The Mandelbaum Gate

by Muriel Spark

To rendezvous with her archeologist fiance in Jordan, Barbara Vaughn must first pass through the Mandelbaum Gate--which divides strife-torn Jerusalem. A half-jewish convert to Catholicism, an Englishwoman of strong and stubborn convictions, Barbara will not be dissuaded from her ill-timed pilgrimage despite a very real threat of bodily harm and the fearful admonishments of staid British diplomat Freddy Hamilton.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Middle East, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, Classics

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature". In 2010, Spark was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970 for The Driver's Seat.

Spark received eight honorary doctorates in her lifetime. These included a Doctor of the University degree (Honoris causa) from her alma mater, Heriot-Watt University in 1995; a Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris causa) from the American University of Paris in 2005; and Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, London, Oxford, St Andrews and Strathclyde.

Spark grew up in Edinburgh and worked as a department store secretary, writer for trade magazines, and literary editor before publishing her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961, and considered her masterpiece, was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film.

Reviews

[Violet wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

Usually Spark writes about what she knows. There's little need of research in her novels. Here she puts her imagination to a more challenging feat. The novel takes place in Jerusalem at the same time as the Eichmann trial. The trial is rarely mentioned in detail but it haunts the novel as a kind of admonishing emotional weather. Take the monster out of Eichmann and you're left with a bureaucrat who suppressed emotion in favour of a small minded notion of efficiency. This is a trait Spark's two central British characters share. Freddy is a man in his fifties who is bullied by his mother. If we weren't told he was in his fifties we would imagine him a callow youth. A brilliant bit of characterisation from Spark. At one point he stumbles on a Bible quote that summarises his entire life - "I know of thy doings, and find thee neither cold nor hot; cold or hot, I would thou wert one or the other. Being what thou art, lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, thou will make me vomit thee out of my mouth."

Barbara, half Jewish who has converted to Catholicism, has been working as a teacher and is seemingly edging close to a lesbian relationship with the headmistress until she falls in love with an archaeologist working in Jordan on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It surprised me how much leverage Sparks gives to sexuality as a liberating force in this novel. When Barbara crosses over to Jorden on a religious pilgrimage she will be hunted as an Israeli spy and also by the headmistress who has heard about her love for the archaeologist.

Spark uses Forster's template for A Room with a View - Brits entering a more passionate culture and being shaken out of their stuffy defensive decorum. There's the dynamic throughout of divisions and the border gate - through which one must venture in order to connect with the more expansive life. For much of the time this is probably the most serious of her novels. It's almost as if she's trying out a new genre. Except, in the home strait, she can't resist her penchant for farce and the ending very much has the atmosphere of a circus tent. The best of her lesser known novels in my opinion. Exhilarating.

[Fionnuala]

There's a great French expression for when you forget things: you say you have un trou de mémoire, a hole in your memory. I always imagine it as a black hole through which things fall, unimportant things mostly, but sometimes important things too. I peer into the black hole with all my concentration but the lost memory doesn't re-emerge very often, and especially not when I'm peering into the black hole very intently. However, it sometimes reappears when I'm not looking for it — like the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus.

One of the characters in this book walks through the Mandelbaum Gate in East Jerusalem from the Jordan side one day in 1961 and has a trou de mémoire there and then. The last three days of his life slide through the black hole and he very nearly sinks into the hole himself. Only slowly, and much later, does he and his memory re-emerge, and then there's a complete resurrection in his case, not to mention a transfiguration.

For me, the Mandelbaum Gate in this story came to symbolise a black hole in itself. Some people pass through it and emerge on the other side, diplomats and people on religious pilgrimages mostly. But for others, there might not be any resurrection should they attempt to pass through the Mandelbaum Gate.

This is my tenth Spark in a row and unlike several of the others, the memory of it is unlikely to disappear down the black hole. I enjoyed the characterization very much, as well as the various twists and turns of the unusually long narrative (most of her books are short). It's an unusual setting for Spark too, only one of the other nine books I've read has been set outside England, and that one, Territorial Rights...disappeared down the black hole almost instantly.

This one was written around the time of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie which I like to think of as Spark's finest period. There were moments when I felt I was reading the alternative adventures of Jean Brodie, the real Prime as it were, since the main character here is a 'spinster' school teacher on a summer vacation in the Middle East. Her vacation soon veers from religious pilgrimage — the holy sepulcher and the tomb of Lazarus being highlights — to the intrigues of double and triple espionage. And, as you've probably guessed, she also disappears into a black hole soon after passing through the Mandelbaum Gate. You'll have to read the book yourself to find out on which side she re-emerges and how transfigured she is by her resurrection.

A book of many and various miracles.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had Muriel Spark, like Graham Greene, divided her books into "novels" and "entertainments," she might have been torn about this one. It starts off with meaty intentions, but following an episode of amnesia, an escape from a convent, a touch of scarlet fever, a murder, and a catfight, quickly metamorphoses into a deliciously Sparkian tale of espionage. The transformation is slightly jarring, but oh-so entertaining.

