Territorial Rights – Muriel Spark (1979)

Many of you will remember I hosted a year long reading event for Muriel Spark’s centenary in 2018. I read a lot of Spark that year, but didn’t get to them all, and I became a very firm admirer of her work. Territorial Rights was Muriel Spark’s fifteenth novel. Set in Venice it was written during the period Spark lived in Italy, one of only three of her novels to be set there.

I thought it was marvellously Sparkian, it is deliciously odd, with a dark seam as ever flowing through it. Muriel Spark is endlessly readable – and unique in her storytelling. Story strands weave together in a complex – though never confusing – manner, coincidences abound, and there is more than a little comedy to boot.

Young art student Robert Leaver arrives in Venice from Paris, booking in at the Pensione Sofia which is run by sisters Katerina and Eufemia. Before the war – the war, around thirty years in the past looms large in this novel – the pensione was the Villa Sofia, owned by a Bulgarian count. Katerina and Eufemia were young women then, and remember those times keenly.

Then Curran turns up, an older wealthy man, who also knew Venice during the war. Robert Leaver used to live in his flat in Paris, but their coming to Venice at the same time is merely a coincidence, one of several in this novel. There is something mysterious about Curran, he’s a man with a past. Curran opts to stay at the much more expensive Lord Byron Hotel.

“He was often in London, often in the South of France, often in Capri, sometimes in Florence and less frequently nowadays in Rome. He hardly ever went to Germany unless to buy a picture and he left Switzerland alone. Venice was very much his territory; it changed less than other places with the passing of time.”

Robert’s latest interest – aside from any art studies he claims to be undertaking – is Bulgarian defector Lina Pancev. Lina is at least a decade older than Robert, and lives in building by the canal that looks like it needs demolishing. Lina defected from Bulgaria when she was on a student exchange trip, but she is very much still a product of her communist upbringing. Lina is searching for the grave of her father – a man allegedly involved in an assassination plot – he was himself murdered at the end of the war. Curran appears very interested in what Lina is doing, he tells Robert he should stay away from her and talks about her with his old friend, the mysterious socialite Countess de Winter.

“Violet de Winter, chief agent of Global-Equip Security Services Ltd for Northern Italy and adjacent territories, had been feeling the pinch of modern immorality, as she put it. Over the past ten years her business, on the GESS side, had deteriorated by seventy-five per cent largely because unmarried lovers no longer chose Venice as the most desirable place to be together and, moreover, the lovers’ husbands and wives no longer seemed to care if they did. ‘The bottom has fallen out of the love-bird-business,’ she frequently told her old friend Curran, who, in his turn, had always found her useful in many ways.”

Next to turn up out of the blue is Arnold Leaver, Robert’s father. A retired boys’ school headmaster, he arrives in Venice with his mistress Mary, the former cook from the same school. Bumping into Robert at the Pensione Sofia it all gets a little awkward – as Robert’s mother; Arnold’s wife remains at home in Birmingham. Arnold and Mary speedily decamp to the Lord Byron too.

Meanwhile, back in Birmingham, Arnold’s wife Anthea is anxious to discover just what her husband is doing in Venice. She decides to put a private detective agency from Coventry on the case, and tells her good friend Grace Gregory all about it. Grace isn’t sure that getting a detective agency involved is the right thing to do at all, and takes matters into her own hands. In the company of her lodger, Leo, Grace travels to Venice to find out just what Arnold is up to. Grace was formerly the matron at Arnold Leaver’s school, and young Leo was a pupil – she was also we discover, once Arnold’s mistress.

So, the scene is well and truly set for chaos, confusion, and revelations from the past. Then, Robert goes missing.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable Muriel Spark novel – perhaps one that is less well known than some, but with many of the elements that I enjoy in her writing.