Muriel Spark's mementos

...She was received to the faith in 1954 ("one wet afternoon I did it") after taking Jungian therapy...

...But perhaps it was the fine line of her writing, its skill and its artistic joy, that mattered most...

...Which brings us to Reality and Dreams, Spark's twentieth novel, a short crisp book that is typical of her style and manner...

...Spark's real spiritual home or base camp was Italy, where a good many of her best books are set...

...It's improbable, absurd, yet still somehow governed by some hunger for truth, purpose, reality...

...She starts out grimly enough, as a moralist, "worthy as any man or woman in the works of George Eliot, unlovely, graceless," but gradually acquires a more ambiguous and sinister aspect...

...When, in the early 1950s, she turned her skills to fiction, all this was grist for the mill...

...His most recent books are Dangerous Pilgrimages (Viking) and The Atlas of Literature (De Agostini...

...One key fact in her books was her religious conversion: first to T.S...

...She grew up in that Calvinist city built around its fine Walter Scott memorial, became a youthful poet, then fled to Africa and a short-lived marriage...

...The Public Image, splendidly witty, morally serious too, is about a movie star, but above all it's about the empty postmodern self and one convenient way to fill it (pregnancy—though even that becomes just another manipula-ble element of the public image...

...The result is often a dance of deceivers...

...Film stars, filmmakers, and other fantasy-creators in our latter-day dolce vita took on increasing fascination, along with those dealing in law and money...

...Yet it's a dream where there's no apparent moral law...

...From her Roman home came, during the 1960s, a wonderful burst of fiction...

...Tom is a 63-year-old English film director, married to an extremely rich American wife, Claire, who falls off a crane during the shooting of his latest movie, The Hamburger Girl...

...The critics have often noted that most of her works deal with characters who are themselves engaged in making fictions, constantly reinventing themselves in roles, or trying to direct the lives of others...

...The Catholic novel had long been practiced in Britain, but it had had a strange quirky renaissance in the work of Greene, with his black Catholic existentialism, and Waugh, who once said if he hadn't been a Catholic he would have loved no one—as, indeed, he probably didn't...

...The end of the aging 20th century is a time severely afflicted with downsizing and "redundancy...

...So she acquired not just a new interpretation of the world, but a distinct kind of literary tradition...

...In fact it's time, as one of his daughters, Marigold, says, to see things—life and wealth and love and womanizing—under the gaze of eternity...

...So, in the creation of hers, does Muriel Spark...

...Life is a black comedy unfolding in a strangely divine universe...

...It's the work of the novelist who said, right at the beginning of her career, that "psychologists have shown how the world of dream and fantasy bears a direct relation to art," and the stories of artists have a source in the psyche...

...The many "redundant" characters of Reality and Dreams, constantly shifting between roles in film and roles in life, are stylish manipulators in a deception that is as real as life itself...

...Some of Spark's books give us a witty and retrospective history of the years since the war, which are seen mostly as the years of a great emptying-out of reality...

...Born Muriel Camberg in Edinburgh in 1918, she was that not-too-common figure, a Jewish (rather, half-Jewish) Scot...

...Spark's fiction gave a new dimension to all this, a kind of black Catholic irony...

...Her work became more and more concerned with illusions and realities, fictions and falsehoods...

...Nor has she qualified her divinely—and wickedly—critical view of this post-modernizing century, now so old, so very old...

...Her conversion was partly presided over by two eminent writers—Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh...

...Other books capture the grim postwar time when, as she said in The Girls of Slender Means, "all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions...

...Infidelity, sexual and otherwise, is a matter of course...

...One of the more unusual was Muriel Spark...

...Everyone remembers The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, where—recreating her Edinburgh schooldays—she gives a stylish, extraordinary, wonderfully ironic portrait of the prissily elegant teacher who wins her girls over by style and wisdom (nearly over to Hitler, in fact...

...black propaganda: ideal training for the literary life...

...Others, like A Far Cry from Kensington, return us to those Grub Street wars and the world of literary hopefuls and impostors, the basis of any useful literary culture, which in fact England then still had...

...Marigold starts a book on this very subject, and, as she says later on, when she reemerges as a dissident hippie, "Few people realize what redundancy can lead to...

...Muriel Spark has been writing fiction for forty years, but in no way has she lost her touch...

...As if symbolically, everyone in this book is losing a job, or falling off an economic or social perch, and so feels threatened with a crisis of purpose, or a sense of unstable reality...

...The Girls of Slender Means is an end-of-wartime comedy about arbitrary salvations and damnations...

...Muriel Spark's Mementos The Twentieth Novel of an Arch Ironist By Malcolm Bradbury In the 1950s and early 1960s, Britain had a great flourishing of new novelists: William Golding, Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, John Fowles, and more...

...Tom's filming crane, his ideal helicoptered overview, is his attempt to acquire a godlike, directorly role in a divine dream...

...Eliot's elected faith, Anglo-Catholicism, then to Catholicism...

...In poor, bomb-blasted, postwar London, it was still possible to lead a bohemian literary existence on near-nothing: writing reviews (and selling the review copies), helping tired elderly scholars with research, working on small literary magazines, undertaking commissioned books for small publishers...

...Marigold is one of those figures of vengeance and memento mori who often show up in Spark's fiction...

...Tom accepts the absurd and the unexpected, and equally the sexual dances and the unexpected combinations and disloyalties of his world...

...Spark lived a Grub Street existence, wrote poetry and various interesting biographies, and was active in the complicated affairs and bitterly nasty politics of the Poetry Society (poets bite...

...The Spark tone, cool and comic, was unmistakable...

...He damages his ribs, breaks his hip, finds himself in a world of nurses and physios, puts his film at risk, and generally comes face to face with his own dreams and realities...

...Spark writes: "It was typical of Tom, and in a way part of the mores of that world of dreams and reality which he was at home in, the world of filming scenes, casting people in parts, piecing together types and shadows, facts and illusions, that he made no distinction between divorced members of his family and those still married...

...Memento Mori is a (metaphysical) joke about age, dying, and the remembrance of sins...

...She came back near the war's end and was engaged to work in Malcolm Bradbury is professor emeritus of American studies at the University of East Anglia in England...

...Some, like this one, are set in the current world—at a time when, as Tom Richards, the central character, keeps remarking, "The century is getting old, very old...

...Reality and Dreams is a pure Spark novel: strange, disturbing, absolutely confident in its own vision of the world...