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Atlantic
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Judgments of Muriel Spark
The novelist Muriel Spark died almost 20 years ago, but she still regularly appears on lists of top comic novelists to read on this subject or that. Crave more White Lotus– level skewering of the ridiculous rich? Try Memento Mori, The New York Times suggests. An acerbic take on boring dinner parties? Symposium. Interested in 'the fun and funny aspects of being a teacher'? Read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie —also good for learning how to be a highly inappropriate teacher, if you want to know that too. Obscured by her reputation as a wit is the fact that Spark was a religious writer—indeed, one of the most important religious writers in modern British literature. She embraced Roman Catholicism in 1954, at age 36, and joined the cohort of renowned literary Catholic converts such as T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. The most consistent influence on her work is the Bible, especially the Old Testament. She began reading it as a girl in her Presbyterian school and kept rereading it throughout her life, less for 'religious consolation,' she writes in her essay 'The Books I Re-Read and Why,' than 'for sheer enjoyment of the literature.' She was particularly drawn to the Book of Job, an anguished outcry against the seeming randomness of evil. And yet her tone throughout her work is so acidly droll, her touch so light and sly, that we could read most of her 22 novels and 41 short stories and never quite process that their central concern is God. That's because she communicates her theology largely through form rather than content. She rarely discusses; she prefers to sculpt. With a steely command of omniscience, selective disclosure, irony, and other narrative devices, Spark re-creates in the relationship between author and reader the sadomasochistic partnership between the Almighty and his hopelessly wayward flock—or, to put it another way, between his absolute truth and our partial understanding. In other words, she plays God. Not necessarily a nice God, either. In the Book of Job, the Almighty is mercilessly capricious, condemning Job to bitter suffering in a wager with Satan. This God's ends are not our ends. Nor are Spark's. A Creator who acts according to his will on his own unknowable schedule darkens her bright, chipper prose like a skull in a still life. 'Remember you must die,' the anonymous callers in Memento Mori (1959) say to their shocked elderly victims before hanging up. Frightening as these prank calls are, their recipients refuse to take the message seriously, because surely the whole thing is just a macabre practical joke. One feature of Spark's comic genius is her ability to come up with screwball storylines that recapitulate our hapless drift toward final judgment. The collision between God's lofty vantage point and human shortsightedness yields absurdist disaster. In Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel, Frances Wilson revels in her sublimely contrary subject. Her account is a corrective to Martin Stannard's 2009 authorized Muriel Spark: The Biography, a sober, balanced, and plodding opus, though still the definitive biography. Stannard's problem was that Spark had trained as a secretary and filed everything away, no matter how trivial. (Another way of saying this is that she hoarded.) When she died, her archives consisted of 195 linear feet of 'letters, proofs, receipts, memos, agendas, minutes, newspaper cuttings, diaries and manuscripts,' Wilson writes. Spark had given Stannard exclusive access to it all. The mass of material seems to have crushed his spirit. Almost as soon as she chose him, she regretted it, and Wilson imagines her torturing Stannard the way the ghost of a murdered woman toys with her murderer in Spark's short story 'The Portobello Road.' From the September 2010 issue: The 20th century's most wickedly funny novelist Wilson, by contrast, feels free to focus on the parts of Spark's life that informed her art—and luckily for us, these are plentiful, both because Spark liked to rework her own experiences and acquaintances for her fiction, and because her life tended toward the fantastical in ways that served her writing. Wilson borrows Spark's own mystical whimsy about the relationship between her life and her work, which was that her fiction somehow preceded her experiences. 