From an extraordinary debut inspired by a real-life breakdown to a creepy masterpiece, here’s a guide to the Scottish novelist’s works
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ext week marks 20 years since the death of the Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist Muriel Spark. She was best known for her 22 novels – uncanny, astute and witty – beginning with her 1957 debut The Comforters. Here, James Bailey, the author of a new biography, Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark, guides us through her oeuvre.
Allowing for exceptions, a Spark novel has a particular method of reeling us in. She starts by introducing an enclosed community (be it of nuns, schoolgirls, or desert island castaways), which is full of gossip, deceptions and conflicts both petty and profound. Into this little world she drops a bomb: murder, scandal … or an actual bomb, if she’s feeling particularly reckless. She stands well back, and lets us watch as sparks fly.
Anyone new to Spark’s way with a story would do well to start with 1959’s darkly comic Memento Mori. The novel introduces a cast of bickering pensioners, who find themselves troubled by anonymous phone calls. Each call contains an identical message: “Remember you must die.” Does death’s imminence liberate us from our fears, squabbles, jealousies and neuroses, or do these things cling to us like barnacles until the bitter end?
