Edmund Wilson once remarked that "the English do not insist on having the women in their fiction made attractive." Muriel Spark's readers on both sides of the Atlantic do not seem to insist on any of her fictional characters being appealing. And her 15th novel, Territorial Rights, is populated by as rum a lot as you will find between hard covers, even in these disenchanted times….

On the surface, the book might pass for a comedy of decaying manners…. Yet underneath the deftly paced plot and the gleaming prose there lurks a disconcerting darkness that goes beyond black humor.

The trouble, I think, is that the characters are dislikable to a degree that is fatal to the novel. True, other writers have given us obnoxious characters—Evelyn Waugh, for one—who share some of the nastiness of Spark's creatures. But one does not recall them with the same kind of distaste one feels on putting down Territorial Rights.

A comparison with Spark's earlier work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, may help to clarify the point. Miss Brodie, not a likable person to say the least, loses her teaching job when an affair of hers is revealed by a student, Sandy, who later becomes a nun and wins fame for a "strange" book on psychology. At the end, Sandy is asked about the influences on her work. Clutching the bars of her grille at the nunnery, she replies, "There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime." We are left, then, with a grudging admiration of the difficult Miss Brodie and the recognition that to have been one of her girls was no bad thing.

The people of Territorial Rights, by contrast, are empty of the human ingredient that made Miss Jean Brodie worthy of respect. Robert's mother is told by a friend, "You're mistaken if you think wrong-doers are always unhappy…. The really professional evil-doers love it. They're as happy as larks in the sky." That neatly sums up the ironic point Spark has been trying to make, but the facts of her characters' lives belie this….

The best that can be said for this book, therefore, is that the ultimate failure of Spark's design for her characters—doing evil joyfully—is an affirmation of the moral order.