the quiet twist
Muriel Spark's The Public Image from 1968 is 5 x 8 x 0.4 inches & 144 calculated pages.
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Last week, I was mostly working on a review of a new novel about an actress (already beloved by actresses!). The way it approaches its subject—with intimacy and loving critique—is in total opposition to this Muriel Spark novel, also about an actress. The Public Image (surprise) seems only concerned with surface. It’s cool, precise, extravagantly dry.
The Public Image stars a famous British actress, her young infant, and her less famous, very jealous husband. The public, we’re often told, adores this actress’s smoldering eyes, which confer that she’s a very composed lady in the streets and a sultry wife in the domestic sphere. This dual-personality is her public image. It infuses all her acting roles. And while it never shared any semblance to reality, everyone in her orbit is professionally reliant on maintaining this public image. This is a book that echoes its title a lot.
Anyway, they’re all in Rome to film a movie. The actress coops up in an empty apartment waiting on repairs and furniture delivery. Her husband’s sleeping with everyone and even calls an orgy to their empty apartment. Dozens of people and crates of booze arrive, with no warning to the actress. Her husband doesn’t even have the decency to show up.
There are two twists in The Public Image, but they are very different, so different I think that someone could fairly say there was one twist. The first twist is loud and it’s public. It’s been underway the whole time but we (the actress, the reading audience) simply didn’t know. Its power works backwards and forwards (it changes the meaning of what previously transpired, it changes how everything transpires next). In the words of Muriel Spark, talking about the pace of home renovations in Rome, it makes time move “anticlockwise” at some point. It dominates in every dimension.
The second twist, it sneaks up on us all. It doesn’t come until the last few pages. It’s small, quiet, it resonates. It takes place in just a little moment, and in sum I guess, it’s the only private image in the whole book.
P.S. John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols band, Public Image Ltd, got its name from Muriel Spark’s The Public Image.
P.P.S. Here’s the original cover. I’m devastated I do not hold this one in my hands.
P. P. P. S. Circa 1968 was another brief era of the cut-out.
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