Chapter One of Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark, with an introduction by Kapka Kassabova

Venice was very much his territory; it changed less than other places with the passing of time,’ we are told early on by a brisk narrator. This one-sentence masterclass in narrative brevity introduces us to one of the themes and two of the characters in this deliciously black burlesque, as delicious as delusion – the Sparkian tragic flaw of choice – and as black as the miasma of the ‘gutter-canals’ at low tide. Curran, whose territory Venice is, or so he thinks, is a cultivated, idly rich American-in-Paris with a past. His way of sending someone packing: ‘Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.’ But Curran is limited by his rational reductiveness, and this is Venice off-season. With its gliding gondolas and mists, Venice is unmistakably a theatre of the subconscious mind, a half-submerged labyrinth of unfathomable intrigue. In the Anglo-American literary canon, foreigners who arrive in Venice looking for something, usually Byronic excess, tend to come to sticky ends in back alleys. Out of all of Spark’s novels, Territorial Rights most resonates with the Henry Jamesian paradigm of innocents abroad – except that in Spark, there are no innocents. No matter how young – I’m thinking of the girls in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie whose flash-forwarded lives nibble at their innocence in the present – the protagonists arrive on the page already tainted. The tracing of the original crime – sin, intended or committed, past or future, is one of the psychological thrills of her work. Territorial Rights is no exception.Incidentally, flashes of Don’t Look Now are inevitable. Daphne du Maurier’s story, and the film based on it, appeared several years before Territorial Rights. Here too we have two dear old sisters who aren’t what they seem, a funereal gondola cortège, an obsession with a church, and revenants of a guilty past glimpsed in the shadows. By the time two more characters arrive at their lodgings, a relationship triangle is in place, mirrored neatly by a physical triangle that represents the various masks of Venice. Curran is lodged at the expensive, tasteless Lord Byron Hotel. Robert Leaver, a young English opportunist and vague student of art history, checks in at the cheaper Pensione Sofia. The pensione was formerly Villa Sofia, property of a ‘Bulgarian count’ until the end of the war. The war creeps in early on: Curran knows Venice from the war; the sister proprietesses of the pensione, Katerina and the delightfully named Eufemia, were in their prime during the war, and so on. “And so on,” Curran says tartly to Robert, for these two have an unhappy history. The third point of the triangle – one of several relational geometrical figures in the novel – is Robert’s new interest, Bulgarian artist Lina Pancev. A girl of slender means, she lodges in a half-rotten building by the canal and wears Parisian-bohemian clothes of dubious cleanliness. Alarm bells are meant to ring whenever we meet a sartorial disaster in a Spark novel: clothes mattered to her.Despite defecting from her home-country on a student exchange trip to Paris, Lina remains indoctrinated by her Communist upbringing, and her candid rigidity and ruthless resourcefulness provide much verbal comedy – “While I’m here, I ought to snoop.” Lina is searching for the grave of her father, Victor Pancev, mysteriously murdered in Venice at the end of the war for his part in a presumed plot to poison the Bulgarian tsar Boris. When Curran, who is suspiciously well informed, tells this to his old-time Venetian friend-socialite Countess de Winter (a fake countess), they have a good laugh. As a fellow felon, de Winter is one of few people in Curran’s life to have “the power to infuriate him”. This is how “usefulness” is measured in Territorial Rights, and usefulness is the only measure of relationship. Spark’s Venice off-season is cold and “Byzantine” in Curran’s words, just like her characters’ hearts. These vile bodies fall in and out of alliances, and their ruses trip them up. Without delay, more coincidences pile on, the plot thickens, the past is churned like the unmarked grave of Victor Pancev, and Curran and de Winter aren’t laughing any more. Who will have the last laugh? - Kapka Kassabova