Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)

Devilish

Muriel Spark, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (London: Macmillan, 1960; repr. London: Penguin, 1999)

Itinerant Scot Dougal Douglas (aka Douglas Dougal) comes to post-war Peckham and is adored and despised as he triggers a series of scandals and intrigues. He’s a trickster character with, he claims, lumps on his head from his horn-ectomy. But – utterly brilliantly given the gleefully satirical tone and effortless violence – he’s also an innocent. Touches of William Blake.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is filled with sublime set-pieces (including one in a dancehall that alone makes the novel worth reading), and peopled by vivid characters. All the 1950s South London women work or run their own businesses.

I particularly loved that Dougal – who goes on after the story’s timeframe to turn ‘the scrap ends of his profligate experiences’ into ‘a lot of cockeyed books’ and go ‘far in the world’ (p. 142) – is, in one of his many jobs, ghostwriter of the actress Maria Cheeseman’s autobiography, and that the list in his notebook of stock ‘Phrases suitable for Cheese’ is misread by his enemies as some kind of criminal code:

I was too young at the time to understand why my mother was crying. […]

Memory had not played me false.

He was always an incurable romantic.

I became the proud owner of a bicycle.

He spoke to me in desiccated tones.

Autumn. Autumn again. The burning of leaves in the park. […]

Once more fate intervened.

Munificence was his middle name. (p. 91)

Glorious.

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I’m a playwright who writes about twentieth-century novels and other literary/theatrical matters. Subscribe to The Essence of the Thing with your email address to have my weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox. It’s free.