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...

It is probably impossible to read several of Muriel Spark's novels without realizing that her Roman Catholicism is much more than an item of biographical interest: it is a potent force which has profoundly affected the shape of her art. For Miss Spark does not stop short at simply bringing the question of Catholicism into her work; she has chosen to place the traditionally Christian outlook at the very heart of everything she writes. This "outlook" is perhaps best illustrated by one of ...

Muriel Spark, in a series of tightly organized, sharply pointed novels, has achieved, with an amazing degree of illumination, translations of vast abstractions into crisp, containing modern terms, never losing the necessary qualities of suggestiveness and humility. For she has tackled the most difficult translation of all…. She has obviously set herself the task of bringing good and evil over into concrete objects of consideration and into explicit situations. It is a temptation to say that she is ne...

[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 m...

There is certainly a remoteness, a lack of ordinary compassion, in [Mrs Spark's] dealings with characters, but this is part of the premise of her fiction; if we feel sorry in the wrong way, it's because our emotions are as messy and imprecise as life, part of the muddle she is sorting out…. [Not only is she] an unremittingly Catholic novelist, committed to immutable truths, but … she is [also] uncommonly interested in the shapes assumed by these truths as perceived in the tumult ...

Sometimes it seems that writers who can write can't tell a story and those who can tell a story can't write. Because of the unfortunate division in our century between high art and popular entertainment, there are few novels that are both well-crafted and immediately appealing. Our serious fiction is formally inventive and linguistically splendid, but it seldom compels the reader to read on. ("Lolita" is one of the few novels since World War II to possess this miraculous double a...

From Thomas Mann to Patricia Highsmith and from Henry James to Daphne du Maurier, Venice has not merely exerted a potent fascination on novelists but has brought out the best in them. The beauty of mouldering palazzi reflected in water contaminated with garbage has represented spiritual deliquescence; secret courtyards, labyrinthine alley-ways and choked gardens have represented mystery, danger and intrigue. The Venetian genius loci, corrupt and corrupting, broods over Muriel Spark's Territorial Righ...

Edmund Wilson once remarked that "the English do not insist on having the women in their fiction made attractive." Muriel Spark's readers on both sides of the Atlantic do not seem to insist on any of her fictional characters being appealing. And her 15th novel, Territorial Rights, is populated by as rum a lot as you will find between hard covers, even in these disenchanted times…. On the surface, the book might pass for a comedy of decaying manners…. Yet underneath the def...

When a novelist embeds quotations from some fictitious novel in his/her own text [as Muriel Spark does in Territorial Rights], it is, of course, always with aesthetic intent, usually parodic. The glum kitchen-sink realism of Anthea's library book, its plodding record of banal thoughts and predictable emotions, is clearly intended to contrast with the sprightly narrative style, the glamorous local colour, the dazzlingly complex intrigue of Territorial Rights, and perhaps to underline the advantages en...

It may not be true, but I have the feeling that Muriel Spark is one of the few, in the category of fine writers, who has a grand time at her work. This is not because she writes comedy. It would be wrong to believe that people who write comedy sit down to their desks already laughing. However, readers who have enjoyed her novels from the early Robinson and Memento Mori may suspect that Muriel Spark sits down to her desk already malevolent. In her new book, Territorial Rights, there is hardly a character one...