Another novella about an abbey! Perhaps I have A Thing. Who else would, in 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, have the wit and invention to reimagine Richard Nixon’s downfall as a farce in a convent? It takes the strange supernatural imagination of Muriel Spark to do that. Here a secret has been stolen from a sewing box and the poplars have been bugged, as a nun attempts to steal the election of Abbess from her rival. The allegory works because of the setting, the closed and claustrophobic convent in Crewe, where the eyes of God have been translated into recording devices hidden in the walls throughout the building. The convent is a different kind of White House, a setting simultaneously sober and absurd, making the insane farce within seem ever more extreme.
First published by Macmillan, 1974
A Personal Anthology 