Book Club Review: The Driver’s Seat
RAD Book Club’s fourth read of the year was The Driver’s Seat, the 1970 novella by the Scottish novelist, Muriel Spark. A dark psychological thriller, The Driver’s Seat follows Lise, a lonely and erratic woman, as she vacations alone in Southern Europe. The reader discovers early on that Lise will be murdered while on holiday, and much of the novella is composed of witness testimonies from the ensuing police investigation. Because Lise’s fate is revealed so near the beginning of the narrative, Spark described the book as a ‘whydunnit’ rather than a traditional ‘whodunnit’ mystery and this approach, along with her terse, surrealist prose, makes for an oblique and enigmatic read.
The group was pretty evenly divided on the book, with some of us thoroughly enjoying it and others not enjoying it at all. A few members of the group found Lise and many of the other characters in the book incredibly unlikeable and confusing and they thought that the ending was unnecessarily gruesome. In contrast, other members of the group enjoyed how dark the book was and found the characters’ unlikeable and confusing behaviour compelling and thought-provoking. We were also impressed with how tight and condensed the book was while also managing to feel chaotic and ramshackle.
Some of us also thought the book was very funny. Several of the men Lise meets in her travels are comically awful, particularly a macrobiotics fanatic who she sits next to during her plane journey and who she has the misfortunate to bump into again during her holiday, and there is a hysterical, almost silly quality to a lot of Lise’s interactions.
One theory that was presented to the group was that the novella could be understood as a commentary on victim-blaming and how society sees non-conforming women. Lise is something of a cipher in the novel, an absence at the centre of the book, and most of the reader’s impressions of her are gleaned from other characters’ reactions to her, including the man who eventually murders her and who provides a somewhat baffling explanation of events. One way to interpret this baffling explanation and all of the book’s other confusing elements is to read it as the self-serving narrative of a murderer looking to shift the blame onto his victim.
Overall we had mixed feelings about the book, with some of us really loving it and some of us feeling mostly ambivalent about it. Our average rating of The Driver’s Seat was 7/10.
Book Club will meet again on Thursday the 26th of October 2023 at 13:15-14:00 in the Library to discuss the book The Haunting of Hill House by American novelist Shirley Jackson for our Halloween session. A classic haunted house novel and one of the most influential works of horror ever published, The Haunting of Hill House follows a group of four researchers as they investigate reports of paranormal activity at the titular property.