Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat is a short and savage character study of a woman gradually losing control of herself. Lise has worked in the same dull office job for sixteen years, and finally, she is going on holiday. However, this isn’t an idyllic retreat from the humdrum existence of her everyday life - we soon discover that Lise will be found brutally murdered by the end of the first day of her vacation.
The Driver’s Seat opens on an exchange in a store dressing room over the stain-resistant fabric of a dress. The encounter is told in an almost cyclical way, first as it happens, shifting back to what happened just before and then the original exchange is retold, with slightly different details. This technique is used often throughout the novel, a comment on perception, on the effect time has on memory – something that will become crucial and more pronounced as Lise’s steps are retraced by witnesses in the wake of her murder. As she prepares to leave for her trip she begins to gleefully lie to strangers, creating elaborate false identities and personas during her encounters. It becomes apparent through Lise’s interactions with her co-workers, shop staff and strangers that there may be something not quite right about Lise’s behaviour, whether it is the product of mental illness or just eccentricity remains to be seen.
Once the reader is informed that Lise will be found stabbed to death, everything is shadowed by a vague sense of threat, everything, even innocuous remarks, seems potentially dangerous and threatening. A man frightened by Lise’s appearance moves away from her on the airplane. A macrobiotic diet fanatic engages her in conversation and invites her to meet up with him later. Lise hides her passport in a taxi. As she wanders around the unnamed city with the elderly Mrs Fiedke, she is on the lookout for a man but she doesn’t seem to know who or where she will find him.
‘Will you feel a presence? Is that how you’ll know?’
‘Not really a presence,’ Lise says. ‘The lack of an absence, that’s what it is. I know I’ll find it. I keep making mistakes though.’
Most prominently, Lise shops endlessly. On her holiday, with our knowledge of her imminent death, the objects she buys and accumulates seem to hold great importance. It soon becomes apparent that Lise has plotted her own murder, as though her death is something as easily purchased as a lipstick, a scarf, or a silk tie. If consumer culture allows us to buy into an idea of a certain life or ideal, then surely it can also provide the ideal death? The murder scene, and the calculated approach that Lise takes to engage her murderer, is disturbing – all the threatening atmosphere and people seem harmless in comparison when Lise is the most dangerous to herself.
Ultimately, this scenario raises many more questions than it answers: why does Lise make herself so willingly visible, her clothes, her demeanour, her interactions with others, when this was her plan all along? To ensure witnesses? To ensure that someone, somewhere remembers her? To be certain that some form of story, however untrue, can be gleamed from the witness statements? The Driver’s Seat is genuinely confounding.