#muriel-spark

#muriel-spark

Death comes for us all, but if you're a character in a Muriel Spark novel, it may come faster than you think. In Not to Disturb, a poetry-quoting butler orchestrating the murder-suicide of his master and mistress says of two intruders that they are nothing more than minor characters: "They don't come into the story." The unhappy pair is later dispatched, as if by afterthought, in a subordinate clause:

I never felt the influence of Muriel Spark, despite the fact that she was a substantial female figure in British literature. It's a pity, because there was much to learn from her macabre, entirely unsentimental art and its account of the strange violence of living. It was only quite recently, when I came across a new volume of her collected letters (meticulously edited by Dan Gunn), that I first felt confronted by her persona.

Spark believed herself wired into a supernatural process happening within all things, sensing knowledge beyond normal channels and experiencing events she wrote about.