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Muriel Sparks's third novel, the macabre but sharply witty Memento Mori (1959), has three epigraphs; the first two by Yeats and Traherne are about old age, while the third from The Penny Catechism is as follows:

Q. What are the four last things to be ever remembered?
A. The four last things to be ever remembered are Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven.

Sparks, who was 39 before she published any fiction, had converted to Roman Catholicism five years before, calling the church "something to measure from" rather than a direct source of inspiration. But the "four last things" are not listed as such in Scripture, as eschatology had been developed by that very church out of Jesus' references to apocalypse (largely in Matthew 24-25), bits of Isaiah and Daniel, and especially the Book of Revelation.

Sparks might well have added an epigraph from the psychology of C. G. Jung, for in this novel all her characters are not merely old, but some are senile; and Jung held the view that anyone in old age who did not focus on the goal of death was probably neurotic. By Jung's definition, most of Sparks's characters are.

This aging circle of old friends and rivals lives in the quarrelsome past; they prolong old literary arguments and jealousies, jockey to inherit wealth, snipe at society and one another, employ silly substitutes for former sexual vitality, collect encyclopedic but insignificant research on the process of aging, and when blackmailed, either keep or reveal secrets the reader judges to be trivial. In short, these elders meditate on everything except their own imminent deaths.

Besides this cluster of superficial friends and kin in the 75 to 85 age bracket, 12 old ladies (called by nurses "the Grannies") survive but wet their beds in the government-subsidized Maud Long Medical Ward. The dozen includes Miss Jean Taylor, formerly a maid-companion and acquaintance of that larger senior group still able to live independently outside old-age institutions. Both Taylor and retired Chief Inspector Henry Mor-timer receive the whispered fears of the rest as, one by one, they begin receiving phone messages from an anonymous caller who says only, "Remember you must die!" and then hangs up. To every person, the caller reveals a different tone, accent, apparent age, or class.

After Dame Lettie Colson is bludgeoned to death during a random robbery, police try to link these spreading telephone calls to some actual stalker preying on the elderly, but wiretaps and detective work fail. Both Mortimer and Taylor decide the strange caller must be Death himself, or else a personification rising from the subconscious of each victim on whom death is persistently laying claim, despite their denials of mortality.

During his own conscientious investigation, policeman Mortimer remarks that if he had his life to live over, he would "compose himself every night by practicing the remembrance of death," because that practice intensifies life. "Without it," he adds, "you might as well live on the whites of eggs."

And when one visitor to the old ladies' home, who is also plagued by the unknown caller, suggests that Jean Taylor's quick mind with its history of sophistication must hate to be remanded by arthritis to this collection of drooling, incoherent wards of the state, she calls those other 11 grannies her own "memento mori—like your phone calls."

However gloomy this plot summary may sound, Memento Mori is an amusing novel in Evelyn Waugh style, affirming life by showing this last stage either deepened or wasted, produced by a writer who has always been preoccupied with metaphysical questions of good and evil.

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October 5 1998, Vol. 42, No. 11