The Comforters
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Lippincott (US)
 First edition | |
| Author | Muriel Spark |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Victor Reinganum[1] |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Macmillan (UK) Lippincott (US) |
Publication date | February 1957 (UK) |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 232 |
| OCLC | 1238257 |
The Comforters is the first novel by Scottish author Muriel Spark. She drew on experiences as a recent convert to Catholicism and having suffered hallucinations due to using Dexedrine, an amphetamine then available over the counter for dieting. Although completed in late 1955, the book was not published until 1957. A mutual friend, novelist Alan Barnsley, had sent the proofs to Evelyn Waugh. At the time Waugh was writing The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which dealt with his own drug-induced hallucinations.
Waugh's and other positive responses prompted Macmillan to publish the novel in February 1957 in the United Kingdom, and it was also published that same year in the United States. The novel's quick success enabled Spark to give up editorial work and devote herself to full-time creative writing.[2][3] It has been published in several editions in the United Kingdom and the United States since then.
The central character is Caroline Rose, a novelist recently converted to Catholicism. On returning from a retreat, she starts hearing a voice and the sound of a typewriter, which she refers to as the Typewriter Ghost, and which lets her hear the text of the novel she's in. Meanwhile her boyfriend Laurence, who has been staying with his grandmother in Sussex, discovers that the older woman is involved in smuggling, baking diamonds into loaves of bread. The end of the first half of the novel sees her criticising the plot, which leads to the narrator pettily causing her car to crash, after which the narrator tries to deal with her criticisms.
As Muriel Spark recounts in her memoir Curriculum Vitae, the title is taken from the Biblical story "The comforters of Job." Spark, a Catholic convert, had recently taken instruction and believed that the Comforters were really demons whose intention was to pour salt into Job's wounds.
The idea for the plot came to Spark after a serious mental breakdown, during which she believed that there were secret word game style codes in the poems of TS Eliot. She became so convinced by this that she would spend night after night encoding.
She finally became better as a result of improved nutrition (she had been chronically malnourished) and a rest cure funded by a number of writers, including Graham Greene. TS Eliot was also moved to write her a letter, reassuring her that there were no such codes in his work.