Reading the 80s - 1981

Yes Minister by Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn never struck me, when I was a child, as a story of white, male, upper-middle class privilege, despite the fact I was living on a council estate myself. I suppose I just accepted that the people in charge mostly looked like that and talked like that, in the same way I accepted many of the characters in Golden Age Crime fiction went to parties in country houses, and even sympathised with their desire to maintain the status quo. 

Not that any one of the three main characters in Yes Minister is actually malicious, Hacker is even quite idealistic in spots, with his belief in collective responsibility and the caring society, and it helped, of course, that I had seen the TV programmes first and the three main actors - Paul Eddington, Nigel Hawthorne and Derek Fowlds - played their parts so beautifully. 

It's still their voices and expressions I hear and see when reading the book and it's still very funny, with a rich vein of cynicism woven in that passed me by originally, as well as some valid points about how much competence can be expected from a Minister who is suddenly in charge of a government department about something he knows nothing about, with officials who have been specialists for years, while still having one eye to pleasing the party and the PM rather than his conscience or the people who voted for him.  

So does Yes Minister still stand up now? I think it does, actually. Even when it came out it existed in a kind of alternative universe where Thatcher never existed, so actual relevance is an irrelevance really, and although the books are set out as Hacker's memoirs, written many years later, interspersed with Woolley's point of view (in conversation with the authors), the occasional letter, and other bits of biographies that have 'come out' since, which sounds like a dreary format, it actually works really well. My version is a three book compendium, and I was tempted just to carry on. 

Muriel Spark: Loitering With Intent. 

Although published in 1981 Loitering with Intent is set in the late 40s, although it's clear throughout that the narrator, Fleur, is writing at a later date - looking back on a particular time of her life when she was young and carefree and writing her first novel Warrender Chase while also making a precarious living providing occasional articles and reviews for magazines and doing short secretarial stints. 

She takes a job at something called the Autobiographical Association, which organisation at first seems rather pathetic, then possibly a scam to obtain blackmail material, before moving into more sinister territory still - unless Fleur's obsession with Warrender Chase is causing her to see things that aren't there.. 

Like all of Spark's books that I've read this is short but packs a lot in. The characters and Fleur's cold, clear thoughts on them (she is described as 'unnatural' by one of the friends who has read her book) are particularly entertaining. Spark has a gift for making the reader like people who aren't actually that likable, and the descriptions of Fleur's life are just enough - down to the intricacies of shared telephones and utility clothing - to make the whole mad mess feel completely real.