Emitting Sparks

James Wood on Muriel Spark:

"All Muriel Spark's novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved. Her brilliantly reduced style, of 'never apologise, never explain', seems a deliberate provocation: we feel compelled to turn the mere crescents of her characters into round discs. But while some of her refusal to wax explanatory or sentimental may have been temperamental, it was also moral. Spark was intensely interested in how much we can know about anyone and in how much a novelist, who most pretends to such knowledge, can know about her characters."