Set in Israel in 1961, during the Eichmann trial, it centers on Barbara Vaughan, a Catholic with Jewish heritage who is on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and is out to prove that she isn't the spinster she appears to be. The politics of the region were as complex in 1961 as they are today, and Spark evidently did her research. At points I had my doubts, amnesia seems like a rather cheap narrative trick except for in a soap opera, but the keyword here is pivot. Do a quick one-eighty, and you're all set--this is a Muriel Spark novel, after all, although for a minute she had me fooled. Be willing to buy into Barbara's slightly absurd pilgrimage, or your own will end in frustration. Paul Bowles meets EM Forster about sums it up. One of my new favorites by Muriel Spark.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this several months ago - and it's been hanging around on my Currently Reading for ever - because the plot was so convoluted and complicated that I boggled at the idea of even attempting a summary. I don't generally go for summaries in my reviews but somehow you do have to mention some major aspects. This is not usual Spark - it's quite political, quite religious, and remarkably sexy, flirtatious as well - she packed a lot in - ah think she went a bit too far.
I stuck it out - I don't review books unless I've read half or more. Occasionally a book annoys me so much that I dnf it and do a neg review - but not in this case. Spark is an extremely gifted and capable writer, but I prefer her shorter, humorous - black humour usually ones like - Memento Mori, or The Driver's Seat, A Far Cry From Kensington etc. Her wit, her eye for catching the absurdities of human nature, her pithy deconstruction of social codes and values really fit better into shorter novels. In this one - she's more serious - but there are sections where the mocking tone seeps in - and it doesn't quite work.
I would have to re-read to pull out examples and redo some character analyses - but it's so damn long - really not likely to happen any time soon.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can be a curmudgeon, but this book didn't really exceed my low expectations; the final Spark novel I hadn't tackled, but put off for quite a while. Recommended only for Spark completionists.

It's seriously dated. That's not always a problem if one can call it a historical snapshot, but here? No. I have never seen reference to the Mandelbaum Gate myself except for this book. Israeli profiling has become sophisticated enough since the early 60s that the whole tourist arrival from Jordan is more... streamlined, shall we say. The political issues were just really difficult for me to find at all relevant.

As for the characters, the story is told from (essentially) three points of view: a British woman, who though a Roman Catholic is referred to regularly as a "half-Jew" which, though I try to take historical language in context, struck me as creepy. Moreover, much anguish over whether her divorced boyfriend's marriage will be annulled by The Church; this angst struck me as especially tedious. The woman turned out a bit quirky, but not so much in a good way. We also follow a British male, where I'm forced to agree with other reviews that he was a colonial parody. Finally, there's an Arab fixer, opportunist, whatever who came across as whiny (audio narration could have contributed to that I'll grant). Best part of the book came towards the end in a sort of Mrs. Pollifax espionage subplot of the British woman's getting back into Israel without alerting authorities, where I found a couple of secondary characters' quirkiness amusing. However, I never exactly bought into why she was in such a dire situation?

This work left me with the feeling that it was based on a sort of catharsis, or personal situation, that meant more to Spark than for readers. ("Guess you had to be there..." deal)

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must apologise for having allowed a backlog of four unreviewed books to build up again - it has been a busy week socially so I haven't had much time to sit and think. This book in particular would have benefited from a prompter review, as I am already forgetting some of the details.

I picked this book up because it is much longer than most of Spark's novels, and I was interested in how it fits in to her oeuvre. It is probably a little more serious than most of her books, but she can't resist allowing a few farcical elements and comic set pieces to slip in.

The book is set in 1961, when part of Jerusalem was still in Jordan, and for most visitors access between the two parts of the city was through the gate of the title. The main character Barbara is a spinster in her late 30s, a half-Jewish convert to Catholicism who is on a visit to the Holy Land, partly as religious pilgrimage but also because the man she is planning to marry is working as an archaeologist at the Dead Sea in Jordan.

Another important character is Freddie, a British diplomat in his 50s who helps Barbara in her plan to visit Jordan avoiding the danger and suspicion her Jewish roots will engender. The other main players belong to an Arab family who facilitate the tourist industry and indulge in other shadier deals.

Reading the book now, after so much change in the Middle East, it is inevitably an interesting period piece, and some of Spark's characters are a little stereotypical, but it is still quite a weighty novel of ideas, which offers some insight into the politics and intrigues of the time.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A work of absolute genius. A master of the craft in complete control of her text and her themes.

