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Memento Mori
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Memento Mori - Muriel Spark
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Memento Mori is unusual in having a cast largely made up of elderly characters, many of whom start to receive phone calls reminding them "Remember you must die". The characters then largely choose to ignore the message but death comes to all.I basically agree with Patrick when it comes to the ending. The novel does not go where I expect and it is a little flat. I don't always connect with Muriel Spark but either I did not understand this book or it could have been better developed.
I rather liked reading this little book. Maybe it is because I like old people, they all bring something to their lives that takes ages to build: a knowledge that "this too shall pass". The ensemble of characters are mostly a bit unlikeable in various ways and they all have secrets, or obsessions, or sicknesses that are revealed as the story goes on. The phone calls that tell the characters: "Remember you must die" are interpreted differently depending on how each of the characters lives their life and how they face death. There is not a great deal of dramatic action, even though there is a murder, adultery and betrayals which one would think could be dramatic. Also, the villains get not their "just desserts" but they actually are rewarded and of course, death comes to everyone eventually.
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This is even more delicious than the other Muriel Spark novels I have read. She published it when she was 41, having had some experience of the elderly losing the faculties and languishing in nursing homes. Maybe old people interest me because I am one of them, so I really enjoyed this book. Old age comes with various infirmities (it is not for sissies many say) and the horror of losing one's independence, relying on strangers and the indignities of the loss of bladder control, for example. or one's memory for another, loom large in one's thoughts. Having just spent several months 'death cleaning" I can attest to the fact, that, like Charmian, momento mori is definitely front of mind. Never mind the morbid subject matter, Muriel Spark has a wry slant on things, and the book is highly entertaining, from Godfrey's penchant for looking at stocking tops to Alec Warner's obsession with monitoring heartbeats when people are confronted with bad news. There is Dame Lettie's breathtakingly self-centred insistence that the phone calls which are bothering her should be mentioned in the Houses of Parliament, or Olive's grandfather, Percy Mannering, stalking Guy Leet about a poetry review and ending up straining Leet's hospitality by staying three weeks with him! And then there is Dame Lettie's wont to keep changing her will as the one avenue to power that she has. It is a novel that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.
I read this decades ago when I first embarked on the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die project. I didn’t remember anything about it, so I thought I’d give it another try when it came up as a Book of the Month. I anticipated more of a “whodunit” based on the brief plot description. There is a mystery, but there’s not a simple answer to the question of who is making the phone calls. I’m glad I re-read it. Food for thought.
A group of long-time connected elderly people start to receive enigmatic phone calls from an unknown source, where the only message left is: "Remember you must die". These calls lead to further interactions between these sometimes very old people and revive some stoushes and unearth some secrets that few ever expected or knew. The novel has at times the same quirkiness as Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; however, it lacked the same novel's liveliness, as it took more than half of the book for the story to become interesting. By the end, most of the characters die, but probably not as spectacularly as one would expect; the ending felt a bit flat. Not terribly bad, but not terribly good.