Why I love the novels of Muriel Spark

Lately I’ve been thinking about what it is that I like so much about Muriel Spark. One reason, I suppose, is her sense of humour, her mischievous sense of humour. 

“I happened to get a job for Patrick very easily, having been actually asked by a bookseller in the Charing Cross Road, when I was in his shop one day rummaging around the second-hand shelves, if I knew of a young man capable of minding the shop, selling books and also packaging and posting the mail orders. But this brought on my head a series of reactions from his wife, Mabel, who rang me every day and sometimes twice on the same day with alternating expressions of gratitude and reproach. First I was a wonderful woman to have done this great good deed for Patrick, especially as he now got more pay; and secondly I was a fat old whore who was never done trying to wheedle him into my bed with my wiles and favours. For Patrick’s sake I tried to humour her as long as I could. I hardly listened to her on the phone, so that my answers didn’t always correspond to what she was saying: ‘It was a pleasure, Mabel. No trouble on my part. I hope everything will go well with you, now,’ I said, once, when she was actually accusing me of ‘doing it upside down’ with her husband.” (A Far Cry from Kensington, ch.6) 

Before picking up A Far Cry from Kensington, I tried reading and gave up on my first Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment. Ferrante may be good—it’s too early to tell—but the book is heavy, intense, claustrophobic, and I didn’t feel like being in Olga’s mind. Muriel Spark in contrast has a light touch, even though she often writes about disturbing subjects. 

Another reason I like Muriel Spark is that she often reminds us that we don’t really know other people, even people in our lives. 

“What did I really know of all the people I had met in the offices where I had worked, day after day? What did I know of Kate? Or of Isobel, perhaps in love with someone, not the father of her child? What had I ever known of Wanda?” (ch.12)

In Reality and Dreams, when Marigold goes missing: 

“The answers that Marigold’s family and friends were able to give to the police about her habits, her possible movements, her whereabouts, only served to show how little anyone knew her.” (ch.10) 

Muriel Spark conveys that sense of human mystery, that distance between human beings, and sometimes further, the inability to truly know another person. In The Public Image for example, she writes about an unhappy marriage behind some carefully constructed façade, but how could Annabel Christopher imagine such contempt and hatred her husband has for her? (Imagine if Muriel Spark were alive today and came to know of the Gisèle Pelicot story). In The Driver’s Seat, she depicts Lise’s actions but not her thoughts, as though reconstructing the events—why Lise does what she does is not answered because it’s unanswerable, beyond understanding, beyond analysis. 

And because we can never truly know another person (the way we get to know, say, Tolstoy’s characters), Muriel Spark often writes about evil lurking in ordinary people, in people we know. When I first picked up The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I didn’t know, because of the deceptively light touch, that that witty book about a charismatic teacher was actually about manipulation. The book I’ve just read, A Far Cry from Kensington, is about the publishing industry and there’s a character named Hector Bartlett, who is quite similar to Billy O’Brien in The Public Image, a kind of parasite one can’t get rid of, and someone willing to do anything to get what he wants. But if Billy O’Brien is motivated by shameless greed and entitlement, Hector Bartlett is driven by anger and resentment because Mrs Hawkins has called him a “pisseur de copie” and said he “urinates frightful prose”, and there’s a viciousness in Hector Bartlett that is quite terrifying. It’s even more terrifying because Muriel Spark chooses Mrs Hawkins to be the narrator (a first-person narrator is quite unusual for her novels) and keeps him at a distance. We don’t know his thinking. 

Her novels are so witty and funny (and quotable), and at the same time so disturbing.