'If she wrote about a burglary,' Wilson says, 'her own house would then be broken into; if she wrote about manuscripts being stolen from a bedroom or a cache of love letters being used as blackmail, this would likewise be her fate.' This was true. Her house was burgled a decade after she wrote about similar burglaries in her novel Symposium (1990). Blackmail featured in her first novel, The Comforters (1957), and in Memento Mori; in 1963, she was blackmailed by a rare-book dealer in possession of her love letters. You'd think Spark took dictation from a far-seeing God. Indeed, that's more or less the subject of The Comforters. A young woman hears voices narrating her exact movements, or else predicting the near future, accompanied by the sound of typing. Everyone presumes she's going mad, but what the voices say is either true or about to come true. Who controls the narrative? That's Spark's big question. Whether to trust or resist those who attempt to control it is the follow-up question. A lot of untrustworthy people tried to take charge of Spark over the course of her adult life, most of them men. Her childhood, however, was happy and relatively free of such power struggles. Born Muriel Sarah Camberg in 1918 to a Jewish father, Barney, and a mother, Cissy, who had some Jewish heritage, she was raised on a haphazard mix of gods and rituals. Her mother, more eclectic than observant, Wilson writes, put seven candles in the window on the Sabbath, went to synagogue on Yom Kippur (in order, Muriel said, to show off her hat collection), celebrated Passover, kept an image of Christ in her locket, a Buddha on a lotus leaf in the living room, served hot cross buns at Easter, mince pies at Christmas and pork all year round. The family lived modestly on a street in central Edinburgh that was full of delights for a curious child. In her building were a painter, a singer, a sweetshop, and a jeweler, and outside was a communal garden to play in. The Cambergs—Muriel had an older brother—gave over one of two bedrooms in their small apartment to lodgers, then to Barney's sister and later Cissy's mother, a former suffragette (indomitable, witty, and 'astonishingly ugly,' Spark later wrote). Muriel adored them both. Her father, an engineer, was genial and funny, and friends were always dropping by. Spark's mother mocked them behind their back; Spark once called Cissy, not disapprovingly, 'a complete hypocrite.' The child internalized her mother's satirical edge as well as the neighborhood 'maxims, idioms, accents, aphorisms, rhythms and catchphrases,' Wilson writes. Her ears had memories, was how Spark put it. When she was 11 and a student at James Gillespie's High School for Girls, Spark came under the spell of Miss Kay, a pedagogical grande dame who exposed her to Italian art and Romantic poetry and trained her in poetic meter. By the time Spark was 12, she had published accomplished poems in her high-school magazine and in an anthology of poetry by Edinburgh high-school students. Miss Kay, Wilson says, 'both was and was not the model for Miss Jean Brodie,' Spark's most notorious character. They shared 'mannerisms and speech patterns'; both overpraised their protégés as the 'crème de la crème.' But Miss Kay was much nicer. Miss Brodie is partial to Nazis and Italian fascists and maneuvers her girls into position to act as her advocates and surrogates—which is not always in their interest. 'By the time they were sixteen,' Spark writes with characteristic mordancy, 'they remained unmistakably Brodie, and were all famous in the school, which is to say they were held in suspicion and not much liking.' Spark's marriage at 19, in 1937, drove home to her that the world was not inclined to let women take charge of their own destiny. Oswald Spark, a teacher who courted her for a year, had accepted a job in Rhodesia and asked Spark to follow him. He'd support her, he said, and she could keep writing poetry. She consented. Their wedding night was 'an awful mess,' Spark said later, 'a botch-up,' and marital relations did not continue for long. But she got pregnant and nearly died of septicemia after giving birth to a son, Robin, toward whom she was never able to muster as much maternal solicitude as he longed for. Oswald turned out to have a 'severe nervous disorder,' in Spark's words, and after two years, she left him. Colonial society horrified her, especially the way white people talked about black people as if they weren't human, but war had broken out and she only managed to make her escape in 1944, resorting to a troopship that had to navigate through enemy waters. She was forced to leave Robin behind; it took her 10 years to win back custody. Wilson frames the next phase of Spark's life as a key to the fiction that was still a decade away, and she's not exaggerating its importance. When Spark arrived in London in 1944, she got a job as a