I agree with jt from New Jersey. I picked up "Far Cry" based on its review in the NY Time Book Review in 1986 (front page coverage). If you simply accept Mrs. Hawkins at face value you will fall in love with the setting, the time and Mrs. Hawkins approach to life.

Perhaps the book has a special place in my heart because I read it in a hotel bar overlooking the Arno in Florence while my pregnant wife was resting upstairs. I still reread the book and remember the bar. Funny.

I enjoyed "A Far Cry from Kensington" and recommend it. It's an entertaining story about an overweight young editor who matures in many ways (weight loss, new romance) over the course of the novel and exhibits strength of character in overcoming various tribulations. When she puts down a toadying literary hanger-on, this unpleasant person becomes something like a stalker. A good yarn; the last chapterlet is bang-up. It's one of those novels, which I think are pretty rare, where the last two pages are the best part.

I am a big Muriel Spark fan -- I mourned her passing earlier this year -- and was very interested in a book that is generally accepted as a companion novel to the brilliant "Loitering with Intent", one of my favorites. I was particularly intrigued given the reviews on amazon. So I want to caution prospective readers that there's no way that this is up to Spark's best work. It simply doesn't have the resonance or mysterious allusiveness that some of Spark's other books have. It's kind of a throwaway, in fact. So I think some of the reviewers below are getting carried away and overpraising the novel. Open it with reasonable expectations and you have an entertaining, intriguing tale ahead of you.

Muriel Spark's A Far Cry From Kensington (1988) is the bookend companion to her 1981 classic, Loitering With Intent. Both novels share a common theme, and like the earlier novel, A Far Cry From Kensington is largely autobiographical and takes place in virtually the same setting and time period: the literary world of early Fifties London. Both are explorations, via reminiscence, of the banality of everyday evil, taking place among the workaday, routine lives of the lower middle class. Less scathing if no less hilarious than many of its predecessors, the relatively unsung A Far Cry From Kensington is the most realistic and humane novel among the twenty-odd Spark has written. It is also exceptional in that it is the single Spark fiction in which a love affair blossoms into a successful relationship of duration.

The story of the universally respected though immensely overweight Mrs. Hawkins, A Far Cry From Kensington follows two divergent threads in her daily life: the mounting sufferings of a rooming house neighbor who is being anonymously threatened, and the problems that stem from her own continuous encounters with Hector Bartlett, a manipulative sycophant who hopes to use her footholds in the publishing world to advance his nonexistent literary career.

While Loitering With Intent can be read as something of a tactical combat manual, A Far Cry From Kensington is instructive in the art of deduction: caught up in a spiraling series of mysterious and increasingly serious coincidences, Mrs. Hawkins, short of both hard facts and physical evidence, actively unravels the odd events that are taking a toll on both the lives of her friends and her editorial career. Fully realizing she is as prone to misjudgment as anyone, Mrs. Hawkins, utilizing her intelligence, intuition, and instinct, nonetheless proceeds confidently and assertively to pierce the veil of secrecy and quiet conspiracy engulfing her. Spark is at a creative peak as she reveals the subtle turns, nuances, and moment to moment impressions in Mrs. Hawkins' mind as she forms her cautious conclusions.

Unlike Spark's finest novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), in which a significant portion of the mystery of human existence is shown to exist on a partially transcendent level, A Far Cry From Kensington eventually grounds that mystery in the knowable everyday. Though the author was to return to something of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie's vision in Symposium (1990), here she seems to be expressing that at least the mundane truths of human life can be ascertained by diligence of method, applied intelligence, and a fundamental willingness to be believe that some people are unabashedly predatory, unscrupulous, and ethically coarse at best. Another message of the novel is that the weak, the foolish, and the vacuous are among the most potentially dangerous individuals one can become involved with.

Upon its release, a number of critics publicly objected with pointed distaste to some of Mrs. Hawkin's behavior, she who enjoys "a puritanical and moralistic nature; it is my happy element to judge between right and wrong, regardless of what I might actually do." For exhausted with Hector Bartlett's elaborate attempts at manipulation, unhypocritical Mrs. Hawkins calls him a "Pissseur de copie" to his face when she encounters him in a public park, and continues to do so, to the detriment of her publishing career, throughout the novel. "It seemed to me," she says, that he "vomited literary matter, he urinated and sweated, he excreted it." Far from keeping this observation to herself, Mrs. Hawkins loudly shares it with authors, editors, and publishers, and since Hector is protected by best-selling author Emma Loy, finds herself fired from one job after another. But Mrs. Hawkins is without regret: "I can't help it. Sometimes the words just come out and I can't stop it. It feels like preaching the gospel." Thus in this and other passages, A Far Cry From Kensington supports speaking one's perception of truth under certain circumstances, regardless of consequence, even if that truth represents an enormous breach of upper class WASP manners and social decorum.

