A perfect amalgamation of the corruption and absurdity of power. I had never thought about the political nature of religious hierarchies until I watched The Young Pope. Here, Spark weaves Watergate into the fabric of this story, a passing knowledge of which I think is necessary and heightens the story itself. This was a rich mine of literary, religious, political allusions. I can only hope that someone has categorised and explained all the ones that I have surely missed. Even without a full dissection, as with all her books that I've enjoyed without full understanding, this was another topnotch Spark for my shelf. ( )

Scandal rocks the abbey. But is the infelicitous affair of Felicity and her Jesuit Thomas the source or the object of the scandal? And why have all the bugs in the abbey garden turned out to be electronic? And what of the new Lady Abbess, Alexandra, and her love of Popish English poetry? It all sounds perfectly preposterous. And yet…

Muriel Spark is clearly having a fine time setting her epoch (and that of the Watergate scandal) alight. As ever, it is another sparkling tour de force. But it may not have much lasting significance beyond it’s narrow temporal target, because after Watergate who could imagine that level of buffoonery seeping into the upper echelons of power? … Well, maybe it does have a more lasting irony after all.

In any case, it is a bit of fun and can easily be gently recommended. ( )

I didn’t know anything about this small book when I grabbed it at the used bookstore, other than it was by Muriel Spark, which was enough. I started to figure out what it was when I found myself making the following marginal notes:

Sister Winifrede=Haldeman

Sr Walburga=Erlichman

And then later:

Sr Gertrude=Kissinger?

Jesuit students=Cubans, Liddy, et al.

Yes, it is in fact a satire of Watergate, the action transposed into the election for a new abbess. From a contemporaneous review: “Muriel Spark is the first writer to demonstrate that Watergate and its attendant immoralities are materials not of tragedy, but of farce.”

Very funny. Recommended. ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2018/06/201832-abbess-of-crewe-muriel-spark.html ( )

The Abbess of Crewe is a Firbankian romp set in a Benedictine religious community in England, which rather bizarrely turns out to be a satire of Nixon and the Watergate scandal. The nuns have to elect a successor to the late Abbess Hildegard, and the two main candidates are Sister Felicity, who stands for love, peace and needlework, and doesn't take the vow of chastity quite literally, and Sister Alexandra, who runs the sisters' electronics laboratory and has an unrivalled collection of incriminating tape recordings. When a couple of Jesuit novices are commissioned to break into the sewing-room in search of documents and they overreach themselves by stealing Sister Felicity's silver thimble, it becomes hard to keep the resulting scandal out of the papers.

There's also a Kissinger-like nun, Sister Gertrude, who trots the globe propagating the faith through the little tribal wars she organises in remote countries, and Sister Alexandra turns out to have a fatal weakness for English poetry - in the end it's a provocative citation from Milton that is responsible for losing her the support of the Roman Curia. So a lot of fun, some clever wordplay, but not a huge amount of substance. ( )