A Far Cry From Kensington
By Muriel Sparks

It’s been a few months since I read this book, and my memories are hazy, but I do remember liking it and deciding that Sparks is a good writer whom I would read again.
The story is told in the first person, and the narrator is an overweight 28 year old woman who is known to everyone as ‘Mrs. Hawkins.’ She lives in a boarding house in Kensington and the story centres around the characters who live in the boarding house and a menacing character called Hector Bartlett whom she meets through her work as an editor.
Sparks has a talent for characterization and for the telling anecdote. Many characters drift into the plot, as they do in boarding houses, but their tales are well woven into the whole.
The character of Hector Bartlett is a memorable one. At first he appears to be an annoying but avoidable poseur, untalented, but with literary aspirations. Mrs. Hawkins loses patience with his pretensions and name-dropping and tells him that he is “un pisseur de copie.”
As the story unfolds, it develops that Hector Bartlett, and by extension, others who, lacking talent of their own, try to live off the success of others, is a venomous man. Mrs. Hawkins’ name for him stuck, and rang true to other people who were trying to shake him off. He had devious ways of promoting himself and sucking up to talent and a lot of people didn’t like him. He attributed the cold shoulders to Mrs. Hawkins’ epithet and developed a complex and really evil plan to get retribution. Unintellectual that he was, he got caught up in radionics, a cult that believed in the power of a black box, and he tried to use its magic powers to get revenge. He took advantage of a simple dressmaker, Wanda, who lived in the boarding house, and in the end, caused her to commit suicide.
The Hector Bartlett story is paralleled by Mrs. Hawkins’ own battle to find a new life now that she is widowed. She finds a better job, loses weight, finds a new boyfriend, and her life works out. But she retains her dislike of Hector Bartlett and the evil that he is masquerading behind his pretentiousness, and she unearths the full extent of his plot against her and the power that he gained over Wanda.
Thirty years later, rich and famous, the narrator meets him again in Tuscany. Once again, he is trying to impress a group of acquaintances, and she goes up to him as she did at the beginning of the tale, and hisses the same words at him and discredits him in public. When she leaves the restaurant, her husband asks, “Did you settle the bill?” She answers, “Yes.” And then concludes, “It was a far cry from Kensington.”
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