Danse Macabre

MEMENTO MORI (224 pp.)--Muriel Spark --Lippincott ($3.95).

When the geriatricians have succeeded in adding another age to Shakespeare's seven, what will all the porcelain teeth chatter about? The same old things, answers thirtyish Author Spark in this novel of arthritis and ague. None of her major characters will see 70 again, but since no sin has yet proved deadly, the reasoning of the ancients seems to run. there is reason to hope that wrongdoing may even be healthful. So they tyrannize each other, gloat over signs of decrepitude in contemporaries, stir the ashes and the urns of old loves with gossip. One septuagenarian lady runs a profitable blackmailing business, and an old eccentric whose blood is still faintly warm manages, at 87, to be more venereous than venerable; he pays cash for the titillating sight of gartered female legs. Most outrageous: ah amateur geriatrician, himself 79, who gathers data by digging up bad news, mailing it to friends, and asking them to check their pulse rates.

Yet dogging all the old folk -- a dotty lady novelist, a rich London brewer, a withered poet and a wardful of grannies in a charity hospital--is the intimate awareness of death. A name slips from an aging memory; an obituary read with morning toast turns out to be that of a friend with whom one was to have had tea. To make things worse, a plague of mysterious telephone calls begins. A man's voice delivers a chilling message: "Remember you must die." Police investigate but uncover nothing; suggestions are made of mass hysteria. The plague spreads; old scoffers answer their phones, hear the message, but shut it out when they can, determined to caper out their danse macabre till they drop. At their best, which of course is their worst, they behave like characters somehow kept alive after the last page of a Waugh novel and unearthed 40 years later.

The old people never discover who is deviling them. The dreamers among them lean to the belief that it is Death himself. Death, for the author, is a grinning morality-play specter with his arm familiarly draped around Everyman, and this theory is the most tenable one that she leaves. Some readers may object that such mysticism is too woolly, but few of them will complain that Author Spark's funerary satire lacks bite. Any reader over 25--the age at which, as Scott Fitzgerald might have said, a man realizes that he must die--will have an uneasy time forgetting this memento.

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