Muriel Spark, in a series of tightly organized, sharply pointed novels, has achieved, with an amazing degree of illumination, translations of vast abstractions into crisp, containing modern terms, never losing the necessary qualities of suggestiveness and humility.

For she has tackled the most difficult translation of all…. She has obviously set herself the task of bringing good and evil over into concrete objects of consideration and into explicit situations. It is a temptation to say that she is never didactic, but simply investigative, a sentiment of this sort usually being considered loftily complimentary. But actually she maintains firm stands: she is a translator of something objective (and in that sense foreign); she has the born translator's compulsion to make it accessible, and for the work which she loves, she entertains an undeviating conviction of the rightness of its terms.

Her frame of reference is the Catholic moral universe; her translations of its terms are into the language, actions, and above all, frames of mind of present-day England and derivative cultures. There must be an obstinate streak in her which insists upon the nearly impossible…. The achievements of Mrs. Spark are many, but surely the most striking is her totally successful air of unself-consciousness. She gives an impression of moving in an atmosphere rather than creating it…. [She] perceives effortlessly the real not only under the apparent, but permeating it. (pp. 129-30)

[In] her work the surfaces of life are both conductors to its depths and also—with the apparent inconsistency of existence—deceptive camouflage for its deeper reaches. In Memento Mori, she encompasses both extremes. Here, in a novel where almost all of the characters are belligerently old, she uses their apparent indestructibility as an ironic contrast with their frail tenure of mortality and also as a means of access to their fears. The stoutly barred door advertizes the terror within at the same time that it conceals it. And usually it includes the reason for the terror, for the murderer has entered long ago in the innocent glare of midday and lies happily hidden, waiting for his moment to come to him. (p. 131)

Mrs. Spark ticks off the types whose neat but adamantine self-sufficiency is the engine of their failure. In her method, there is a Kafka-like devotion to the point of contact between extremes. Possibly the chief note of distinction between the two, however, is that whereas Kafka uses disgust as the junction from which his many lines of meaning radiate, it is a sort of engagingness from which the trains go out in Mrs. Spark's interpretations. Alec Warner, in Memento Mori, is a far-from-lovable character, but there are in his composition those elements which cause a reader to warm to a character—which make the unregenerate Scrooge someone to collect in a way that no one ever wanted to collect a character from Theodore Dreiser. (p. 132)

[Within] the old minor poet Percy Mannering … smallness reaches large dimensions, and an epic pettiness is attained through lifelong unobstructed devotion. Here also the Kafka-like proneness of Mrs. Spark to convey large issues through familiar smallness comes to high achievement…. (pp. 132-33)

[Here] is no doomed universe. Mrs. Spark is as far from the authorized versions of predestination, newly revised, as she is from sentimental evasion. She would probably agree … that the action of a novel should ultimately rest on a realistic conception of existence…. (p. 133)

There is [in her work] a happy fusion of setting and people. As there is growth of personality and theme within her novels, so also as an integral part of this process, there is a progressive self-fulfillment of her setting. If there is none of the romantic proneness to treat the setting as opulent scenery before which the characters act, neither is there that self-consciously thematic treatment of setting which, in Thomas Hardy, makes the reader feel as though he were being managed with the kindly condescension due to the slow-witted and having indicated to him, with a slow patient forefinger, the philosophical dimensions of the landscape. Mrs. Spark in this respect fits in admirably with Elizabeth Bowen's conception of setting brought to its ideal function: "Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it." (pp. 133-34)

Possibly in The Ballad of Peckham Rye this admirable treatment of setting is most observable, although not any more skillfully used than in her other novels. Here, however, the devil walks in unlikely haunts. Why it should be unusual for him to circulate among the drab energetic ways of British middle-class to lower-middle-class existence is not clear, but somehow he is usually expected to function within greater ceremonial blaze. Nor is one definitely authorized by Mrs. Spark's treatment to call Dougal Douglas, the central figure of The Ballad of Peckham Rye, the devil; rather, one has suspicions in that direction. By the end of the novel, however, there is no doubt whatsoever as to the evil which he has so joyfully welcomed into himself and even more joyfully dispensed.

