[Muriel Spark's short] stories represent a lesser achievement than her novels, particularly the pieces in … Voices at Play. On the surface this writer possesses all the writing virtues that should make her a master of the short story: she is able in the most crisp and economical prose quickly to develop believable characters and a situation in which the reader is immersed; she is skillful in developing personality through conversation and in finding exactly the right singularity of speech to make a character stand out as a type and as an individual at the same time …; she is also able to handle point of view in any way that suits her, writing as omniscient author or in the character of a person in the story, either in the first person or as a consciousness described rather than describing; finally, she can construct her plots as tightly as her...