“He looked as if he would murder me, and he did.” Muriel Spark’s most famous of her famous sentences, gleaming with ice and mirth, is to be found in her short story, The Portobello Road. It’s a good window from which to peep at the work of this great writer, born in Edinburgh 100 years ago today.
Together with Iris Murdoch, Spark was the British novelist who put an end to the tedious angry young men novels of the 1950s. Murdoch did it by writing about big philosophical themes next to which those self-important males were shrunk to the size of garden gnomes.
Spark wrote about small worlds that could suddenly yawn open to reveal eternity. They often featured rejoicing young women, coming into their own, while surrounded by angry frustrated men and charismatic women, many of whom think nothing of stooping to forgery, blackmail and murder.
Not since GK Chesterton’s novels has the sea of good and evil been sailed with such a sense of billowing adventure. From 1957 till shortly before her death in 2006, Spark produced 22 novels in which she shook up novelistic technique, and revealed the unexplored potential of horror, mystery and ghost stories.
She was an avant-garde writer with a popular appeal. She adapted some techniques from the ballad and repetitive verse forms; others from the Old Testament, certain 19th-century dandies, and mid-20th French writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet. But her stories had such a lightness of touch that they could be read for sheer pleasure, usually in a single sitting. All but one were as taut and compressed as a novel by Georges Simenon, whose work she liked.
As a result, for long years the underlying seriousness of what she wrote was missed even by some of her fellow writers. More often, what happened was that the worth of one novel might be underestimated by one writer but treasured by another.
As with Simenon, the rhythm of her prose is important for the meaning of her work. Simenon’s best descriptive scenes can often be successfully broken up into verse. Likewise, Spark’s work could marry the techniques of the French nouveau roman with the rhythms of Greek classical dialogue (a technique learned from Ivy Compton-Burnett).
The final sentences of two novels (The Public Image, 1968, and The Driver’s Seat, 1970) have the cadences of dactylic hexameter. Such found verse – with its echoes of classical poetry or, elsewhere, courtly forms like the villanelle – help explain why she continued to think of herself primarily as a poet.
But they also remind us that, as an impoverished young woman, she eked a living by writing works of criticism. By the time she began to write novels in her mid-30s, she knew exactly the effects she wanted.
The mystery of her novels is not a puzzle to be solved. It’s a poem that finally makes sense
Out of the 22 novels, there are no more than three or four that didn’t find a champion among the illustrious list of writers and critics like Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Iris Murdoch, John Updike, Frank Kermode, Christine Brooke-Rose and Gabriel Josipovici. The fastidious New Yorker championed her early-middle work aggressively, publishing at least two novels in almost their entirety. The only distinguished, consistent refusenik is Harold Bloom, who denied her entry into his Western Canon.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is her most famous work. Its success made her wealthy – she referred to it as her milk cow. But other works deserve at least as much attention. The writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac had film directors like Alfred Hitchcock who could truly appreciate their innovative tales of mystery and horror. Like those stories, Spark’s novels also focused on the victim, but they never found as talented a director.
It’s tempting to daydream about what Hitchcock would have made of a story like The Portobello Road. It is an early short work but after writing it Spark felt she had assured artistic control over the form. It certainly gives us a glimpse of her originality.
The story is ostensibly a ghost story, when a murdered woman, nicknamed Needle, spots her murderer, George, at the London flea market, and begins to haunt him to breaking point by saying, cheerfully, “Hello, George”.
However, like a lot of her novels, the story can be read as an arresting take on the detective story. Agatha Christie startled readers, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by making the narrator the murderer. Here, the narrator is the murder victim.
Unlike Christie, Spark does not keep the secret till the end. That Needle is dead is revealed right at the beginning. In future novels, Spark would repeatedly unveil, right at the start, the secret that a classical mystery story or thriller usually reserves for the very end.
Her plots are not based on finding the criminal’s identity. Nor are her novels like Simenon’s – where the mystery lies in exploring why an ordinary man turns criminal.
Spark didn’t care much for exploring motive. The first time she met Murdoch, the two writers eventually got round to discussing their craft. Murdoch’s writing was always concerned with ethical psychology and psychoanalysis. Like most writers, she felt there was a point when her characters began to take over the writing. She asked Spark what it felt like for her.
Spark replied that her characters do exactly what she wanted them to do. It would be a surprising reply coming from a novelist preoccupied with character. But it’s not surprising coming from a mystery writer: writing about characters driven by plot is her stock in trade.
Yet, if she was not interested in who did it or why, where lies the mystery? It lies in identifying the true plot. As in life, the real mystery is not in who is doing what to whom and why – but what is really happening to us. What is really going on in what is taking place?
Her stories are full of mad characters pursuing intrigue and hidden agendas in their little worlds. As with the classic detective story, her stories are full of signs and clues – every object has a tale to tell but must be read right.
But we soon find that, in pursuing their intrigues, the characters aren’t revealing a plot. Filled with their self-importance, taking their own public or charisma too seriously, they literally lose the plot.
The real plot needs to be found. Indeed, the plot is about feeling lost and then being found.
The mystery of her novels is not a puzzle to be solved. It’s a poem that finally makes sense and, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds, reveals the heroine with its beams. She is the novelist of transfiguration.
Spark’s international reputation has faded in recent years. But she’s your novelist if you’re from a small world, pullulating with small-time crooks, forgers, blackmailers, murderers, fixers, charismatics and stigmatics, staking their territorial rights and plotting a takeover of your life.
There are no novels more malicious and thirst-quenching than hers. You will drink them down and, like her confident heroines, go coolly on your way rejoicing.