In Spark's vision as expressed here, building relationships of any kind solely for personal gain, manipulating others through callous, self-interested `networking,' and general toadyism are high crimes, all of which Hector Bartlett is guilty of in the extreme. In fact, Hector is one of Camille Paglia's "court hermaphrodites": "red hair en brosse, brown corduroy trousers, tweed coat with leather patches on the sleeves, a yellow tie and a green shirt: this was gaudy in those days, and Hector Bartlett was always dressed in bright colors. He was tall, with a pronounced stoop of the shoulders, which made him seem older than he was - I imagine at the time, he would be in his mid-thirties. His face was round with a second fat chin. He had a small but full baby-mouth as if forever asking to suck a dummy teat." Though many critics have felt otherwise, no amount condescending liberal piety can excuse Hector's routine aggressive subterfuge, moral mediocrity, and parasitic nature. It's unlikely that Spark chose this character's name randomly: "hectoring" is exactly what this he often does to those he encounters, and `Bartlett' suggests his "pudgy," pear-shaped physique.

Written in the plainest language possible but poetically conceived and executed, A Far Cry From Kensington belongs, with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Driver's Seat (1970), The Takeover (1976), and Loitering With Intent, among others, with the very best of Spark's work.

This is one of those books that cannot described in a nutshell. If you had to hazard a guess at a description, you'd have to place it firmly in the comedy/ tragedy/ drama/ mystery/ romance section, or simply file it under Spark: Muriel in the Classics section.

Narrated by the once round and central character, Agnes Hawkins (a.k.a. Mrs. Hawkins or Nancy), the story revolves around her experiences as a young widow living in furnished rooms in a semi-detached building in South Kensington. She colorfully describes her neighbors and acquaintances, and gives us tantalizing glimpses into their little secret worlds, in which she is a trustee and confidante.

Despite the mysterious black boxes and the lurking threat of enemies, known and unknown, our heroine manages to keep her head above water, remains a pillar of strength and finds true love among the rubble. Thanks to her diet plan (freely given to the reader as a bonus for purchasing the book), she gains new self-respect, and reinvents herself in a new country, a far cry from her humble beginnings.

A simple classic by an inspired writer.

Amanda Richards

I picked up a copy of Muriel Sparks, "A Far Cry from Kensington" on a friend's recommendation, and I loved it. Mrs. Nancy. Hawkins, the main character is a woman that everyone depends upon and needs to talk with. She has that certain way about her that summons trust and understanding. The fact that her figure is zaftig and that she is a widow lends credence she believes to her trust factor.

Mrs. Hawkins tells her story from a 30 year distance. It is 1954, post World War II, and she is living in a furnished room near Kensington. She has several neighbors of interest and Milly the landlady, was one of the more interesting. She was also a widow and was
Known as an organizer, She was able to organize everyone and everything. Basil and Eva Carlin were a quiet couple and lived on the first floor. Wanda Podolak lived next to them. She was a Polish dressmaker. Kate Parker lived at the end of the hall. She was a district nurse and suffered no germs at all- she was constantly cleaning. On the attic floor, lived a medical student William Todd.

Mrs. Hawkins was an editor at a publishing house and in due time she lost her job and went on to several others. She was excellent at her job, and, of course, everyone confided in her. She knew everything that was going on with everyone. Like the rooming house she lived in, Mrs. Hawkins spent her days and evenings giving advice. The rooming house becomes involved with Wanda and her anonymous letters that turn into blackmail and eventually into big trouble. Along the way, we meet Hector Bartlett, a charlatan who turns many lives upside down.

Mrs. Hawkins gives advice to many and one day she looks in the mirror and discovers that she is too obese. She resolves to lose weight, and by eating only half portions and then quarter portions, she does just that. Her fine bone structure is revealed, and her new body structure also attracts many men. She finds herself in a relationship with William Todd the medical student, which eventually turns into a marriage. Thirty years later,
Mrs. Hawkins, so wonderfully happy with her life in Italy, "a far cry from Kensington",
looks back at her life and continues to offer us advice.

Muriel Sparks has been called "Britain's greatest living novelist", and she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1993 and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1996. She lives in Tuscany, Italy. An outstanding story, told by a wonderful novelist. prisrob