Loitering with intent was the other VMC Spark title that was new to me this week, and it was another very typical Spark novel, although I didn't quite enjoy it as much as A far cry from Kensington. It is the story of Fleur Talbot, who works as a secretary for the Autobiographical Association (a body which collects people's memoirs as they are written, and keeps them for 70 years until the people mentioned in the memoirs have all died and can be safely published). At the same time Fleur is trying to get her own book, Warrender Chase, published. Like other Spark books this combines both comedy and mystery - after Fleur's manuscript is stolen, events in her life and at the Autobiographical Association start to mirror the novel surprisingly closely.I enjoyed the story, and as usual Spark's depiction of the characters, but I can't help feeling that some of the subtleties of the novel may have been lost on me; it made me think about the process of fiction and wonder whether the novel was imitating life, or life was imitating the novel, but I never really came to a conclusion on that. However, it did offer an insight into the mind of an author, and I wondered if this perhaps was giving me an insight into the mind of Muriel Spark.
Have any of you read this? And what thoughts did you have about it?
