Word: rye
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ballad of Peckham Rye, by Muriel Spark. Peckham Rye is a London suburb where the people are too average to sin grandly but not too average to sin. The result is often hilarious...
...Ballad of Peckham Rye, by Muriel Spark. A brief encounter between a London Mephistopheles and the local mediocrities produces a hilarious novel, and some reflections about how even the common place can be touched with mystery...
...bewitched eyes and at "the alarming bones of his hands" and suffers a nervous breakdown. Mr. Druce himself, suspecting that Dougal is a police informer in alliance with Merle Coverdale, kills his mistress by stabbing her nine times with a corkscrew. Dougal at about that time flees Peckham Rye for Africa, where he makes a living selling portable tape recorders to witch doctors...
...been compared to Evelyn Waugh, but the comparison is inexact: she is, in fact, a kind of welfare state Jane Austen, a novelist in whose hands the commonplace becomes mysteriously implausible, the routine eerily irrational. Unlike the scheming septuagenarians of her earlier novel, Memento Mori, the inhabitants of Peckham Rye are so determinedly average that they lack even the capacity to sin grandly. When Mr. Vincent Druce, the managing director of a small textile firm, visits his secretary, Miss Merle Coverdale, to make love to her in the evening, their activity is as carefully calculated as the time-motion studies...
...victims nor the reader ever discovers precisely what is deviling them. It is Novelist Spark's triumph that it never seems to matter. When Dougal is accused of being "unnatural," he replies: "All human beings who breathe are a bit unnatural." On every page of Peckham Rye, the author demonstrates that notion with high comic brilliance and a strabismic...