"Muriel Spark is best known today for "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie," her semi-autobiographical novel of growing up in Edinburgh. (The film based on the book won an Oscar for Maggie Smith in a bob.) But a new sharp biography by Frances Wilson has sent me back to reread some of her twenty or so other novels. Spark excelled in dark humor of a particular British type-apparently presentable people plotting ingeniously malignant crimes (think Roald Dahl)-and combined this with a gift for dry, demimondaine London dialogue in the style of, say, Anthony Powell."
"The handful or so of not-so-young London men of the title justify their marital status with casual misogyny and the safety of numbers: "These are the figures," one reads to another from the 1951 Greater London census. "Unmarried males of twenty-one or older: six hundred and fifty nine thousand five hundred." For them there's plenty of sex to be had, and the rest of their day is their own. Weekends, however, test their mettle. "Funny how Sunday gets at you," one comments, "if you aren't given a lunch.""
Muriel Spark is presented as a master of dark British comic fiction, best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, whose film adaptation won an Oscar for Maggie Smith. A sharp new biography of Spark by Frances Wilson has prompted rereading of Spark's numerous novels. Spark's work combines ingeniously malignant plots with a gift for dry, demimondaine London dialogue, evoking Roald Dahl and Anthony Powell. The Bachelors (1960) follows a group of not-quite-young London men whose unmarried status masks casual misogyny and weekend loneliness, and the narrative escalates when a fraudulent clairvoyant, Patrick Seton, is accused of absconding with a widow.
Read at The New Yorker
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