Books: Out of Eden

THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS by Muriel Spark. 176 pages. Knopf. $3.95.

As the climax of a comic novel, the scene seems a touch strenuous. Here are 13 young women, some of them naked and lubricated with soap, desperately trying to squirm to salvation through a tiny bathroom window in a burning London house. Happily, no one excels Scots-born Novelist Muriel Spark at the satiric art of making the outrageous seem natural—and the natural outrageous. In The Girls of Slender Means she not only gets away with trial by hip-size in the bathroom but thriftily makes it a moment of religious crisis. After witnessing the scene, a male character joins the Catholic Church and heads for darkest Haiti, where he is eventually martyred by angry natives.

Such doings may sound like something the author picked up at the last sale of Waugh assets. Actually, this account of the giddy life in an upper-class club for young women in London just after V-E day is touched by a cheerful inhumanity all Muriel Spark’s own. “As they realized themselves,” she writes about the May of Teck Club members, “few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage.”

Not to mention balmy. One girl natters on about an unexploded German bomb buried in the club garden. Another dresses endlessly for an imaginary dinner date with a famous British actor. A wholesome vicar’s daughter gives elocution lessons and keeps the rafters ringing at odd moments with bits of Byron and snatches of Shakespeare. “Joanna Childe,” the author says, describing the girl in one of those thumbnail assessments that keep her books blessedly brief, “had a good intelligence and strong obscure emotions . . . she loved poetry rather as it might be assumed a cat loves birds.”

This demi-paradise, this Eden for the voracious young, throbs with girlish concern for love and money, in that order. But evil, when it is finally faced firmly by Mrs. Spark, comes in the form of lust, not for human flesh but for one of the club’s principal assets —a taffeta Schiaparelli dress that is lent around among the sleeker girls for evenings on the town. Does lust for a Schiaparelli justify the burning of Eden? Is Author Spark just pulling the reader’s leg? A final scene is not much help. In it, the vicar is told that his poetry-loving daughter believed in the existence of Hell. “Really?” he replies with dismay. “I’ve never heard her speak morbidly. It must have been the influence of London.”