Memento Mori

A circle of Londoners in their seventies and eighties, most of them tied together by decades-old affairs, rivalries, and a shared secret from the 1920s, start receiving anonymous calls from a voice that says only 'Remember you must die' and hangs up. Spark refuses to resolve who is calling, and the refusal is the point: police investigation, séances, and gossip all fail to identify a caller because the caller's identity was never the real subject, mortality itself is, arriving indifferently and on schedule whether or not anyone answers the phone.

Dame Lettie Colston treats the calls as a personal persecution to be defeated by better locks and angrier letters, while Jean Taylor, bedridden in a charity ward with none of the others' money or status, receives the same message and simply agrees with it, the novel's clearest case of a character who has already made peace with what everyone else is still refusing to hear. Spark's cast is stratified by class and comfort, but the calls land on all of them equally, the one plot device in the novel that doesn't care who has money.

Godfrey Colston, Lettie's elderly brother, is quietly blackmailed for years by his own housekeeper, Mrs. Pettigrew, who holds proof of an affair he had decades earlier and uses it to extract cash and small humiliations on a running basis. Spark treats the blackmail almost as comedy, Godfrey pays and grumbles and keeps driving Mrs. Pettigrew around town, and the smallness of the scheme against the largeness of the calls' subject is deliberate: this is what people actually do with the years death has left them, run petty rackets rather than reckon with anything.

Charmian Piper, a once-celebrated novelist now dismissed by her family as senile, turns out over the course of the book to be sharper than anyone gives her credit for, her lapses selective rather than total, and her late-life return to writing, dictated, since her hands shake too badly to hold a pen, reads as the one form of defiance against mortality Spark actually endorses: not denial, and not Lettie's anger, but simply continuing to make something, dictated sentence by stubborn sentence.