Yet Mrs. Spark has much of the mystery writer about her: she knows the importance of gathering effects. These she has invested with thematic significance far beyond the dimensions of the typical mystery; also, the truth progressively dawns rather than bursts at the end of things. But she knows the narrative importance of a growth of light, and the uses of tension in that respect. (p. 134)

[Mrs. Spark has the] cruel ability of certain ancient ballad writers to recognize marks and signs and to be shocked but not surprised when the diabolic eye grows drumly. There is an appropriate grimness with which she follows Dougal Douglas in his rise to clerkly importance and beyond, and retails his crescent ways. There is also a grim economy about her treatment of the bitterness, even to the point of death, which he causes.

Nor is one allowed the satisfaction of Dougal's failures; for when these occur, his manipulation of them is confident and authoritative, his transitions to something better easily within his own control. It is true that at the end when he is left writing successful autobiographical novels on the Riviera, all does not seem to be too entirely well with him, in the light of hints that previously he has slipped successfully out of so many fields of endeavor that almost no careers are any longer open to his talents. But nevertheless he remains a threat beyond the point of the novel's conclusion. (p. 135)

[In Robinson] evil moves more obliquely than it does in [Mrs. Spark's] other works. That is, its early ways are oblique; when it comes into direct attack, it becomes massively apparent, but always couched in human terms: when her effects come out of the foggy eeriness of adumbration, there is a sort of tropical glare lighting up their significance, the one exception being Robinson himself, the misanthrope. He stalks through the setting of his island, always alone, a trifle melodramatic in his lonely satisfactions, in his paradoxical pride that he has not allowed his three unwanted guests, sole survivors of the plane crash, to break through into the isolation of himself. His attitude is paradoxical, for there is a small note of surliness within it which contradicts his main point and which suggests that there has been an intrusion into his aloofness. But if his attitude is illogical in a minor way, it is even more impressively human….

Robinson, like all of [Mrs. Spark's] major (and many minor) characters, is never imprisoned within a dominant trait. In his case, as in many others, it is a kind of central elusiveness—suggestive, but never admitting, of final definition, that provokes probing rather than cataloguing. And it is through the deserted island, over which Robinson nevertheless seems to rule so absolutely (and at least in the manner of crops, so inefficiently) that Mrs. Spark establishes his mysterious loneliness. (p. 136)

Roaming the landscape of the island, freed from both the restraints of life in England and from the presence of Robinson, are January's two fellow survivors of the plane crash, Jimmie Waterford and Tom Wells. In the case of each of them there is an ambiguity of intention in which evil may possibly have a full hold, as it most certainly does stand in part possession. Here, the probability of violence impinges; and there is a certain affinity with Graham Greene in the easy confluence of mystery suspense with theological conviction except that in Greene, mental action is matched with external movement; in Mrs. Spark, the second is emphatically subordinate to the first. In this respect, she is closer to the frame of mind of Joyce in Ulysses and Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury than she is to the Aristotelian conception of tragedy as an action. Suspense gathers mightily in her novel, but the approach is still more meditative than it is dramatic. The matter is, however, hierarchical, not competitive: psychological examination and spiritual examination have the upper hand.

Nevertheless, the obvious catalyst is the setting, the nature of the island…. [It] is the island whose oppressive rural charms lower upon [Tom] and compress secretiveness until its tightness must out. Nor can one evil fail in so obvious a situation to seek out another: the mysteriousness of Robinson demands a blackmailer's focused attention.

Jimmie also brings to the island a past that prefers wider places for freer circulation and that sort of concealment part of whose basic nature is circuitousness. His is a more amiable aptitude for perversity; his appetite for evil uses the pointed complaisance of the freeloader. It is a more pleasant brand than Tom's of the same general invention.