Structurally extremely complex, and brilliantly so - there are multiple layers of the core focus of both/and rather than either/or, of being a whole formed from fragmented, contradictory parts. Whether that be a Roman Catholic Jew, a divided Jerusalem, a land both ancient and modern, a past both "true" and myth, bisexuality, a novel that is both a melodramatic spy adventure and a deliberate undercutting and obfuscation of the same (her technique of giving out the traditional plot climaxes in an aside 200 pages too early and in a manner which could easily confuse, was particularly enjoyable). A novel too which is obviously fiction yet attempts to achieve a kind of truth through its overt fictionality (I am reminded of Herzog's concept of Ecstatic Truth). A Jerusalem where, on the Israeli side one hears the muezzin, and the Wailing Wall is on the Arabic side where Jews are forbidden. Where Christian pilgrims are taken by Muslims to see spots mentioned in the Torah.

Any yet it manages to do all this in a style which was so enjoyable that, for the first time in a very long time, I have repeatedly stayed up late reading because I did not want to stop.

(This is not, of course, to say that the novel does not have things one could critique from a modern perspective in terms of its view of the Israeli/Palestinian situation - though one should also note that Spark was critical of American Zionism in particular - but it is also important to take a novel written by a British half-Jewish woman in 1965 for what it is and what it attempted to be and its focus on more the reconciliation between "the Golders Green Jewishness of her mother’s relations and the rural Anglicanism of her father’s, the Passover gatherings on the one hand and the bell-summoned Evensongs on the other".)

Nice piece from the wonderful Ali Smith here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

[jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

i found this book totally exhilarating. since i haven't read anything else by muriel spark, i have no idea how it compares to her other work, but, come on, hard to beat a picaresque romp in and around israel and palestine taking place a few years after the end of the british mandate with the eichmann trial (not exactly comic matter) as background! the story involves muslim arabs, christian arabs, a jew who recently converted to catholicism, english and israeli jews, and of course good old unreligious but VERY DECENT britons. this decency is part of what's at issue, along with: occupation, colonization, and the birth of israel; sex and love; femininity and masculinity at the onset of post-modernity; and being a cool catholic in a complicated world.

spark delivers the crisp, well-wrought, wry, not-quite-explicit prose that we expect from a mid-twentieth century English Writer, and her composition, cutting quickly back and forth in time, is perfect.

the inter-cultural stuff is the most fun -- especially the way various groups have the other ones "made" only until it happens that they get totally outsmarted (did i mention this is a spy thriller? it's a spy thriller). here's a sample of the shrewdness required when people of various different cultures are forced to share narrow spaces: "By the time [the servant] returned, Joe had gone a long way to measuring Miss Rickward's substance, and with the experience he had long acquired of the English-woman on her travels, calculated that her cheap, shapeless, pink-and-red cotton dress, broad brown sandals, large old dark-brown leather shoulder bag, unvarnished finger-nails, eyes the colour, near-grey, of western spiritual compromise, and her yellowish, much-filled teeth, added up to a woman of some authority and wealth."

and, of course, people are constantly hiding, with lots of unlikely and thrilling masquerading, too.

[Will Ansbacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was not at all what I thought it would be. I had understood it involved the Eichmann trial in some way, but it merely forms part of the backdrop; one character, Barbara Vaughan sits in at the trial for a day and Eichmann’s deadened, mechanical responses from the trial transcript are truly chilling as an illumination of evil. There are other references to the trial but they don’t impact the story, which is good - really good.
Initially I was a bit lukewarm to some of the meandering passages but the story grew on me as I realized their relevance, and it bore reading several times. Part mystery, part psychological portraits, and it’s a fascinating portrayal of the tensions in the Middle East at that time.

Barbara is a wonderful study of family contrasts: mother’s Jewish side loud but accepting, father’s Gentile family reserved and highly class-conscious. I loved – absolutely loved – Spark’s pointed and witty descriptions of the two sides.

My Gentile relations tried too hard to forget I was a half-Jew. My Jewish relations couldn’t forget I was half-Gentile. Actually I didn’t let them forget, either way

Barbara, who has converted to Catholicism, is in the Middle East on a pilgrimage. In Israel she encounters Freddy Hamilton, a British diplomat. He worries that her Jewish heritage will put her in significant danger if she crosses into Jordan (this was 1961, before the Palestinian State was formed, and the Mandelbaum Gate is the only crossing point in Jerusalem).

Freddy has many friends on the Jordanian side and often stays there, but he suffers a memory loss on the weekend that Barbara also crosses into Jordan and then disappears for over two weeks. Freddy turns up on the Israeli side again three days later, in a confused state (he claims he had sunstroke), missing two days of his life.

In an intricate weaving of foreshadowing and revelation, Spark neatly shifts the timeframe back and forward as Freddy gradually regains his memory of the two days that he and Barbara travelled together, and further, that he had witnessed an act of espionage involving someone at his own workplace. Barbara in fact had fallen ill with scarlet fever and had been looked after in Jericho before being smuggled back into Israel.