secretary for the head of a clandestine project overseen by the British Foreign Office. In fact, she may already have been doing undercover work. Wilson hypothesizes that she spied for the British colonial government during her last year in Rhodesia, possibly trying to uncover enemy aliens among the settlers. Wilson cites no direct evidence but rather a curious gap in the record of what she was up to, or even where she lived. Spark's new boss was a wildly imaginative and very demanding foreign correspondent of Falstaffian proportions named Sefton Delmer. His outfit, the Political Warfare Executive, conducted psyops from a secret compound north of London. The PWE's mission was 'the successful and purposeful deceit of the enemy'; it produced disinformation in German that was published in a counterfeit newspaper, sent in the form of forged letters and fake secret messages, and broadcast over the radio. An anti-Semitic Nazi talk-show host who ranted drunkenly about corruption and sexual depravity among the party elite from his illegal outpost in the fatherland, for instance, was in reality a German writer of detective fiction employed by Delmer in England. From the February 2001 issue: Dame Muriel's surreal meditation on belief Working for Delmer may have been the best training a future novelist could get. He was fanatical about verisimilitude: All the details in the team's fabrications had to ring true. He hired people from every profession. In addition to writers, he enlisted farmers, psychologists, actors, even cabaret singers, some of them German Jewish refugees knowledgeable about German life. Plus the military fed Delmer the latest intelligence. He was 'omniscient,' Wilson writes, and scary; he liked to play mind games with his own people as well as the Germans. Spark's immersion in 'a world of method and intrigue,' as she put it, taught her about the slipperiness of truth. For the rest of her life, she would be obsessed with—indeed, paranoid about—'codes, secret messages and the circulation of fictions posing as fact,' Wilson writes. Several of Spark's novels feature shady characters spying on one another and hatching whisper campaigns against a defiant but naive heroine. She later was the target of a plot herself. During Spark's brief tenure in 1947 as the editor hired to update The Poetry Review, a stodgy publication overseen by an elderly poetry society, a board member scheming to oust her pried into her life and threatened to use her divorce against her. Spark put this experience to use in more than one novel, most notably Loitering With Intent (1981), probably her funniest. The Poetry Society becomes the Autobiographical Association, whose ridiculous members write their memoirs under the supervision of the director, a snooty character clearly conniving to use their confessions for some sort of skulduggery. Then there was Spark's nervous breakdown in January 1954. Always worried about her weight, an anxiety shared by some of her heroines, she had been taking Dexedrine to control her eating. During the ensuing psychotic interlude, she fixated on T. S. Eliot, whose most recent play, The Confidential Clerk, had a character named Muriel. Convinced that Eliot, whom she had never met, had sneaked encrypted declarations of love for her into the script, she spent months obsessively trying to decode them. This wasn't easy. At one point, Wilson writes, 'Eliot's words started jumping around and cavorting, reshaping themselves in anagrams and crosswords.' A doctor weaned Spark from Dexedrine and put her on antipsychotic medication, and she briefly went into therapy with a Jungian psychologist. But Roman Catholicism restored order to her disorderly mind, Spark said. It made her 'see life as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected happenings.' She put herself in the hands of God, who sees and hears all—God being a preferable eavesdropper and spy to ex-boyfriends and boards of directors. Piety did not make her dogmatic or conservative. She neither went to confession nor renounced abortion, contraception, or divorce, and she embraced doubt. From the November 1965 issue: Muriel Sparks's poem 'Note by the Wayside' Spark's turn to religion coincided with her turn to fiction, which was not an accident. Catholicism allowed her to find her voice as a writer. While editing a volume of the letters of Cardinal John Henry Newman, she had read his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which details the steps of his conversion to Catholicism and inspired her to begin to take her own. The qualities in his reflections that attracted her—simplicity, concision, a refusal to accept easy answers—double as a good description of the style she was developing. Catholicism itself had aesthetic appeal. She was drawn to its living magic—its 'saints, angels, miracles, and mysteries,' Wilson writes. 