Where to start with Muriel Spark: a guide to her best novels

Muriel Spark, the author of our August Book of the Month, Loitering with Intent (1981), is one of the distinctive geniuses of English-language fiction in the 20th century. 

She was a writer of astonishing productivity, writing 22 novels which were varied in subject matter but united by her vision. They were short – usually 100 to 150 pages in length – and dealt in the darkest themes with the lightest touch. ‘She looks upon pain and death with a dry, glittering eye,’ wrote David Lodge. 

Spark was born in Scotland and lived in Zimbabwe, London, New York and Rome, but her work was untraceable, with no precedents and no imitators. (Who would even dare?) Her books were usually funny, always surprising, and made no attempt to be realistic: yet she bottled the human spirit – typically its worst impulses – like a genie. ‘You may not call Spark’s novels lifelike,’ wrote the novelist Allan Massie, ‘but it is probable, even certain, that you will someday, sometimes, find life to be Sparklike.’ For her own part, Spark felt that she had ‘liberated the novel in many ways, showing how anything whatsoever can be narrated, any experience set down, including sheer damn cheek.’ 

Here is our guide to the best of Muriel Spark.  

Most of Muriel Spark’s novels are funny, but two early novels encapsulate the ripest elements of her comedy. The Ballad of Peckham Rye was the first of two novels she published in 1960 (I told you she was prolific), and opens with an impeccably succinct confrontation: 

‘Get away from here, you dirty swine,’ she said. 

‘There’s a dirty swine in every man,’ he said. 

‘Showing your face round here again,’ she said. 

‘Now Mavis, now Mavis,’ he said. 

The argument – leading to a punch in the mouth – is part of the fallout from the arrival in Peckham of Dougal Douglas, a sinister Scots charmer (‘You can’t help but like him. He’s different,’ says one local) who brings havoc to the inhabitants’ lives. As the book opens, Dougal has been run out of town with a black eye, and in the rest of the novel we find out why. There’s something devilish about him – are those sawn-off horns under his hairline, or just cysts? – and in scenes of brittle, quippish dialogue, he fills the residents with ideas, from taking Mondays off work to other things. ‘He’s a sex maniac, I was told.’ There’s a quality of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing in the workplace where Dougal settles himself, where the mundanity of the job contrasts with the strange behaviour of the employees. But then, as Dougal says – having just offered to comb his boss’s hair – ‘All human beings who breathe are a bit unnatural.’ It might be a manifesto for Spark’s work. 

Families – that great engine of the novel – rarely feature in Spark’s fiction. This may be because her own family life was uncertain: she quickly divorced her husband Sidney Oswald Spark (keeping his name because ‘it possessed some ingredient of life and fun’) and was estranged from her son, Robin. Instead, her novels are filled with surrogate families: the school in Miss Jean Brodie, the workplace in Peckham Rye, and in The Girls of Slender Means (1963), the May of Teck Club, a residential institution in London for young ladies at the end of the Second World War. The girls there are down-at-heel but relentlessly cheerful, and their lives are contrasted with three older ladies who have never left the Club, and who resent the changes it has experienced. In this way, Spark reflects the political upheavals in Britain after the war, when the country elected its first Labour government. Some of the funniest moments come from Spark’s salty skewering of the publishing industry through the character of Jane, whose employer, a publisher, has her ‘do some of the detective work on new authors […] to find out their financial circumstances and psychologically weak points so that he could deal with them to a publisher’s best advantage.’ This is – as we shall see – not the only time in Spark’s career she would bite the hand that fed her. 

Appreciation of Spark’s work tends to focus on the string of major works of the 1960s that made her name, but there is brilliance both before and after. Her debut novel, The Comforters (1957), showed from the beginning that hers was a unique talent: it is about a woman, Caroline, who keeps hearing typing noises and becomes aware that she is a character in a novel. It was flavoured by Spark’s conversion to Catholicism – hence its reflections on power, creation and control – and was praised by two fellow convert-novelists, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. (Waugh remained a fan for the rest of his life, and in 1961 sent her a copy of his last novel, Unconditional Surrender, dedicated ‘For Muriel Spark in her prime from Evelyn Waugh in his decline’). 

But if Spark’s books were off-the-wall from the first day, then in the 1970s she entered an even more experimental phase, influenced by Alain Robbe-Grillet – Spark admired his ‘obsession with exactitude’ – and the coolness and impersonality of the French nouveau roman. Spark’s work was never didactic – ‘I don’t moralise in my novels,’ she once said. ‘Maybe I should but I don’t’ – but these novels were even more dispassionate and left the reader to their own devices. Alongside The Driver’s Seat, the best novel from this period is The Hothouse by the East River (1973), about a well-off couple in New York who become convinced that a man they betrayed during the Second World War has come back from the dead to exact revenge. The result might be Spark’s strangest book of all, blending the existential despair of William Golding’s Pincher Martin with the comedy of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman – and one other secret that unites those books. ‘Mrs Spark does not want to know us any more,’ wrote one critic reviewing it. ‘She has left us all behind.’ But Spark, of course, wanted readers to follow her, provided they were willing to get up on their hind legs and make the effort.