Here are some reasons for disliking the novels of Muriel Spark. First, that she is, as the mother of a friend of mine put it, a girl of slender means. Her books are too spun-out. They seem all surface, and a rather dry, sparsely furnished, though elegant and mannered surface at that. The one exception is The Mandelbaum Gate, which offers us, as the blurb-writers say, a vivid panorama of contemporary Israel. But there, if you like, is a book which lacks moral profundity. A serious young man once told me that he could find nothing but distaste for a writer who, confronted by the Arab-Israeli conflict with all its tragic moral and political dilemmas, chose to treat it all, as he put it, merely as the background for a trivial love story.
'Trivial.' The word is out. Yet Muriel Spark's novels seem, while one is reading them, to be profoundly, if obscurely, preoccupied with morality, not to say moral theology. Indeed they seem to be about nothing else. But there is no denying the obscurity. (p. 225)
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