'She also liked the paradox, metaphor, sixth dimension and rearrangement of time and space.' For believers, those staples of faith had an immediacy and a proximity to the everyday that Spark may have felt was best embodied in fiction. From the start, in her very first (and prize-winning) short story, 'The Seraph and the Zambezi' (1951)—still one of her best—she effaced the distinction between naturalism and the supernatural. During a Christmas pageant held by a gas-station owner in his rickety garage near Rhodesia's Zambezi River, a six-winged creature appears onstage and proceeds to kick everyone else off it. It's a seraph, straight out of the Book of Isaiah. 'This is my show,' the owner, Cramer, tells it. 'Since when?' the Seraph said. 'Right from the start,' Cramer breathed at him. 'Well, it's been mine from the Beginning,' said the Seraph, 'and the Beginning began first.' Why Catholicism and not, say, Scottish Presbyterianism, the country's Calvinist-inflected denomination of her youth, or her father's Judaism? Spark's love of high style surely rebelled against the austerity of Protestantism, both in worship and creed. (As a writer, however, she made heavy use of the doctrine of predestination, disposing of characters summarily and parodying herself in the figure of Miss Jean Brodie. 'She thinks she is Providence,' a disenchanted student reflects. 'She thinks she is the God of Calvin.') Spark was even more conflicted about Judaism. In The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), a chatty, muddled autobiographical novel, she describes her protagonist going back and forth between her chilly Christian relatives and her warmer Jewish ones and belonging among neither. To one side of the family, she was faintly pitiable because she was half Jewish; the other was kinder, but she felt her lack of Jewish knowledge excluded her from their cozy home rituals. Spark always had the Bible, though, and read it 'with a sense that it was specially mine,' as she put it. She thought God had given a good answer when Moses had asked his name at the burning bush: I am who I am. Was she 'a Gentile' or was she 'a Jewess'? 'Both and neither. What am I? I am what I am,' she writes in her essay 'Note on My Story 'The Gentile Jewesses.' ' Spark's range as a novelist was impressive—one work might adopt the guise of a murder mystery, the next of a ghost story—but she had a signature rhetorical move: prolepsis. The scholar Clare Bucknell came up with a Spark-worthy term for it: the 'auto-spoiler.' In a throwaway remark toward the beginning of a story, the narrator gives away the end. We learn in Chapter 3 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) that one of the Brodie set will betray her to the school's administration, which is desperate for an excuse to get rid of her. In The Driver's Seat (1970), Spark's most surreal novel and also her favorite, we are told, also in the third chapter, that the tourist disembarking in a Southern European city will have been murdered by the next morning. By revealing the fate of her characters, Spark frees us from the grip of curiosity about what's going to happen and forces us to study why. Who made it happen? What does it mean? Does providence foreordain or do characters have a say? Is everything a conspiracy or does accident play a role? Spark's convictions let her interrogate God's designs without despairing that there are none. As a child, Spark had found God to be 'a charming and witty character' with 'a lot of conflicting sides to his nature,' as she wrote. The worry that crops up in her fiction is that he'll turn out to be a rogue operator like her old boss Delmer. But Spark also admired the God of Job because he was 'not the God of love,' Wilson writes. He was the braggart God who boasted to Job that—in Spark's words—'I made this and I created that, and I can crush and I can blast and I can blow. And who are you to ask questions?' A devoted ironist is the answer: Spark reserved the right not only to ask questions but to admit amusement and dismay into her faith. Anyone can worship a God who doesn't trim himself to the size of the human imagination—that's what God is for, to make sure that we don't mistake our petty schemes for anything other than half-baked. But it takes a Spark to be fond of a God who chest-thumps and is otherwise outlandish—a God who, she writes, 'basks unashamed in his own glory, and in his anger is positively blasphemous.' Because who are we to say how God should behave?
