Dougal Douglas, or Douglas Dougal if he is on the other side of the Rye, is an interloping fey source of chaos who nearly evenly divides opinion in Peckham, whether those opinions are expressed by workers in the mills, management, the police, elderly landladies, or aging actresses. Very few can pinpoint what exactly it is they like or dislike about Dougal. Certainly the things he says and what he does are constantly surprising. Dixie, betrothed to Humphrey, doesn’t like him. But Humphrey does. So does Mr Druce and Elaine and Merle. In fact, it’s probably true to say that no one is unaffected by him. But it can’t be leading to something good.

Muriel Spark is in top form with this sprightly tour de force as she quick-cuts forward and backward in time and jumps from one character to the next. The pace will leave you breathless. But that might also be due to the laughing. Some of what Dougal does is ridiculous. Yet it’s all so Dougal, isn’t it?

So easy to recommend. ( )

It’s a bit dated, as quite a few of Muriel Sparks earlier works. But Dougal Douglas is a wonderful character.
Quick and easy and riveting. Well worth reading. ( )

Perfectly pleasing romp through the offices of Peckham. The ideal book to read on the sly when you should be doing some work. ( )

This hectic book centred on Peckham is sometimes a bit confusing. Who is Dougal Douglas anyway? What's his game? I enjoyed this and also liked the Curiously Specific podcast unpacking it (https://www.curiouslyspecific.com/2018/11/09/the-ballad-of-peckham-rye/) but I think I need to read it again to properly get it. ( )

This is one of Spark's crazier novels, published the year before Miss Jean Brodie. It is set in a working-class district of South London, and the story is all about factory workers and their bosses, dances, nights at the pub, fights about girls, petty crime, adultery, saving up to get married, sneaking lovers past the landlady, etc., so it's clearly setting itself up as though it's in the same genre as the novels and plays of contemporaries like Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow. But this is most definitely not grittily realistic angry-young-man fiction, it's more like a sophisticated, playful parody of its conventions. No-one here is the victim of anything other than their own moral limitations. The violence, when it occurs, is as balletic as anything in West Side Story, and the story line is constantly wavering at the very edge of realism.

The comic disturbing agent in the plot is the Scotsman Dougal Douglas, who often seems to be Psmith playing the part of Donald Farfrae. We're in Wodehouse country, after all: Peckham Rye is just down the road from East Dulwich. Douglas is an agent of chaos who enjoys inserting himself into social situations and interfering at random. Apparently he does this simply to see what will happen, as Psmith did, but he himself also enjoys dropping hints that he is an incarnation of the Devil, an interpretation Spark does nothing to confirm or deny (Peckham Rye is also William Blake country...). In the course of the story he completely undermines employee morale in two local factories where he's been brought into the Personnel department as an "Arts man" with an ill-defined mission to tackle disaffection and absenteeism (so ill-defined that he's able to hold the same job simultaneously in both companies without his bosses noticing anything); he sends several managers into breakdowns or depression; he sabotages a long-planned wedding, and he's indirectly responsible for at least two deaths. And he has time to adapt his adventures to fit a ghosted autobiography he's writing for an elderly actress...

Entertaining in a very Sparkish way, but I'm not sure if it does anything beyond that. There may well be a serious moral tale buried under all that exuberant chaos, but if there is, it's so convoluted and ambiguous that few readers are going to bother to work it out. ( )