Spark has created many other characters who are a joy to read about. They include Barbara’s colleague and (ex)-room-mate Ricky (Miss Rickward); her fiancé Harry Clegg, a noted archaeologist; the whole Ramdez family – the corrupt patriarch Joe, his son Abdul in Israel who is teaching Freddie Arabic, and his daughter Suzy who guides Freddie and Barbara through Jordan then arranges for Barbara to be looked after in the family home; and even Freddie’s family, existing only in letters to and from him. Even though this is a short book, the characters are fully developed with enough background to place them exactly where they need to be.

In contrast to Barbara, other characters like Harry and Barbara’s Jewish cousin Michael are refreshingly forthright and economic regarding emotions and feeling. Barbara spends much time, for example, agonizing over why she never told Ricky she was getting married:

Michael took the words out of her hands ‘She was too possessive’, he said. And of course, when he said it, she knew this was the ultimate definition and felt relieved. Michael resembled Harry in his habit of making obvious rational comments about difficulties he did not feel were worth the trouble of analysing

For me there was only one negative: everything concerning Barbara’s nervy and angsty Catholicism (which is to say, Muriel Spark’s - likewise a Catholic convert).
There’s this obsession with her pilgrimage, why is she still in Israel when Harry is in Jordan? Should she go to Jordan or not? And when she does finally go (disguised as Suzy’s Arab servant) there are pages quoted from some travelling priest’s sermon delivered in one of the shrines that Barbara visits; it was supposed to be satirical I think, but I found all that quite tedious. Then there is the angst about getting Harry’s previous marriage annulled so she can stay in the church; it involves a petition to Rome to pretend that the marriage never occurred. Harry doesn’t care but he would do this for her, and he is in fact in Rome and not at his dig in Jordan. (The anullment ultimately hinges on whether Harry himself was born a Catholic and it does have a nice, pointed, resolution involving a double-cross by Ricky.)

Why an independent, free-thinking spirit like Spark would be drawn to such a patriarchal and authoritarian religion is beyond me, but she seems to be using The Mandelbaum Gate to work through some of her problems with the church’s attitudes to sex, morality and so on. I had a feeling that with the Eichmann trial she also wanted to make a connection with more general questions of good and evil, but found the story was becoming too involved to pursue that further.

But whether that's true or not, I thoroughly enjoyed the story.

[Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse) · Rating 5 out of 5]

On top of all this, as jo depicts beautifully in her review, there is the repression, long-delayed expression, fluid and surprisingly direct sexuality in this novel that contains not one, not two, but three very different 'excellent women' - as Pym would have it - i.e., spinsters. And also notable in this, now second, novel I've read by Spark, there's a really dark kind of farcical comedy, complete with a household of many wings and many guests, all of which are linked to and separated from each other by a hair's breadth, not only in space and time but also in Spark's intricate but always-under-her-control plot. There are disguises, escapes, intrigues personal, political and religious, letters hidden in trees and burned in lavatories, lots of poetry, plenty of cross-cultural romance, a generous dollop of biblical history, madness, amnesia and a murder -- all of it taking place in the enormously complex setting of the newly-founded Israel, Jordan, Lebanon with side references to Syria, Athens, Cairo, and Rome (and of course Britain). (wowza!)

Really fantastic!! It took me probably 20 hours to listen to this 12-hour audiobook because the plot is so dense, you simply can't afford to miss even a small part of it or you're lost forever, a reality made more challenging than altogether necessary by the most peculiarly-accented reader, Frederick Davidson, whose marble-mouthed performance was redeemed only by his mastery of multiple Arabic, British, female and male characterizations.

[booklady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb story! It reminded me of its Middle Eastern setting the way it wound around narrow corners, popping out in unexpected surprising places, sometimes with profound insight and other times with laugh-out-loud humor.

I'm so tempted to share some of my favorite parts to prove my point, but will refrain so as to leave the mystery and wonder to Ms. Spark's clever masterpiece. What I will say is, she seems to give the end away in the beginning ... more than once in fact, but don't be fooled. Stay with the story, follow the rabbit trail and see where it leads. It won't spoil anything to tell you that some of the funniest parts of The Mandelbaum Gate are near the end; in particular I loved the disguises used to cross between Jordan and Israel. The characters, from multi-nationalities, were also vividly and realistically portrayed. The entire time I was reading this book, I could visualize an incredible movie, but only if they didn't mess with the basic elements of the story!

I don't include many novels on my 'worth reading over and over' shelf. That in itself says more than almost anything else I could write.

Thank you Kathleen for this incredible GOOD read!

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the 8th book I have read by Muriel Spark. She always surprises me, sometime she confounds me. This time she did both.

The story is set in Israel in the early 1960s. Barbara, an English school teacher, half-Jewish, recently converted to Catholicism, arrives in Jerusalem with two objectives. She intends a pilgrimage of all the holy Christian shrines while she joins the archeologist she intends to marry.

Her pilgrimage involves crossing into Jordan through the Mandelbaum Gate. Being half-Jewish, she is suspected to be a spy by Arab security. Her innocent quest sets off a series of events that turn the story into a kind of political thriller. I am not sure, but knowing a bit about Spark's macabre and satiric tendencies, she might have written a spoof of the political thriller.

