Observing in its prefatory note how Muriel Spark’s obsession with “fiction and death” has been “making her novels shorter and shorter”, this very short, very funny parody announces itself as “not an excerpt from, but the entirety of, her newest, shortest, and most deathly work, The Nuns of Terminus”.
And you could almost believe it, Bradbury captures Spark’s voice and mannerisms so well. From the start, we know that Sister Mercy, “who is famous for being stupid … will die, in distressing circumstance”, and are fairly sure how it’s going to happen: “‘I hope you are both keeping an extremely careful eye on the weather,’ says Sister Felicity, who is small and fat, with a shrewd mouth. ‘It is perhaps the commonest way available of procuring our downfall.’”
While we wait for the inevitable strike of lightning, Bradbury takes the opportunity to make some more general points about fiction. “‘You must understand, Mercy, I have been in a novel before’”, says Felicity, who indeed appeared in Spark’s novel of the previous year, The Abbess of Crewe. “‘It is extremely uncomfortable, unless one manages to stay entirely peripheral to the main line of the action … the best way is to be a member of the servant classes.”’ The founder of UEA’s Creative Writing Course and writer of all those great campus novels never could quite take off his teacher’s hat.
First published in the New Review, March 1975. Collected in Who Do You Think You Are?, Secker & Warburg, 1976
A Personal Anthology 