Muriel Spark’s acerbic, unsettling novels populated by vivid types have their origins in her rackety life
In 1954, while working on TS Eliot and popping the slimming drug Dexedrine, Spark began to suffer from hallucinations Photo: Frank Monaco/REX
The Telegraph 18 May 2014
While she was at school in Edinburgh in the Thirties, Muriel Spark met a teacher who profoundly influenced her fiction. It was not Christina Kay, the model for Spark’s most famous character, Jean Brodie, but her science teacher Sandy Buchan. As Spark recalled 50 years later in her memoir Curriculum Vitae, Buchan “impressed on us the dangers of trusting in appearances, especially when colourless, odourless and tasteless matter was concerned”. She continued: “I reflected then, and still reflect, that there could be people like that: no colour, no taste, no smell. The moral is, avoid them; they might be poison.”
The young Spark, if we trust the author’s recollection, had already perfected the unruffled moral certainty that makes her prose such a pleasure. In nearly all her 22 novels, the narrative voice sounds like a witty judge summing up a case: characters are hauled up, humorously belittled and then dragged away for punishment.
In Sparkworld, the novelist observes what appears innocuous – colourless, you might say – and sniffs out the poison. In her fifth novel, The Bachelors (1960), the pale Patrick Seton plots the murder of his pregnant girlfriend; in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, published the same year, a man working at a textile factory might actually be Satan. Spark’s vivid types belong more to the world of a Ben Jonson satire than the modern psychological novel.
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