Venetian Affair

By Annalyn Swan

TERRITORIAL RIGHTS by Muriel Spark Coward, McCann &; Geoghegan; 240 pages; $9. 95

Twenty years and 15 novels later, Muriel Spark is as tricky as ever. At first appearance,her cool, elegant prose and witty characters seem comfortable within the traditional British comedy of manners. But with a twist of plot here and a turn of the psychological screw there, Spark sends her comedies careening off in deadlier directions. Wit becomes malice. Tea and crumpets mask terror and corruption. Ordinary lives turn bizarre and mysterious.

Territorial Rights, the latest of Spark's engaging deceptions, is a suspense story set in Venice and full of corruption and intrigue. Clues, coincidences and characters are linked in the sort of intricate plot that seems to come effortlessly to Spark. Robert, a student of art history and a male prostitute in Paris, ostensibly settles inVenice to view the churches and paintings. But he is really there to pursue Lina, a Bulgarian refugee searching for her father's grave. The plot, and the crowd, thickens: Robert's aging male lover, his father and his father's mistress arrive, as well as a friend of Robert's mother, sent to spy on his father.

As expected, Spark's pace is swift and the dialogue crisp. Once again, she demonstrates her skill at underscoring--or undercutting--her characters with a single stroke. Robert's lover, for example, is "a man of sixty-two, with settled, sophisticated tastes and few doubts." Grace Gregory, the self-appointed private eye, is a no-nonsense Henrietta Stackpole type: "I'm a definite friend to Anthea and injury or no injury, I'm going to add insult to it." Back home in Birmingham, Wife Anthea, a study in gray, feeds her goldfish and solaces herself with boring novels. "Everyone abroad, except me," she complains. "No wonder people ask me, where is my sense of humor?"

The first half of the novel is a merry comedy of errors and enmities. But when Robert unexpectedly disappears, leaving behind blackmail notes full of corrosive charges and half-truths, the tone sours. His victims are forced to face ugly personal secrets that they have tried to bury. Territorial Rights turns into a modern Pardoner's Tale, in which the laughter is double-edged and each character unwittingly exposes himself.

Spark does not quite bring off this wedding of parody and parable: she is no Evelyn Waugh. But her Venetian affair, buoyed by whimsy, is never in danger of sinking into the sea. As always, her precise images linger: "A waiter came forward with a dazzle of black and white, the black being his trousers and hair, the white being his coat, his teeth, and a napkin folded upon his wrist." This is Spark the peerless observer, in the grand tradition of her The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Abbess of Crewe.

-- AnnalynSwan

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