Girls of Slender Means

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark, 176 pages

When the Jesuit priest Nicholas Farringdon is martyred in Haiti, he is remembered with fondness by the girls of the May of Teck Club, a boarding house for young women making their way in London.  Those girls, now women, grew to know him in the closing months of the War not as a priest or even a believer, but as the aspiring anarchist poet who once spent a night with Selina on the roof.  His acquaintance with the girls of the Club, it turns out, changed his life profoundly in ways none of them intended or could foresee.

The Girls of Slender Means is a beautiful novel that is exactly as long as it needs to be.  The obvious comparison is to Graham Greene, although Spark's novel is lighter and more feminine, without, however, becoming either superficial or sentimental.