Muriel Spark (1918- )

Muriel Spark began as a sharp, funny and disconcerting observer of bourgeois life, with novels like Memento Mori (1959) and The Bachelors (1960), which attracted the admiring attention of Evelyn Waugh. Then in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she published a succession of novellas in which description was reduced to the minimum necessary for her immediate atmospheric purpose, and which achieved the dislocating clarity of dream. In all these books natural order is disturbed, most evidently in The Hothouse by the East River (1973), in which nothing is as it seems to be: the principal characters, living in the New York of the early 1970s where "sick is interesting, sick is real," were, we learn, killed by a flying bomb in London in 1944, and it is their alternative unlived lives of which we read. In Not to Disturb (1971) everything which is going to happen in the novel has already happened in the minds of the characters: the servants in a chateau in Switzerland know that their master and mistress, and the secretary who has been lover to both, will die by murder and suicide, before the deaths have taken place, and have accordingly sold their stories to the world's press and arranged for the arrival of the television cameras. These novels are probably the finest examples of "Magic Realism" in English.

Yet in the five novels she has published since 1976 Muriel Spark has abandoned this sort of experiment with time and structure. Her fiction, though still original and unsettling, has nevertheless again positioned itself in the "real" world of sense and society. She has eschewed the oddity with which she flirted. Her latest novels affirm the truth of what the French critic Nathalie Sarraute (herself the author of some of the most interesting examples of the nouveau roman) wrote in L'Ere du Soupçon: "the traditional novel retains an eternal youthfulness; its generous and flexible form can still, without resorting to any major change, adapt itself to all the new stories, all the new characters and all the new conflicts which develop within successive societies. And it is in the novelty of characters and conflicts that the principal interest and the only worthwhile renewal of the novel can be found."

Her novels represent a distillation of experience; she has always remained true to her sense that "everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost, and wonders never cease" (Loitering with Intent, 1981). Her novels are notable not for their fidelity to life, nor for an attempt to impose patterns on experience, but rather for their awareness of that strange substance whence patterns are formed. Inasmuch as the novelist's problem is to effect the perfect marriage between manner and matter, so that the novel satisfies as an aesthetic objects, while at the same time permitting the elaboration of discussible themes, then she succeeds time and again.

Nowhere is this more evident than in The Only Problem (1984). The subject might seem too large for fiction, for it is that posed in The Book of Job: "how can an omnipotent and benevolent Creator permit the unspeakable sufferings of the world?" Conversely, this short novel might seem too slight for its subject. But Job itself is a short book, and as Spark makes her hero Harvey Gotham observe, in a judgement that might be applied to the whole body of her fiction (or at least to its spirit): "moving passages about for no other reason than that they are more logical is no good for The Book of Job. It doesn't make it come clear. The Book of Job will never come clear. It doesn't matter. It's a poem."

Acceptance of the fundamentally mysterious nature of life is critical to an appreciation of Spark. Truth is beyond reason, its recognition an act of faith. But experience itself cannot be bounded by reason either. Human nature is contrary, and its remorseless selfishness always threatens to destroy the fabric which alone can sustain it. Spark's art is founded on paradox. The manner is inconsequential, but no modern writer has a clearer sense of the ineluctable nature of consequence. She has said that her narrative model is to be found in the Border Ballads, where one thing happens and then another, without explanation. Yet no one has a more intrusive authorial voice, setting us right, warning, advising, or choosing to mislead. She can write of the gravest matters in the lightest, even most frivolous, of tones, and then remind us that a thoughtless and apparently unimportant action can have the most appalling consequence, and be, in fact, a monstrous sin.