Spark Country (review of Loitering with Intent, by Muriel Spark)

SPARK COUNTRY

It is reassuring to open Muriel Spark’s 16th novel and find the usual complement of defrocked priests, commercial charlatans, frayed nobles, and profane nonagenarians. These are the longtime tenants of Mrs. Spark’s kingdom, which has never, despite certain resemblances to it, been quite of this world. The times and places and happenings of her books may seem, for stretches, almost real, but just as her grammar occasionally collapses, her plots inevitably blip off the radar screen of the possible. Her constant readers have come to expect a certain weirdness with her wit, and will not be surprised to hear her latest heroine, Fleur Talbot, describing her own concerns as “slightly hallucinatory.” But Mrs. Spark herself, in this

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About the Author

Thomas Mallon

SPARK COUNTRY

It is reassuring to open Muriel Spark’s 16th novel and find the usual complement of defrocked priests, commercial charlatans, frayed nobles, and profane nonagenarians. These are the longtime tenants of Mrs. Spark’s kingdom, which has never, despite certain resemblances to it, been quite of this world. The times and places and happenings of her books may seem, for stretches, almost real, but just as her grammar occasionally collapses, her plots inevitably blip off the radar screen of the possible. Her constant readers have come to expect a certain weirdness with her wit, and will not be surprised to hear her latest heroine, Fleur Talbot, describing her own concerns as “slightly hallucinatory.” But Mrs. Spark herself, in this