It took some grit on my part to stick with the story which circles endlessly within a short period of time. I admired the intricate mix of history, current events, British vs Israeli vs Arab, religious beliefs and practices. All of this is overlaid with a slick layer of cynicism. If anything, it reminded me of The Alexandria Quartet by Laurence Durrell. That is high praise coming from me.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first of Muriel Spark's books I've read and I thoroughly enjoyed its mix of exotic thriller and gentle English satire, a cross somehow between a less fierce Graham Greene and a milder Evelyn Waugh.
All the characters are improbable, most behave wildly at least once, the action flits all over the place and occasionally spins into outright farce. I found my self laughing out loud which made a welcome relief from the emotional timbre of the books I've read recently about beaten women, sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the Japanese treatment of prisoners of war in WWII.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

'The Mandelbaum Gate' is very different to every other Muriel Spark novel I've yet read. It's more than twice as long as her punchy novellas and I did not find it funny. Still present and correct are her sharp insight into each character and careful plotting. The setting is Jerusalem in 1961, divided between Israel and Jordan. To cross from one side of the city to the other requires passage through the Mandelbaum Gate. Compared to Spark's other work, I found the setting more vivid and obtrusive, as it shapes the circuitous plot. The novel is not told in linear style, often skipping events that are filled in later or alluding to subsequent happenings. It centres upon a pilgrimage undertaken by Barbara Vaughn, a self-described Roman Catholic spinster who is also engaged and half Jewish on her mother's side. Her background and religious affiliation naturally influence her plans, which bring her into the orbit of characters on both sides of the gate. Spark is masterful at showing the muddled nature of people's motives, which are often mysterious even to themselves.

The tense games of concealment and escape that unfold reminded me of John le Carré. There is a similar sense of politics as practised chaotically by individuals and grim awareness of irony and self-interest. The relationship between religion and politics is particularly evident in Jerusalem, of course. The Eichmann trial is briefly featured and discussed several times. Spark examines religious attitudes delicately by giving her cast varied and uncertain affiliations. I found the younger Arab siblings Abdul and Suzi particularly interesting in their political ambivalence. The friendship between Barbara and Suzi was excellent, especially as a contrast to Barbara's relationship with Ricky and awkwardness with Ruth. There is a pleasing sense of the unpredictable about events, which keeps the tension high throughout. Although amateur espionage was not what I expected from a Muriel Spark novel, it was involving and beautifully written. I think the book could perhaps have been a little shorter, as the amnesia episode appeared to serve no purpose other than drawing things out. Barbara was an excellent protagonist, though. I liked her self-aware independence of mind very much:

He was demanding an explanation. By the long habit of her life, and by temperament, she held as a vital principle that the human mind was bound in duty to continuous acts of definition. Mystery was acceptable to her, but only under the aspect of a crown of thorns. She found no rest in mysterious truths like, 'I am who I am'; they were all right for deathbed definitions, when one's mental obligations were at an end.

However my favourite line was, 'Every spinster should be assumed guilty before she is proved innocent, it is only common civility'. A sentiment worth printing on a coffee mug.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

While The Comforters is still probably my favourite Spark novel (that I've read so far...), this definitely comes second. Longer, more serious, and more ambitious than I'd come to expect from her, it took a little while for me to get into it. It's worth it though, and the way it all finally comes together in the second half is very rewarding. The unstructured skipping between time periods is handled with unbelievable confidence. The philosophical examinations of religious belief and feminism, particularly female sexuality (as, actually, I'd come to expect from her), are fiercely intelligent.

She writes about her characters with a kind of acerbic, but never distant, cynicism, which I adore. And the way she manages to reconcile her devout Catholicism - and, in fact, a sympathy for all the religions in the Middle East, which are numerous - with her natural sensible, no-nonsense, and overwhelmingly sex-positive attitude is fantastic.

It's not perfect - even if you make the usual allowances for when it was written - and it sometimes feels slightly flabby, and the transitions into philosophical discourse are occasionally a bit clunky. But I still found it accomplished, fascinating, and ultimately very affecting.

[Hermien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful old-fashioned English novel. I also liked the setting and the historical background.

[Sylvie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novel is set in 1960s Jerusalem, with its atmosphere of suspicion and enmity between Arabs and Jews. Muriel Spark was sent to Jerusalem to report on the Eichmann trial that was taking place at the time. Like Barbara Vaughan in the novel, she was half Jewish, and a convert to Catholicism.

In many other respects too, Barbara is a Sparkian heroine, combining an acute intelligence with a naive sense of trust. She wishes to cross the Madelbaum Gate into Jordan to visit the Biblical Holy sites and eventually to join her lover Harry Clegg, an archaeologist, who has been working on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Blinded by an adventurous instinct and a certain lack of guile, she fails to appreciate the dangers of crossing the Mandelbaum Gate even as a half Jew. It is a heritage she cannot escape; nor can she escape Ricky, the formidable headmistress of the school in England where she taught, who stalks her over land and sea.

