"Memento Mori" is Latin for "Remember you must die," a threatening message delivered by a series of anonymous phone calls to a group of about a dozen elderly people, most of them affluent Londoners and tied to
each other by blood, friendship or romance. They presume it is a nuisance caller, or perhaps that one of their hostile relatives is trying to frighten them, but the prank caller speaks in different voices and accents to different people and has an unaccountable knowledge of their movements. Various explanations of the source of the calls are proposed, but none fits all the evidence, and the police are baffled - they decide that the elderly people are hallucinating.
The center of the group is Dame Lettie Colston, OBE, who has retired from extensive work in prison reform. Other major characters include her brother Godfrey, the heir to and retired head of a brewing company; Godfrey's wife Charmian, a successful novelist; and Charmian's former maid Jean Taylor, who is now in a public nursing home. Each individual has a different reaction to the message, ranging from paranoia (Lettie) to anger (Godfrey) to acceptance (Charmian). The caller is never identified nor caught, despite the police investigation, and some believe that the offender must be Death itself.
The number of characters is large. The speed and abruptness with which the narrative switches from one point of view to another, managed by an impersonal but intrusive narrator, is a distinguishing feature of nearly all Spark's fiction, which consciously violated the aesthetic rules not only of the modernist novel as written by Henry James and Virginia Woolf but also the Neo-realist novel as written by Kingsley Amis and other authors from 1950s Britain. Muriel Spark was a postmodernist writer before the term existed.
The plot is extremely complex as well. We have blackmail and intrigues over wills, multiple deaths and discoveries of secret scandals, a labyrinthine plot which reads like a parody of the Victorian sensation novel (and is too complex to describe here). All the same, the behavior of the characters is utterly convincing, rendered with subtle observation. The novel concludes with the deaths of almost all the major characters, but, although its subject matter is the inevitability of death and the various afflictions, physical and mental, of old age, the novel is far from being morbid or depressing. On the contrary: it is wonderfully funny and sparkling throughout.
Spark was 41 when Memento Mori was published in 1959. She was a relatively late starter as a writer of fiction, having pursued a career as critic and editor before she wrote her first novel on 1957, after experiencing a nervous breakdown and conversion to the Roman Catholic church. More novels followed in quick succession, until The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) made her a literary star. But Memento Mori was her first masterpiece. Other great novels are, for example, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), The Driver's Seat (1970), and Loitering with Intent (1981).
As Muriael Spark said: "The prospect of death is what gives life the whole of its piquancy. Life would be so much more pointless if there were no feeling that it must end."
This is one of the funniest novels I know.