The Public Image by Muriel Spark

“It’s what they want to believe that counts .”

In The Public Image by Muriel Spark, Annabel Christopher is a successful actress, and her career is on the brink of taking another giant leap forward. Her husband, Frederick, is a loser. His acting career never took off, and even though he wrote a script for a film (starring his wife), it flopped. Annabel enjoys a certain ‘public image’. She and her husband are seen as the ultimate loving couple, and she has the reputation of being a ‘tiger-lady’ in bed. The truth is far removed from this. Frederick resents Annabel’s success, and he’s contemplated leaving her for years. His resentment has festered for so long, that he’s concocted a vicious plan for revenge, and this plan he puts into action while Annabel is filming in Italy, “the Motherland of sensation.”

You can always count on Muriel Spark to weave an insidious shock element into her stories. Frederick’s shockingly bitter revenge is to attack and destroy Annabel’s public image. He loathes the public’s vision of his wife, and he sees her as a fraud. It is almost as though Annabel’s public image is the third person in their relationship, and he’s so jealous of this image, that he goes to enormous lengths to destroy Annabel. Ironically enough, Annabel leans on her public image to get her through her crisis, and she uses this image to metamorphose into the next phase. When I read this book, I immediately thought of Princess Di–she was someone who enjoyed one sort of public image (fairytale princess) and when the bottom fell out of that story, she transformed herself into something else completely different.

This short novel–laced with black humour–is very tightly written, and the story is fascinating. Muriel Spark never wastes a word, and for this reason, her short novels are very controlled and precisely to the point. Spark fans will enjoy this novel, and readers new to Spark may very well become addicted.