Freddy works for the British foreign Office. He likes to write verses to his hosts to compensate for what he thinks of as a failure to contribute anything to the conversation. In the first paragraph, where he is pondering his verses, we immediately get an impression of the archetypal Englishman, a pleasant bachelor who is quite contented with his way of life. Ah, but for how long?

Muriel Spark’s prose conjures up more than the words themselves.

He always felt he had perhaps been boring during his stay, and it was one’s duty in life to be agreeable. Not so much at the time as afterwards, he felt it keenly on his coscience that he had said no word between the soup and the fish when the bright talk began; he felt at fault in retrospect of the cocktail hours when he had contributed nothing but the smile for which he had been renowned in his pram and, in the following fifty years, elsewhere.

The scene is set with these two characters, who seem poles apart, but who will be shown to have an affinity which runs beneath the surface. In fact, the book is a shifting game of things which are not what they seem, an elusiveness beautifully captured in Spark’s crystalline prose.

There are many gems in the novel. Here is one of them, Joe Ramirez’s assessment of Ricky: :

By the time [the servant] returned, Joe had gone a long way to measuring Miss Rickard's substance, and with the experience he had long acquired of the English-woman on her travels, calculated that her cheap, shapeless, pink-and-red cotton dress, broad brown sandals, large old dark-brown leather shoulder bag, unvarnished finger-nails, eyes the colour, near-grey, of western spiritual compromise, and her yellowish, much-filled teeth, added up to a woman of some authority and wealth.

This sounds like a cynical observation, but in the end, he is the one who brings her fulfilment and joy. It is one of the many paradoxes that Spark explores so well.

Ricky was all for doing the right things for the right reasons. To Barbara motives were not simple”.the main thing was that motives should harmonize

Here, Joe’s multiple guises are hinted at by his daughter Suzi. It shows the complexity of her relationship to him, as well as that of the Middle East. It may sound like an extreme case of cognitive dissonance, but in this case it’s far from being associated with discomfort or anxiety. It is a state of being that Suzi and others in the story understand and are happy with.

Suzi Ramirez always said that the main thing about herself was that she was ambitious. Her strength lay in her vagueness about the limitations of her life, and her weakness derived from irs actual limitations which she stood ready to demolish at any time. Beyond any rational expectation she enjoyed the respect of her father, Joe Ramirez. His character twisted around him, spreading and clinging like a vine while hers was a solitary palm tree outlined sharp against the sky, her acceptance of him was total. She knew he was in business for political purposes, that he was in political things to enable him to score personal vendettas; she knew he was also in business for political purposes, was a political informer for the Jordanian secret service, that he passed intelligence to the United Arab Republic concerning the Jordanian government, and that these activities were balanced to a fine point which so depended on instinct that he could no more have put them down on paper than he could actually see his own face. They all revolved round blackmail of sorts, the arranging of forged visas and other papers, and, when dealing with foreigners, a plausible technique of feigned misunderstandings. Suzi did not think of her father as a crook or a traitor, but she knew that he was. He thought of himself as a patriot, an Arab, and overwhelmingly, as a man who, in all his actions, did justice to himself

This is just a taste of the marvellous cast of characters, and the convoluted and bizarre situations of the plot which reflect the insecurities and conflicts of the region itself, conflicts that have in no way diminished.

It is no surprise that religion will feature in this most ancient of places. As a half Jew, she feels an affinity with the place; as a Catholic, the pilgrimage is important to her. Barbara’s conversion to Catholicism is genuine and in no way a pragmatic choice, as we see in this paragraph, though we do sense an undercurrent of conflict

Like practically everyone else – and she was one of those afflicted by her gifts. For she was gifted with an honest, analytical intelligence., a sense of fidelity in the observing of observable things, and at the same time, with the beautiful and dangerous gift of faith which, by definition of the Scriptures, is the sum of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen.

For the first time since her arrival in the Middle East, she felt all of a piece: Gentile and Jewess, Vaughan and Aaronson.; she had caught some of Freddy’s madness, having recognized his manner in the car, as they careered towards Jerusalem, that he had regained some lost or forgotten element in his nature and was now, at last, for some reason, flowering in the full irrational norm of the stock she also derived from: unselfquestioning hierarchists, anarchistic imperialists, blood-sporting zoophiles, sceptical believers – the whole paradoxical lark that had secured, among their bones the sane life for the generations of British Islanders. She had caught a bit of Freddy’s madness and for the first time in this Holy Land, felt all of a piece, a Gentile Jewess, a private-judging Catholic, a shy adventuress.

The Middle East and her desire to visit the biblical places on the other side of the Madelbaum Gate have wrought a transformation in Freddy as well. It is part of the osmosis between people.

