– but that is not, on the evidence of the few monosyllables afforded it, what interests Spark it is the onlookers who preoccupy her. Two courting couples returning from the dusky scope of the Rye’s broad lyrical acres stepped to the opposite pavement, leant on the railings by the swimming baths, and watched. Turned away from Mavis’, Humphrey retires to the pub, where he is promptly punched in the face by Trevor Lomas. It’s a wonderfully economical setup.Īnd it gets better. The scandal, we are told, was enormous, though we might have already sensed that from the passive construction of ‘She was seen to slam’ – not ‘she slammed’ – which suggests eyes on the exchange that rumour and gossip, privacy and propriety have currency here. The refused visitor is Humphrey Place, and he is refused for jilting Mavis’ daughter, Dixie, at the altar a few weeks previously. ‘My daughter,’ Mavis said, ‘is not in.’ She slammed the door in his face. She was seen to slam the door in his face, and he to press the bell, and she to open the door again. ‘Showing your face round here again,’ she said. ‘There’s a dirty swine in every man,’ he said. ‘Get away from here, you dirty swine,’ she said.

Will this Spark fly?Ĭhapter one throws us straight into the action: Which is what I’m doing now, this time with an early novel, The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), the fourth she published in as many years. Whether it’s Alan Taylor’s memoir, Appointment in Arezzo (2017), which attests to her brilliance as a person, or the New Yorker reviews of John Updike, which attest to her brilliance as a writer, I always feel I’m missing something when I read around Spark, and am compelled to give her another go.

The other enticement is the secondary criticism. You do not lose much time reading a Muriel Spark novel, two hundred pages constituting “a long one” for her. So why do I keep returning to Spark? Well, partly because of that other quality her novels share with sparks: their brevity. (When Nabokov described his characters as “galley slaves”, he could just as easily have been referring to Spark’s.) It’s not a good hit rate when I put it like that: 50%. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) caught, Loitering with Intent (1981) too, but The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Driver’s Seat (1970) didn’t take at all, Spark’s famously firm narrative grip seeming firm to the point of inertia in these novels, their characters just too agency-less to engage with. As with real sparks, Muriel Spark’s novels only sometimes catch alight for me.

The ballad of peckham rye