Decline and Fall?

By Paul Gray

THE TAKEOVER

by MURIEL SPARK 266 pages. Viking. $8.95.

For years it seemed that Novelist Muriel Spark had talent to burn. Then, in the late 1960s, a suspicion arose that burning was exactly what she had done with it. Gone was the somber exuberance of such earlier triumphs as Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means. The froth turned sour and her amused awareness of human daffiness was drowned in simple venom. The Abbess of Crewe (1974), Spark's deft parody of Watergate set in an English convent, gave reason to hope that all was not lost. The Takeover proves that nothing has been lost.

The old sheen, the amiably unscrupulous characters and the spectral tugs of mysterious forces are all reassembled--and hardly the worse for wear. Maggie Radcliffe, a fortyish American rich beyond telling, is trying to rid herself of an old hanger-on named Hubert Mallin-daine. He is stubbornly settled in one of Maggie's three houses at Nemi, south east of Rome, where votaries once worshiped at the temple of Diana. Hubert claims squatter's rights on the rather shaky grounds of his alleged descent from Diana and the Emperor Caligula.

Hubert is also systematically selling Maggie's paintings and antiques and filling the house with clever fakes. "Hoping to inherit the earth," he intones, "I declare myself meek."

Tattered Fortune. He is the least of Maggie's problems. The time is the troubled '70s, and as Italy slides toward anarchic egalitarianism, immense wealth is becoming less and less fun. When she and her third husband stay at their house on the island of Ischia, they must hire men to stand on the beach and pose as intruders--in order to crowd out the real ones. Says Maggie: "The time is coming when we'll have to employ our own egg throwers to throw eggs at us, and, my God, of course, miss their aim, when we go to the opera on a gala night." Jewel and art thieves, Communist lawyers, peculating financiers--all descend on Maggie and leave her fortune in tatters.

Like many of Muriel Spark's best characters, however, Maggie keeps busy being clever. She complains that the "tempo" of her husband's lovemaking is all wrong: "He starts off adagio, adagio. Second phase, well, you might call it al legro ma non troppo and pretty nervy . . ." When she is offstage, Hubert the poseur can usually be counted on for verbal sprightliness. "What is opulence," he asks in his best Oscar Wilde manner, "but a semblance of opulence?"

This question is not as flippant as Hubert makes it sound. Indeed, it has theological overtones that echo through the novel. Behind the glitter and chatter.

Spark hints at dark spiritual convulsions, a "new world which was arising out of the ashes of the old, avid for immaterialism." Toward the end of the book, the fraudulent Hubert is lionized by a crowd of jaded Romans as a spokes man for the vengeful goddess Diana.

Maggie Radcliffe's brand of flamboyance, as beautiful as it is ill-gotten in the eyes of less favored mortals, seems doomed. Is it, then, the beginning of a new Dark Age--or a time when interest will accrue to souls instead of money?

Spark does not say, but then she does not really have to. She is content, like Yeats' golden bird, to sing of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Paul Gray

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