The plot thickens, turning it into a semi-comical, not to say farcical spy thriller, where no one can be accepted at face value. At the heart of the romp is the realization that there is a basic need in human relationships to trust in something or someone. The latter part of the story becomes a bit repetitive, as perhaps any chase is bound to be.

The novel deals with many instances of the anomalies inherent in the tense situation between the Palestinians and the Jews in that region. One of them is the mutiplicity of religious practices in the Church of The Holy Sepulchre. The usual arguments and fights between the various Christian denominations are absurd and comical enough, but Spark spices it up with an added twist:

it was emphasized by a close knit body of Japanese nuns’.arguments about who held “the privilege of sweeping whose paving stones.

The tangle of religions and beliefs are observed with Spark’s inimitable shrewdness, and a turn of phrase that is unique. You get a strong sense of the mixture of self-interest and genuine friendliness in the Middle-Eastern character, as well as the paradoxes in a situation where semitic tribes are divided by a history that should unite them.

This image shows the grim reality, stripped of humour:

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/11fdfa...

.

[Andrew H · Rating 3 out of 5]

This started off well. A study of lying ... the art of metaphors. A novel about evasion and deception. Spark at her best. Then it suddenly changed. The central character suffered amnesia. The narrative skipped from present, to the future, then back, and became convoluted rather than complex. One of the main themes is the trial of Eichmann in Israel/"Occupied Palestine." And this seemed to follow Arendt on the banality of evil. Eichmann appears as a cold bureaucrat rather than the architect of evil. The same characteristics are given to Spark's characters: they all have trite catch phrases that are used to map life. In some ways, The Mandelbaum Gate is a study of boredom -- Beckett is quoted at one point -- and how we search for depth in a world of endless equivocation. Ultimately, I could not make the novel hang together. For once, Spark's sardonic wit seemed to get in the way of the narrative.

[Cphe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favourite by the author, Loved the setting and some historical aspects but can't say I was enamoured with the characters here.

[tortoise dreams · Rating 3 out of 5]

The longest of Muriel Spark's novels, this was her effort at a "big" novel with big themes: religion, cultural identity, history, the Middle East. It's also a novel that is nothing like her other books, as if it wasn't written by Spark but some contemporary author appropriating her name. It's intelligent, but also unconvincing, slow-paced, awkward, and unresolved. The slightly comic (arch?) tone constantly battles the subject matter. Despite the autobiographical elements (she had a Jewish parent and visited the Holy Land), Spark herself at the end was "dissatisfied and overwhelmed." She never returned to this style of writing. It was my least enjoyable Spark book (have read all but one of her 22 novels), lacking the wit and charm that I expect, leaving only intellect. Far too much introspection and desultory conversation. Somehow I swung and missed on this one.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set, as the title suggests, on the margins of Israel and Jordan in 1961, around the start of the Adolf Eichmann trial, with the fragile relations between the two countries an ever-present, the novel chiefly concerns Barbara Vaughan, herself a symbol of division, in that she was born Jewish, but has chosen Catholicism (a common factor in Spark novels) which may be forfeited if she marries a divorced man, as she has eyes on.
Other aspects of her character are paradoxical also, is she is an English schoolteacher touring the Holy Land, or is this a guise for a passionate affair with an archaeologicist in the area.
As with everything Spark does the story has a certain stylishness, well-placed humour and vigorous unpredictability.
Personally though, it is some way from being amongst my favourite of her novels, it gets bogged down quite often and is too long, and also lacks the quirky, darker elements of her best work.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Radical for its time. A gay character. Israelis and Palestinians who had social relationships. The prose is polished down to its essence. Best of all her books.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A character based, intriguing, part spy story, now historical fiction novel set in 1961 in Israel and Jordan. The story mostly follows British tourist, Barbara Vaughan, a teacher in her 30s, who has come from England to the divided city of Jerusalem in search of her fiancé, an English archaeologist working in Jordan. Whilst in Jerusalem she meets Freddie Hamilton, a British embassy official who is concerned for her safety. Barbara, is Catholic, but half Jewish by birth. In 1961, Jews entering Jordan were likely to be arrested and questioned on suspicion of being spies. Barbara insists on entering Jordan and Freddie arranges from an Arab businessman to act as Barbara’s guide and protector.

This novel is a little different from most of Muriel Spark’s books. This book is part travel writing / part espionage, with interesting information about Israel and Jordan. The author covers a number of issues including religion, love and loyalty. Readers new to Muriel Spark should begin with more famous, witty and shorter novels like Momento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or The Girls of Slender means’.

As usual with Muriel Spark, there is a sense of fun, for example, when protagonist Barbara Vaughan states:

“..what right have they to take me at my face value? Every spinster should be assumed guilty before she is proved innocent, it is only common civility.”

