An Ungodly Look at Muriel Spark

Abstract

James Bailey’s new book offers a bracingly fresh perspective on Muriel Spark’s early writing. It takes as its starting point a portrait of Spark, painted by Sandy Moffat for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 1984. Spark was far from enamoured by this portrait; as Bailey notes, she would observe, in a later essay, that its artist had been ‘less interested in capturing her in his painting than the brightly coloured scarf that she happened to be wearing... ’ (1). Being unfamiliar with this portrait, I took the trouble of googling it. Spark was right to be disgruntled; the resemblance is closer to Margaret Thatcher, a discomfiting visual reference point in a mid1980s context. Yet this resemblance, whether accidental or implied, is also telling. Not unlike the Iron Lady, Spark has also been mythologized as both sharp and uncompromising in her authorial vision, even if the material of metaphorical choice might be ‘crystalline’ (18) rather than iron in her own case. Bailey sets out to expose and to explode some of the reductive critical templates that have been established, through and alongside this process of mythologization, for interpreting Spark’s work. In particular, he takes issue with the tendency to read the typical Spark narrator in terms of a ‘relatively uncomplicated analogy’ with an ‘omnipotent and often callous God’ (14). Given Spark’s widely discussed turn to Catholicism, theological understandings of her work are not unjustified in and of themselves. Yet, as Bailey persuasively argues, such approaches have come to unjustifiably dominate Spark criticism, thus muting other potential implications and often very subversive forms of socio-political critique that might otherwise be discerned throughout her wide-ranging oeuvre. Bailey, instead, strategically mutes the theological in his analysis of Spark’s early writings and the results are compelling. It leads to an attentiveness to alternative narrative modes and stances – ‘the ghostly (or perhaps haunted narrator); the detached observer; the frustrated voyeur; the postmodernist attention to James Bailey, Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, £75 hardback, 9781474475969.