Aiding and Betting
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Aiding and Betting, one of Muriel Spark's final novels, was published five years before her death in 2006. Unlike her other books, it is based partly on a documented occurrence; however, as the author states in a note, she has taken liberties with the facts. The central figure, Hildegarde Wolf, is a fraudulent psychiatrist, née Beate Pappenheim, working in Paris. She has two patients each of whom claims to be Lord Lucan, an English earl who, in an actual event in London in 1974, killed his daughter's nanny, mistaking her for his wife, whom he did intend to murder. From this premise, the novel proceeds to present successively greater coincidences and improbabilites, for the sake of dizzying, sometimes paradoxically bewildering, hilarity. In comic Christian spirit, the evils committed by Wolf, the real and false Lord Lucans, and secondary characters result in disconcerting reconciliations and final happiness. The late chapters in Africa recall the comical episodes in A Handful of Dust (1934) by Spark's model and sometime mentor Evelyn Waugh.
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