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of this book is about identity and belonging, something which has always held a fascination for me. Spark's father, Bernard Camberg, was of Jewish extraction , her English mother, a Methodist Christian. Spark drew on her experiences as a child of mixed religious heritage through her protagonist, Barbara, who is half Jewish, half Catholic. The gutsy Barbara, unlike so many of a similar background, does not struggle with this, but takes a pride in her identity:

'At Joppa, then, when Barbara came to be leaning over the sea-wall, she said to Saul Ephraim, who reminded her much of the Aaronson cousins of her youth, ‘My Gentile relations tried too hard to forget I was a half-Jew. My Jewish relations couldn’t forget I was a half-Gentile, Actually, I didn’t let them forget, either way.’

‘Quite right. Why should you forget what you are? Said Saul ‘You were right.’

‘I know that. But one doesn’t altogether know what one is. There is always more to it than Jew, Gentile, half-Jew, half-Gentile. There’s the human soul, the individual. Not ‘Jew, Gentile’ as one might say ‘autumn, winter.’ Something unique and unrepeatable”

Interestingly, Spark spent two months in Israel researching for The Mandelbaum Gate. The novel draws on the historical fact of the Adolf Eichmann trial, which took place in Jerusalem from 1961 to 1962. Spark was a journalist there and used this experience to place Barbara at the trial.

I feel, despite the complex, intriguing, and somewhat unbelievable plot, that this book actually worked for me. A solid 4/5.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Spark.

[Robert Sheard]

This was the February selection for the BarterHordes Backlist Book Club. I may come back and review it after our discussion.

[Bernard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was surprised by how little actually happened in the book and how little payoff there was for most of the tension or most of the character drama. Storm in a teacup for most of it, and despite the setting, which one would think would be quite explosive and enveloping, Muriel Spark barely engages with the cultural narratives unfolding in the Levant beyond mere references to nationalism, zionism, anti-semitism, communism, etc. as if they were all terms in some postmodern catalogue to pick at whenever a conversation lulled between an English and a Levantine character. Surprisingly unremarkable, really only kept going by the occasional bouts of chemistry that don't ever reach the surreal heights of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Also should be said that although one could give Spark some leeway in how she depicts arab characters, it does not stand up to scrutiny from a modern-day perspective. Something quite obnoxious about a character's ideology being swept away after spending one night with a petit-bourgeois colonialist English woman to make some confused point about the contradictions of Arab nationalism in contrast to the crisis-of-identity of post-colonial Britain. The Anglo-Saxon gaze is very evident, and I don't blame readers who are offended by off-handed references to polygamy or that the most relatable arab character is a young woman with conventionally Caucasian features.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not your typical Muriel Spark novel. For one thing it is much, much longer than her usual short books. There seemed to be far too much meditating on various religions. Barbara Vaughn, one of the two central characters, is half Jewish, half Gentile and adopted Catholic. Freddy is none of these. There are so many other characters, it made me dizzy. My favourite only arrives two thirds through.

The first 50 pages I found a struggle and by half way I really thought I ought to start again. Soon after there is a sermon from a visiting English priest that goes on for 9 pages. I skipped it! However the plot does pick up in the latter stages and the almost farcical events are more like the Muriel Spark imagination I love so much. There is much switching of characters and the story goes backwards and forwards in time. It's as if the author created all these characters and their stories, threw them up into the air and see where they landed.

Having said all that, in revisiting certain sections before the evening at Book Club, I was far more impressed. Don't ask me why. It will take a repeat reading to say why. That is probably what the writer wants.

[Baz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most of Spark’s adventuresome stories, this one contains secrets and danger, mysteries and intrigue, double- and triple-crossing. The intricate plotting is a marvel, it feels like it should be hard to follow but is actually quite easy. Spark always brings things off effortlessly, with a light touch. This one is twice the length of her other novels, and it was great to read a more leisurely-paced Spark, though it flowed easily and moved quicker as it progressed and I ended up racing to the end. It’s a story about multiple identities, contradicting identities, the inner clashes we experience between the different parts of our selves and the cultures we inherit. It’s 1961 and Barbara is a half-Jewish Roman Catholic convert on a pilgrimage to the holy sites in newly established Israel and Jordan. It’s a dangerous time, there’s palpable tension between Israel, Palestine and Jordan. Everyone is spying, everyone is up to something, and Barbara finds herself on a wild ride. As always Spark is operating multiple gears at once, and as expected, The Mandelbaum Gate was a fun, buoyant, intelligent, dazzling read.

[Adrien]

This is the first Murial Spark that I have stalled on. I loved Symposium and thoroughly enjoyed Loitering With Intent, but this mid period novel seems to have her trying to be a more straightforward novelist, with the mordant wit found in those two later novels on the back burner here.

At the time it my have helped her be taken more seriously as a novelist, if Warner Berthoff's 1967 article in the The Massachusetts Review is any indication of general feeling on the subject (see Fortunes of the Novel: Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch on jstor.org) He claims it's her "first proper novel" and with it "she has staked a bold claim to major critical recognition". Except fast forward 50 years and this book is currently out of print and earlier "subordinate" novels like The Prime of Jean Brodie and Momento Mori are still in print.