite of its brevity. It’s a lyrical account of something and someone long vanished, written by an author to whom “it seemed time that a woman should write of Graham Greene.” At the…
A fledgling novelist in his twenties writes a letter to one of the bestselling authors of the twentieth century. He not only receives a response, but he’s also invited to the author’s apartment for drinks. So begins an unexpected friendship between British author Graham Greene and a young American, Michael Mewshaw, in the early 1970s. It would persist across countries…
Set in a leper colony deep in the Congo, on the cusp of African decolonization, an atheist doctor from Europe and members of a Catholic religious order from Belgium cooperate in caring for society’s most rejected. Located in the remote, humid jungle far from the nearest town of Luc, Doctor Colin and the priests are happy to keep their leprosarium…
King’s College Theology Professor Alister McGrath’s 2010 book Why God Won’t Go Away is a refreshing read in this age of brash clickbait and sweeping statements. He can peel off discredited New Atheism from the broader atheist or secular humanist movement, treating serious thinkers with the respect that is their due, while pulling to pieces New Atheists for their anti-intellectualism…
There’s a ubiquitous template for many contemporary novels and it goes something like this: “an inspiring story of an oppressed protagonist who overcomes all odds and discovers herself.” Anna Porter’s Gull Island, however, is truer to life than to aspirational, preachy fiction. It’s the story of a profoundly dysfunctional family and thirty-something Jude Bogdan’s stumbling, alcohol-drenched quest to make sense…
The opening paragraphs of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair likely resonate with anyone who has tried to tell or write a story. What’s the place where one starts, how much context does one give, how far does one look back? With Greene we get these haunting, memorable opening words: “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one…