Her stay upon the island is both a revelation and a confirmation to January. As in all of Mrs. Spark's novels, examination reveals an interesting world in which grace wars with evil. The former is intrinsically invincible; but the latter flourishes where welcomed…. January has learned nothing new, but she has vastly extended the implications of a steady unsentimental Catholic view. (pp. 138-39)

Humor is the essential ingredient of a Muriel Spark novel, the pattern of mind which suffuses her translations….

In The Bachelors, the humor flows easily into the word choice and the figures of speech, knowing where to stop and insinuate; for Mrs. Spark, like Lawrence Sterne and Lewis Carroll, knows that humor is never stronger than when it is suggestive. Her goal is not theirs, and the feeling of her humorous universe is quite different from theirs, but there is an identity of over-all control. (p. 139)

Mrs. Spark handles her most vital insinuations in the language, if not the century, of Lawrence Sterne.

In The Bachelors, the grimness of her humor enjoys special attention: she studies her bachelors when they are physically alone, and she watches them take this aloneness into company. Often they compare, but they never share. They never give up this totally central possession. It is both their chief pleasure and their source of pathetic isolation. Above all, our own point of view remains investigative and even sympathetic, but we are denied an empathy that would confuse our critical faculties. (pp. 140-41)

What constitutes the prime of life? In British civilization it is certainly most accessible in those hearty, fortyish gentlemen from Charles Dickens or Punch, red-cheeked, joyous, and upright. Ideally, in their legend, there runs an insinuation of broad acres and constitutional goodness, but actually their real prototype is Hogarth's industrious apprentice grown rotund in belly and bank account, both swellings being virtue's behavior under active encouragement….

The irony of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie lies in superficial affinity with this legend, adapted to the terms and figure of an instructor in a successful girl's school, and in sharp inner distinction. One is tempted to see a commentary on the whole legend, but Mrs. Spark is primarily an analyzer of particular situations, not a satirist. The searching spotlight is very definitely on Miss Jean Brodie in particular, rather than on successfully domineering instructors in general. Indeed, so carefully is it focused on her ways and motives, shrewdly viewed, that the supernatural is relegated to the power behind an insinuated approach, in unawareness of which Miss Brodie moves, rather than something which touches down into the action. (p. 141)

Miss Brodie's pointed life left no room for fruitful bewilderment until it was too late. Like others in Mrs. Spark's works, she suffered from self-enclosure. Sandy Stranger, one of Miss Brodie's set of girls, now grown through the years into reminiscence and assessment, has thoughts on the subject: "… she began to sense what went to the makings of Miss Brodie who had elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn't stand it any more." (p. 142)

[With] an objectivity that does not hesitate to lean cantingly from its own definition [Mrs. Spark] follows the trail of even-pulsed, practical evil, confident of its ways. In her short story "The Black Madonna" she records with a lively clinical exactitude the ruthless efficiency of a novena-faithful woman in giving away her embarrassingly dark child, who seems possibly to be the eventual result of many prayers to the Black Madonna.

Perhaps we have here the indication of whatever weakness Mrs. Spark bears as an artist. Like every other artist, she emphasizes—and in doing so, necessarily omits. There is kindness in here, a brisk sort of kindness, as in her approach to old Mrs. Jepp in The Comforters, but little sustained tenderness. There is also the penalty that has to be paid for that air of competence that surrounds all of her characters, but especially the wicked ones or the failures, who march so surely under their respective banners: their briskness lacks leisurely psychological curves. And perhaps even loneliness is too sure of its own nature and never gets lost in fearful informal curiosity about itself. (p. 143)

John Hazard Wildman, "Translated by Muriel Spark," in Nine Essays in Modern Literature, edited by Donald E. Stanford (copyright 1965 by Louisiana State University Press), Louisiana State University Press, 1965, pp. 129-44.