The Mainichi
20-07-2025
- Health
- The Mainichi
Death-themed events inspiring life amid increasing youth suicides in Japan
TOKYO -- Youth suicides climbed to a record high in Japan in 2024, raising the question of how to rescue young people harboring suicidal thoughts. Various groups, including universities, governments and private organizations have launched initiatives to address the issue, including events that lift the taboo on discussing death. Simulating death to inspire life On June 24, Ritsumeikan University hosted an experiential lecture where students participated in a "coffin experience." The session was led by Mikako Fuse, a custom coffin maker. Students lay in coffins with the lids closed for several minutes. This experience, also conducted at the end-of-life planning bar Memento Mori in Tokyo's Koto Ward, apparently changes many participants' perceptions of death and increases their desire to live, according to Fuse. Of the 30 students who attended the lecture, about 80% participated in the coffin experience. The impact was profound. Students shared positive reflections such as, "It was an opportunity to reflect on myself and reset my worries," and, "The fear of death disappeared, and I felt a stronger desire to live." The experience seemed to heighten their focus on "self-understanding and connections with others." Rising suicidal ideation among young students The lecture was prompted by growing concerns over increasing suicidal ideation among young people. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the number of suicides in 2024 reached about 20,000, the second lowest on record. However, among elementary, junior high and high school students, the trend is increasing, with 529 taking their own lives in 2024 -- the highest figure among records dating back to 1980. Many young people harbor suicidal thoughts without acting on them. In a 2022 Nippon Foundation survey of some 15,000 people aged 18 to 29, 44.8% admitted having seriously considered taking their own lives. "Today's youth face complex and multilayered social isolation. They may, after much contemplation, choose suicide to alleviate their struggles with life's difficulties," said Aya Seike, a professor of social medicine at Ritsumeikan University who organized the lecture. Explaining the goal of the event, Seike stated, "Facing death as a means of reevaluating life is an extremely important activity." She plans to use data from these coffin experiences to develop programs aimed at alleviating the difficulties of living, with the hope of preventing suicides. Events focusing on death gaining momentum The Shibuya Hikarie commercial complex in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward hosted "Death Fes," a fest centered on the theme of death, around April 14, informally designated as "Good Death Day" in Japan. Attendance doubled from the previous year's inaugural event, with approximately 4,200 people, about 20% of whom were in their teens and 20s. The event featured talks and discussions on death, including programs that emphasized a strong awareness of mortality. Asked about the reason for holding such an event, Nozomi Ichikawa, who organized and managed Death Fes, stated, "Death is often taboo in society, but many people want to learn about it." A survey by funeral company Tear Co. found that 26.8% of people in their 20s are engaged in "end-of-life planning," such as drafting wills. This indicates an increased awareness of mortality among young people. This, Ichikawa emphasized, is precisely why events like Death Fes are necessary. "It's not possible for others to unilaterally address someone's wish to die. If they have a place where such feelings can be acknowledged, it leads to a sense of security. We need to delve into why someone wants to die," she said. A shift in perspective for a young man Kazuki, 27, a volunteer at Death Fes, has personally grappled with suicidal thoughts. Without a clear reason, he described a vague anxiety that led to feelings of wanting to die. His interest in death led him to work in caregiving, where he witnessed the end of life firsthand. Searching for answers, he attended last year's Death Fes and has since engaged in ongoing dialogues with participants. "Deepening my understanding of death and having someone to consult with has been a major turning point. The presence of family and friends who believe in me is significant," he said. Kazuki now sees his desire to die as a reflection of a wish to live better. He feels that his suicidal thoughts have significantly diminished. Kazuki's experience is not unique. Many have struggled and contemplated death, but sharing concerns with others can bring peace of mind. Both government and private sectors have established hotlines for easy access to support, many of which operate around the clock. (Japanese original by Yuko Shimada, Business News Department) -- Suicide prevention hotline in Japan with English support TELL Japan (English): Telephone hotline: 03-5774-0992 (Daily) Online chat: Counseling inquiries: 03-4550-1146 A selection of emergency numbers with multilingual support is also provided at the bottom of their home page. *Operating hours for the telephone hotline and online chat depend on the day and are subject to change. Check the Facebook page linked below for up-to-date information:
