Muriel Spark, Not to Disturb

"'I'll see the Baron in the morning, I have to talk to him,' says Mr. Mcguire.

'Too late,' says Lister. 'The Baron is no more.'

'I can hear his voice. What d'you mean?'

'Let us not strain after some vulgar chronology,' says Lister. 'I have work for you.'"

Not to Disturb is an odd little duck of a book, it ends almost as soon as it begins, in more ways than one. For one thing, it's short, barely a hundred pages long, and for another, all is revealed at the outset. And in complete contradiction to that last statement, nothing is revealed over course of the book. But that's alright, the murder mystery that constitutes the book's dramatic core is utterly inconsequential to its sequence of events. The book is about something else entirely — it's about the organising principle of aristocracy: incest.

From what i've gathered in my rather rushed reading, this is how it goes: the Baron Klopstock is a serial philanderer and he has most likely impregnated his young maid, Heloise, who is most likely his own daughter, and the latter, on hearing of the fortune to be inherited on the Baron's forgone demise, promptly agrees to marry what is presumably her very disabled half brother, the Baron's legitimate heir. It is in the nature of the dialogue heavy narration that each of these facts is up for debate, as none of the speakers appear particularly reliable, but the intent is clear: eveything is sex, including sex.

But that's only one of the long drawn out jokes that comprise the text, the Baron and Baroness have a knack for hiring servants who share their incestuous proclivities. Lister, the butler, is entangled with his aunt Eleanor, a fellow servant and a woman at least a decade his junior, in a tryst that stretches back to their childhood. It would appear that incest is not simply a dalliance for the wealth. Perhaps, incest is the organising principle of civilisation itself?

Here's where it gets murky; in order to propagate civilisation (class civilisation, that is) through (covert) incest, another, subterranean order must be maintained: sexgender. The aristocracy and their retinue of servants are welcome to interbreed, it's all a matter of wealth and property, but there must remain outcasts who are exempted from all forms of intercourse; these are Passerat's (the secretary who will perish with the Baron and Baroness) two hapless companions, a cross-dresser and a masseuse (that's a funny way to say sex worker). Their ignoble death, at the hands of nature no less (stewarded by the servants, of course) maintains the status quo, property remains within heritable bounds, but only to those who are legible to sexgender, the undesirables are killed.

This thread is made even clearer by the Reverend's attempts to reign in the Baron's philandering. The Reverend brings with him a newspaper cutting, an advertisement for Cyproterone Acetate, which, according to the marketing cured a 'pervert' of his robust sexuality. The U.S. American reader will be forgiven for missing this particular subtlety, C.P.A. remains unapproved for use in the U.S.A. In the rest of the world, it is a widely prescribed drug, either in tandem with Estradiol for birth control, or, in tandem with Estradiol as part of feminising hormone replacement therapy. The only way the Reverend can muster an undoing of the Baron's impropriety is to remove him from his ordained role within the sexgender system. A few more sexual innuendos follow.

Amidst this ribaldry, of course, one prohibition remains; one must not speak of sex, it's far too degrading for persons of such distinguished character. Good old fashioned repression, and the inevitable return of the repressed. It's a very silly little book really, good for a few laughs, which, on further investigation reveals its prodigious can of worms.