These stories explore the serious ramifications of situations in which childish conceptions or antagonisms are transferred into adulthood. Spark makes the reader deeply uncomfortable by taking the agency and placing it in Lise’s hands, only for the story to end up in the same place. To understand how odd this undertaking was it’s worth considering the nature and content of the original text. A vein of cruelty runs through Muriel Spark's novel The Driver's Seat, which has been shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker prize. There are also some lovely cameos, particularly from Gino Giuseppe and Mona Washbourne, and some distinctly strange ones – step forward Italian idol Guido Manneri, and Andy Warhol as an unnamed English Lord!

THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Muriel Spark (BOOK REVIEW) THE DRIVER’S SEAT by Muriel Spark (BOOK REVIEW)

To draw a random corollory –‘The Maltese Falcon’ never lets us know what’s going on in the characters’ heads. First there’s a description of the businessman inexplicably vacating his seat to move away from Lise and Bill.She claims to various people that she is going to meet an unspecified boyfriend but we have considerable doubts about this. S. Byatt, "she [Jardine] was very upset by the book and had to spend a lot of time going through it, line by line, to try to make it a little bit fairer". Some of Dame Muriel Spark's novels focus on unusual crimes and turns of fate, most notably Territorial Rights (1979), about a crime of passion; The Hothouse by the East River (1973); and Not to Disturb (1971), set on the shores of Lake Geneva. It has become my constant profession, and through the written word I have realized my life and livelihood.

Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat Whose line is it anyway? Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat

For all its darkness and discomfort, The Driver’s Seat is an absolute joy to read, crackling with Spark’s wild wit and deft characterisation.In 1940 Muriel left Sidney and temporarily placed Robin in a convent school, as children were not permitted to travel during the war. Some plots turn on a single ironic twist as in “The Girl I Left Behind Me” when the narrator finds her own body “lying strangled on the floor. You can have the book as well; it’s a whydunit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn’t leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up. Sandy's control of other lives, and her own, takes a course she could not have predicted; she differs in this respect from Calvin's God.

Muriel Spark - Wikipedia Muriel Spark - Wikipedia

When the final reel ends, the reader finds, through Sybil’s mental recollections, that two murders were committed shortly after the scenes were recorded on film. She sells his papers to a university foundation but retains an unfinished manuscript which she hopes to complete and publish as her own. However before her plane leaves, the reader is informed that Lise will be found the next morning stabbed to death in a park. At the opposite end of the spectrum, “The First Year of My Life” does not struggle with maturing in society but presents the first-person commentary of an infant, born during World War I.However, while that film has garnered the garlands and awards, it is not the only big screen adaptation of Spark. The Driver’s Seat (which was made into a truly awful movie with Elizabeth Taylor, of all people, as Lise) may or may not give you actual nightmares, but I guarantee that it will literally haunt you; reading it is an experience you will never entirely shake off. Besides sweltering temperatures, curious natives, and preoccupied performers, the presentation is “hindered” by the presence of a heavenly Seraph, complete with six wings and a heat-producing glow. The Driver’s Seat is, however, one of those books that one cannot talk about without revealing the plot, so those wary of spoilers should stop here, and come back once they’ve read the book. Her incipient fascism was a bit much to work into a one paragraph summary of a book that’s just providing background for an entirely different novel.

The Driver’s Seat’ From Page To Screen: The Strange Case of ‘The Driver’s Seat’

Spark began writing seriously, under her married name, after World War II, beginning with poetry and literary criticism. In most people’s lists of the best film adaptation of a Scottish novel, the 1969 version of Muriel Spark’s The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie would deservedly be near the top, with a pre-damehood Maggie Smith winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of the title character. He has a lifelong love of fantasy and science fiction, kicked off by reading The Lord Of The Rings and Dune at an impressionable age. In the opening pages of The Driver’s Seat, the protagonist – we only ever know her as ‘Lise’ – is trying on a gaudy dress.

Miss Brodie, on the other hand, liberal-minded but fatally affected by Edinburgh Calvinism, tries and fails to predetermine the futures of her girls. The answers, like much else in The Driver's Seat, are unconvincing: in very few words Lise persuades another man she meets in the lobby of a hotel to take her away and strangle her. In an interview with John Tusa on BBC Radio 4, she said of her conversion and its effect on her writing that she "was just a little worried, tentative. Obituary", News, BBC, 15 April 2006, archived from the original on 23 April 2006 , retrieved 15 April 2006 . The construct draws attention to not just who is responsible for Lise’s death, but why the question is important at all.