The Age
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Plain gold is soulless': Why collectors love contemporary jewellery
Contemporary jewellery or 'art jewellery' as it's sometimes referred to, has been ubiquitous since the 1950s. And despite shunning traditional materials such as diamonds and gold for resin or steel, these unique pieces can still command considerable sums. If you ask Anne Rutland, a collector of contemporary jewellery, to choose between a chunk of gold or a well-designed piece of contemporary jewellery, it's a clear decision. 'Gold in its raw form is just soulless, dead,' says Rutland, who has spent the last 25 years collecting contemporary jewellery. One of her first acquisitions was a simple brooch, priced at $20 by Melbourne based artist/jeweller Roseanne Bartley. When her momentum for collecting built, Rutland purchased a couple of neck pieces by Carlier Makigawa from Gallery Funaki in Melbourne. Priced at well over $2000 for each, the value has since increased significantly. 'A similar neck piece was purchased by the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris,' says Rutland. 'Contemporary jewellery is still fairly niche and many still don't get the idea of wearing something that's more about the story it tells, than the value of materials,' she adds. Pieces of Eight, a store/gallery in Russell Place, Melbourne, has been a champion of contemporary jewellery for the last 20 years. Jeweller and owner, Melanie Katsalidis, showcases a combination of contemporary jewellery and more traditional pieces, such as engagement rings. Even some of the rings that appear fairly conventional, such as those by William Llewellyn Griffiths, have a slight goth edge, with miniature gold skulls on the shoulder of the ring and a sun dial pattern concealed behind a marquis diamond. Priced at $16,000 (includes GST), the ring is loosely reminiscent of the Memento Mori jewellery that appeared in the Georgian period. Lisa Roet, an artist whose sculptures of primates are well known in the art world, has produced a number of bracelets. There's a gold-plated bronze bracelet, emphasising the strong grip of a primate, or a sterling silver bracelet with the texture of the skin of a gorilla, embossed on the surface, retailing for $575. Other jewellers, such as Belinda Esperson, take inspiration from the Australian bush, with one of her 'paper' cuffs, made of sterling silver rather than paper, priced at $1380. 'Belinda is the ultimate in creating bespoke jewellery, working directly with a client,' says Katsalidis.
Sydney Morning Herald
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Plain gold is soulless': Why collectors love contemporary jewellery
Contemporary jewellery or 'art jewellery' as it's sometimes referred to, has been ubiquitous since the 1950s. And despite shunning traditional materials such as diamonds and gold for resin or steel, these unique pieces can still command considerable sums. If you ask Anne Rutland, a collector of contemporary jewellery, to choose between a chunk of gold or a well-designed piece of contemporary jewellery, it's a clear decision. 'Gold in its raw form is just soulless, dead,' says Rutland, who has spent the last 25 years collecting contemporary jewellery. One of her first acquisitions was a simple brooch, priced at $20 by Melbourne based artist/jeweller Roseanne Bartley. When her momentum for collecting built, Rutland purchased a couple of neck pieces by Carlier Makigawa from Gallery Funaki in Melbourne. Priced at well over $2000 for each, the value has since increased significantly. 'A similar neck piece was purchased by the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris,' says Rutland. 'Contemporary jewellery is still fairly niche and many still don't get the idea of wearing something that's more about the story it tells, than the value of materials,' she adds. Pieces of Eight, a store/gallery in Russell Place, Melbourne, has been a champion of contemporary jewellery for the last 20 years. Jeweller and owner, Melanie Katsalidis, showcases a combination of contemporary jewellery and more traditional pieces, such as engagement rings. Even some of the rings that appear fairly conventional, such as those by William Llewellyn Griffiths, have a slight goth edge, with miniature gold skulls on the shoulder of the ring and a sun dial pattern concealed behind a marquis diamond. Priced at $16,000 (includes GST), the ring is loosely reminiscent of the Memento Mori jewellery that appeared in the Georgian period. Lisa Roet, an artist whose sculptures of primates are well known in the art world, has produced a number of bracelets. There's a gold-plated bronze bracelet, emphasising the strong grip of a primate, or a sterling silver bracelet with the texture of the skin of a gorilla, embossed on the surface, retailing for $575. Other jewellers, such as Belinda Esperson, take inspiration from the Australian bush, with one of her 'paper' cuffs, made of sterling silver rather than paper, priced at $1380. 'Belinda is the ultimate in creating bespoke jewellery, working directly with a client,' says Katsalidis.
