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(More customer reviews)The bleakest of Muriel Spark's twenty one novels, 1971's The Driver's Seat provides its audience with a short, harrowing ride, one often without apparent course or destination. Written in uncomfortable second person present tense, the reader becomes an immediate and hesitating witness to the last days in the life of Lise, the book's erratic, exacting, and strangely confrontational anti - heroine. The Driver's Seat is, among other things, a piercing indictment of both the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of Western sixties culture and the radical break with traditional that the decade represented. Spark pulls off a clever literary coup in the opening paragraph of the third chapter, when she casually reveals the novel's catastrophic ending. By defusing the book's forward motion and the reader's expectations of reaching a climax in the routine manner, Spark forces the reader to look away from the narrative to understand the book's theme and meaning.
Lise, 34, is a product of scrubbed clean and prepackaged modern society, and is or has become a kind of tight - lipped clockwork cog blandly caught in the dull hierarchical social and economic machinery of life. Emotionally sterile and spiritually vacant, only the briefest glimpses into the inner workings of Lise's mind are made available. However, Lise, who habitually erupts into unprovoked barking laughter, has had "years of illness" of the psychological kind, the results of which have left her office coworkers quietly terrified of her presence. Lise is a walking pathology, a brittle death's head effigy who is likely to collapse or collapse a building at any moment should her precarious self regulating control system fail. Lise is a shark fin cutting the surface of life, a breathing but not necessarily living crash test dummy, a combustible wax work 'other' lacking a genuine human presence and an authentic resemblance to mankind. Spark hilariously underscores Lise's tragic monstrousness by giving her the Bride of Frankenstein's hairstyle, skunk stripe rising up from middlebrow to high pile above.
Subtly coerced by her coworkers to take a vacation, Lise already has extensive plans to do so. She will travel by plane from her own northern country (probably Sweden) to a southern country (most likely Italy), leaving behind her modern pine walled apartment, which has been constructed so that all furniture and appliances fold smoothly away into the walls (even the toilet). Lise keeps the few visible household trappings perfectly ordered and devoid of personal touches, leaving the apartment like a hotel room in a perpetual state of readiness for the next guest. Lise's home is her 'pine box.'
Only elderly, sweet natured, and met - along - the way traveling companion Mrs. Fiedke, who can neither see nor hear properly, can stomach Lise's company as Lise searches endlessly for a "boyfriend" she is unable to recognize or describe. In an effort to assist, Mrs. Fiedke asks, "Will you feel a presence? Is that how you'll know?" "Not really a presence," Lise famously replies, "the lack of an absence, that's what it is." Strangely, Lise becomes briefly more human as the narrative winds to a close; she momentarily regrets the plan she has precipitated, even while there is still more than enough time to bring it to a halt. She misses "the lonely grief" of home, and offhandedly says, "I wished my parents had practiced birth control." Readers will find Lise's brief manifestation of humanity starkly poignant.
By revealing that Lise's present condition has been partially caused by her being "neither pretty or ugly," and her continuing isolation due to her intrinsic status as a nondescript person in a world of mediocre, bland, and unremarkable people, Spark underscores the process by which some individuals perpetually overlooked as 'ordinary' can become extraordinary deviant and dangerous. Encouraging already indistinct members of society to assume generic personalities and rigid, conformist lifestyles, Spark seems to be saying, doesn't force the evolution of the New Man, but causes permanent spiritual deformities and creates abominations.
The Driver's Seat is filled with eccentric characters, but unlike other Spark novels, there are no outright sinister eccentrics other than Lise. The Driver's Seat equates evil with processed sterility and blankness rather than with the more traditional concepts of Christian sin and violation of grace and virtue. Here, vacuous stupidity (when Lise and Mrs. Fiedke are surrounded by cavorting hippies, shrewd Mrs. Fiedke says, "They are hermaphrodites. It isn't their fault"), solipsism, witless opinion, groundless protest, and trendy hedonism are merely the new norm, the to - be expected detritus of newly destabilized Western life. Even meek Mrs. Fiedke, representing the decaying old guard, believes all "homosexuals should be put on an island" and doesn't hesitate to say so. In the Driver's Seat, both civilization and nature, both the old order and the new, are at a dead end.
In an absurd world, can a person seize complete control of his or her destiny? If so, to what degree, and to how many possible outcomes? Can man successfully usurp God's role? These are the questions Spark raises and unsettlingly addresses here.
A story of a woman in search of the perfect man, and of two people perfectly suited for one another finally meeting, The Driver's Seat turns every fairytale and romantic notion painfully upon its head. Upon finishing the book, Spark landed in the hospital, apparently suffering nervous strain and exhaustion, which gives potential readers a hint of its macabre power. Highly recommended.
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The Driver's Seat (New Directions Bibelot)Lise leaves her home in northern Europe for a holiday, but it is not rest and relaxation that she is looking for...
Driven to distraction by an office job, she leaves everything and flies south on holiday-in search of passionate adventure, the obsessional experience and sex. Infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in the unnamed southern city that is her final destination.
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