Louise Welsh

I don't know if either of you was brought up as a Catholic, but I mean, Muriel Spark would have recently converted to Roman Catholicism when she wrote this book.

And it seems to me that that idea of memento mori, remember you must die, is actually apparently quite important in Roman Catholicism.

There's Godfrey and his suspender belt obsession.

Pretty well all the characters are more or less awful in this book, with the exception for me of Jean Taylor, who is in this terrible hospital ward where the nurses come in and say, how are we this morning?

Everybody is called Granny.

Granny this, Granny that, Granny Taylor.

But there is one super villain in this novel, Mrs. Pettigrew, who I doubt very much that she was ever married, but she certainly is Mrs. Pettigrew.

Who is a wonderful character.

I mean, wonderfully awful, isn't she?

Really sinister.

I think the only person I felt total sympathy for was, and I expect were meant to, was Jean Taylor, who is clearly, although she isn't of the class of most of them, she was the, I think she was the companion to one of them.

She's the sensible one.

She's wise and she's doubly patronised because she's a working class and she's a woman.

And I just, oh, I actually do feel amidst the laughter really heartbroken for Jean Taylor, who has the most terrible arthritis.

She's in pain most of the time and she's just resigned herself to the fact that she's in hospital and she grits her teeth and she gets on with it.

We've been talking about Memento Mori by Muriel Spark, which is published by Virago.

And before that, we were talking about Edith Wharton's Summer, published by Penguin.

And we began by talking about Espadere Street by Ian Banks, which is published by Abacus.

Now, my copy of Memento Mori is so old that it says on the front, two and six, two shillings and sixpence, that's how old it is.

But what I hadn't realised when I extracted it from the shelf is that it is second hand.