There is certainly a remoteness, a lack of ordinary compassion, in [Mrs Spark's] dealings with characters, but this is part of the premise of her fiction; if we feel sorry in the wrong way, it's because our emotions are as messy and imprecise as life, part of the muddle she is sorting out…. [Not only is she] an unremittingly Catholic novelist, committed to immutable truths, but … she is [also] uncommonly interested in the shapes assumed by these truths as perceived in the tumult of random events and felt upon insensitive fallen flesh. The question for the reader is not at all whether he accepts the truths, but whether the patterns are made good and recognised. Reading them, like writing them, is a work of the imagination, fallen or not. What establishes their validity is … imaginative cohesion, a rightness in the shapes, a truth sensed in the fictions.

The easiest way into this kind of fiction, which shows the world as bearing obscure figurations of meaning like a novel, is by way of The Comforters…. Here is a novel which looks into the question of what kind of truth can be told in a novel. It creates a quite powerful sense—still not absent from later and less openly experimental stories—that to make fictions is in a way a presumptuous thing to do, because the novelist is, unlike God, free at the expense of his creatures. Of course the characters fight back: Caroline, the heroine—who as a Catholic convert knows about absolute truth and is also expert in theory of the novel—does her best to resist manipulation by the mind of the unseen novelist who is putting her into a story and trying to shape her life. So she tries to spoil the plot by an exercise of free will…. The voices Caroline hears recounting or prophesying her actions are novelistic; they are one voice differentiated into many, always speaking in the past tense. (Later Mrs Spark is often, as a novelist, devious about tenses.) The novelist arbitrarily arranges fantastic and pointless coincidences. Mrs Hogg, standing for a singularly odious piety, vanishes when not in the story, having no other life.

The tone of The Comforters is civilised and often frivolous, but it is naggingly about something serious, and the difficulties of saying such things in terms of a convention so absurd and arbitrary as a novel. The plot is deliberately complicated, since the question asked is, how can such an organised muddle of improbabilities, further distorted by the presumptuous claims of the writer on space and time, say anything true or interesting? One of the answers, if one may abstract it, is that even among the falsities of a novel, as among the shapelessnesses of ordinary life, truth figures; and it does so because the imagination, in so far as it is good, is bound by categories which stand in a relation to absolute truth. This shows up in a certain repeated atavism in Spark plots—the assumption must be that the ancient patterns have a more certain relation with the truth. (p. 397)

[Memento Mori] has a superb morbid accuracy, a poetic concentration on a narrow society of people and ideas…. Charmian [is] a novelist within the novel, still giving 'to those disjointed happenings a shape', and well aware that this shape is a deception, like all fiction…. Memento Mori may be slightly overloaded with incident; at this stage Mrs Spark wants swirling activity as well as subtle dialogue and occult figuration.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is nearer to fable and shorter. It has so many heavy hints about the diabolic nature of Dougal Douglas that it could be made to look like a more fictional Screwtape Letters, but it is really a subtle book. The typing ghost of The Comforters now roams arbitrarily about interfering in everybody's life…. Like a novelist, he seduces people into wanton or even self-destructive acts…. Again there is an intense concentration on a small society, again there are tell-tale atavisms (Dougal's dread of water, the cysts on his head). There are also chill Edinburgh high spirits; the novelist herself wantons with the story of the tunnel and the dead nuns.

The last of the heavily plotted books (so far) was The Bachelors; but the world has the same arbitrary limitation, a world of bachelors, their friends and mistresses. Just as, in The Comforters, we are asked to consider the analogy between the writing of a novel and a temporary loss of sanity, we are here made to see an affinity between novel-writing and mediumship (fraudulent and authentic in indeterminable degrees, but fundamentally alien to the truth) and between mediumship and the disease of epilepsy. Mediums, like novelists, speak in a variety of voices, depend on stock responses in their audiences; yet they are no more their own masters than epileptics, who suffer (as all stories do) from atavism in the central nervous system. Yet, like writers, they are sometimes thought very wise. The Bachelors is a comic performance, although it is, as the hero notices, 'all demonology and to do with creatures of the air'. Its comedy arises from the corruptions it deals with; and these imply a primal innocence, which later became Mrs Spark's central topic.

Thus The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie treats of the loss of innocence. It may well be the best written of these superbly written books; there is a fusion of tone and material. There is a characteristic Spark voice, slightly pedantic, produced in Scotland's good schools…. This faint pedantry suits Miss Brodie…. The tone is now more important than the plot: ordinary expectations are flouted by skipping to and fro in time from the Thirties and the schoolgirls to the present time of their maturity.

The unpredictable and often absurd acts and assertions of Miss Brodie are precisely what amuses us; but they also have unpredictable consequences (one girl burnt in the fire, being Miss Brodie's notion of dross; another, taught to transfigure the commonplace, herself uncomfortably transfigured). Miss Brodie fancies herself one of the secular elect, a modern justified sinner; and she assumes a novelist's, or God's, power over character. But her life assumes penitential patterns familiar to the instructed, and repeated with pain by the treacherous Sandy. Hindsight is liberally provided from the outset; but the dominant image is of the justified Miss Brodie presiding calmly over a lost innocence. (pp. 397-98)

[In The Girls of Slender Means the] arrangements are such that slender means and bodies become figures of beautiful poverty; but it is Selina's slenderness that enables her to destroy the image of paradise by a breach, as it were, of the rule of the order, so providing Nicholas with the vision of evil which leads him to the Church, and in the end to martyrdom….

It may seem that the parable element bulks rather large, that the novel is itself trying to get through the eye of a needle. But Mrs Spark uses all her power 'to love and animate the letter'. The commonplace may show the operation of these figures, and others, but it is still represented with an arbitrary novelistic richness….

Such novels assume the reader's sympathetic participation in muddle, they assume a reality unaware that it conceals patterns of truth. But when an imagination … makes fictions it imposes patterns, and the patterns are figures of the truth. The relations of time and eternity are asserted by juxtaposing poetry and mess, by solemn puns about poverty. None of it would matter to the pagan were it not for the admirable power with which all the elements are fused into shapes of self-evident truth—the power one looks for in poems. (p. 398)