Chapter One of The Driver’s Seat, by Muriel Spark, with an introduction by Andrew O’Hagan

What is shopping, what is a purchase, if not a more or less intense moment of desire settled by a sudden act of volition? The Driver’s Seat opens in a boutique, where our heroine, Lise, is getting into an argument about a dress. The shop assistant, it appears, has had the temerity to offer Lise a dress that won’t stain. “Get this thing off me. Off me, at once,” Lise shouts. And right there, at the top of the novel, a sort of deadly philosophy bleeds out of commercial normalcy. Is Lise so provoked by the idea of a stainless dress because she, herself, is already stained, or is it that she must have a garment that will show blood? Both are possible, and Lise is already arranging her fate. Our heroine leaves the shop and makes her way down the street, “scanning the windows for the dress she needs, the necessary dress.” Eventually, she steps into somewhere else. She finds the outfit. “A lemon-yellow top with a skirt patterned in bright V’s of orange, mauve and blue.” She soon joins with it a summer coat of red and white stripes. Lise is satisfied. She is leaving her office job after sixteen years and is travelling to an unnamed southern city that we might understand to be Rome. We know very quickly, because the narrator tells us, that Lise is on an existential errand, a journey to complete her undoing and have herself killed, and yet the darkness seems lit by a kind of comedy, as if it is the times themselves that are absurd.A man sitting beside her on the plane moves seats, later saying he was frightened. Everything is thus reversed. When we meet up with him again, he will seem like the coerced one, but isn’t he the murderer? Spark deconstructs the murder mystery novel with The Driver’s Seat, turning everything on its head, not least the easy separation of killer and killed. As very often with Spark, you look from an eccentric character to a knowing author or a plausible god, to say, “Who is in charge here?” Who, indeed, is in the driver’s seat? The novel is a philosophical conundrum drenched in dread, a late twentieth-century masque, “a whydunnit in Q-Sharp Major” as Lise says of the novel she carries onto the plane. And yet there is an inquiring energy in The Driver’s Seat that is spare and Spark-like, moving the characters around, without sentiment, to meet the lineaments of a comfortless world. “What magic you have,” Alfred A Knopf, Spark’s American publisher, wrote to her at the time, “and what a crazy bitch you have created.” But to her author, Lise was more recognisable than that; she was an elaboration of a possible type. “I think there is a kind of truth in the story,” she wrote to her agent on 20 October 1969. “In some of the murders one reads about one senses a sort of collusion and sometimes one begins to wonder which party is the ‘victim.’” Dangerous stuff, but there you have it.Spark considered Simenon to be “a truly wonderful writer”. In a short piece she wrote on the prolific Belgian thrill-meister, she praises his exactitude and his Dostoevskian way with character, his skill with the type of person who is “known and recognised more and more as our [twentieth] century wears on – the perpetrator of the gratuitous act, the motiveless crime.” In The Driver’s Seat, Spark goes a step further than Simenon, reverses him in fact, and produces a narrative in which all those terms might be questioned. Who perpetrates the murder in The Driver’s Seat? And what is the motive? When people say that Spark is a postmodern novelist, this is probably what they mean: she takes exhausted literary formulae and turns them in on themselves. Is Lise engaged in a semi-comedic attempt at self-slaughter? Does she design her fate? Or is she a little symbol of her times, a cold war heroine, for whom an agreeable affair with an almost random gentleman might take the form of a mutually assured destruction? - Andrew O’Hagan