Business Insider
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
The ending of '28 Years Later' explained and how it sets up the sequel, 'The Bone Temple'
Fans waited nearly 20 years for " 28 Years Later" — and its cliffhanger ending will likely leave them with more questions than answers. The film is set three decades on from when the Rage Virus escaped from a lab in Britain, causing the infected to become mindless and bloodthirsty zombie-like killers. It is essentially a coming of age story about a 12-year-old named Spike, who lives on an island that is cut off from the mainland during high tide, which protects his community from the infected. The opening scene of "28 Years Later" shows the infected attacking a young boy named Jimmy at the start of the outbreak. It then jumps forward to Spike's father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), taking him hunting on the mainland as a rite of passage. They leave behind Spike's mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who is bed-bound by a mystery illness that causes amnesia. Here's the ending explained, and how it sets up the sequel "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple." "28 Years Later" follows Spike as he tries to save his mother. After Spike spots a fire in the distance while on the mainland, Jamie tells him of a man called Doctor Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), whom he saw nonchalantly burning hundreds of bodies when he was younger. He warns Spike of how dangerous even the uninfected can be. However, Spike ignores him and decides to sneak Isla onto the mainland in the hopes the doctor can cure her. He creates a distraction by burning a general store and leaving during low tide. On the mainland, Spike and Isla meet Eric (Edvin Ryding), a Swedish NATO soldier whose squad washed up in England after their boat sank. He saves them from a number of infected, but threatens to kill them when Isla helps a pregnant infected woman give birth to an uninfected baby. However, he's stopped by a variant of the infected called an Alpha, who rips Eric's head and spine off his body. As they escape, Kelson suddenly appears and drugs the Alpha (Chi Lewis-Parry) with a blowdart, and provides Spike, Isla, and the baby with sanctuary in an area where he has built huge towers out of bones and skulls. He calls it the "Memento Mori," Latin for "Remember you die." In one of the film's quieter moments, he diagnoses Isla with cancer, which has spread to her brain. This explains her memory loss and extreme headaches. She chooses to let Kelson euthanize her and she tells Spike that she'll always be with him. She walks off into the darkness with Kelson, and he returns with her skull. In a heartbreaking moment, he lets Spike pick a spot in the Memento Mori to place it, and he climbs to the top of the tower, positioning her skull so that she's forever looking out onto the world. After Isla's death, Spike embraces life on the mainland. The next morning, Spike treks back to the island and leaves the baby outside the gate with a note explaining that she isn't infected, and that he's named her Isla. In a moment of rage and grief, Jamie races out to the sea at high tide to try to find Spike, but he has already disappeared. Spike's decision to leave the safety of the isolated island to explore the mainland alone appears to symbolize that he's left his childhood behind. But a group of infected soon find him while he's cooking fish, and he flees his camping spot. In the film's most surprising moment, he's saved by a man in a bright purple tracksuit and gold jewelry who calls himself Jimmy (Jack O'Connell). Most importantly, he's the boy who survived the film's savage opening. Jimmy is joined by several other young people with long blond hair and matching, colorful tracksuits who kill the infected with large spears. Their appearance is a stark contrast to Spike and the other island survivors, who are haggard. The group's look is reminiscent of Jimmy Savile. The once hugely popular British television presenter who after his death in 2011 was revealed to be a prolific sexual abuser of children and adults. It's possible that in the universe of the horror franchise, Savile's crimes were never uncovered. Jimmy asks Spike if he'd like to go with him, and the film ends there. The scene sets the stage for the sequel, "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple," which arrives in theaters on January 16, 2026.
