Even at its wittiest, Muriel Spark's eccentric fiction tends towards the blacker side of black while she has always demonstrated a savage unpredictability when killing off many of her characters. The sharpness of the writing and the shrewd intelligence of a story such as the coldly superb Bang-Bang You're Dead suggests the woman behind the books is a formidable individual of little tolerance and less sentiment. The author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is, in person, as surprising as her books. You arrive expecting a literary grand dame and instead are met by a plump, smiling, bubble-haired benign matron emerging from behind tall flowers. She seems far younger than 82 and is a lot less absent-minded than she might like to appear.
In the half century since she won a short story competition in the Observer, and began her career as a fiction writer, she has written 21 novels and many stories, as well as three biographies, a play and a briskly candid memoir, Curriculum Vitae, "which I researched as carefully as if I were someone else. I did not allow myself to rely on memory." The British literary establishment reveres her and, judging by the generous reviews afforded her new novel Aiding and Abetting, collectively views Spark as England's leading living writer. It is true she can conjure up 1950s London at will, and has never lost her ear for rhythmic, quick-fire dialogue. "I've always sat upstairs on buses, listening." She is, however, a Scot - if a natural outsider - and as a writer is far more European than British.
Above all, though, Spark's fiction is strange. She smiles at the word and adds a couple of her own - "bizarre, grotesque". Her narratives zigzag, facts are introduced and then elaborated upon. Some of her narrators, as in The Girl I Left Behind Me and The Portobello Road, tell their stories from the grave. Spark does not waste words. "My books are short," she smiles, contentedly. Few writers take as many risks with plot, she is content to reveal the denouement of any tale before midway, if not earlier, within the opening sentences. That over, she then proceeds to explain the happenings, as in The Driver's Seat (1970), in which the possibly deranged Lise choreographs a wilful dance of death against the backdrop of a much-needed vacation.
After more than 30 years living in Italy, Spark's Edinburgh accent is modified, but unmistakable, and she is very quick, alert to nuance. Aiding and Abetting is one of those love or hate novels and its surface slightness would leave one wondering exactly what the current fuss is about - except for its being based on the brutal killing of a young nanny by Lord Lucan in 1974. Lucan had intended to murder his wife. She, however, survived the attack and raised the alarm. The Earl disappeared and, despite many intermittent sightings over the years, remained on the run until he was officially declared dead at the request of his family last year. However, police files remain open.
Spark sees her novel as a story "based on hypothesis", she says, and remarks that through the British government's decision to close the case, "I got interested again". But the force of the narrative lies in her moral outrage at the fate of Sandra Rivett, the nanny, not only at the hands of Lucan, but at the hands of the British press and, to some extent, the public, whose reaction seemed to hint, "at least it was only the nanny, not his wife". Spark sees the response in the context of class. "There was no sympathy for the nanny. There would be now. Nor would he (Lucan) have all those willing helpers. I feel sorry for the nanny, she was a very pretty girl and a single mother. Most of all, I feel sorry for the boy. It was only after she was dead that her son found out she was his mother, not his sister - as her parents were raising him as their own." Alongside Lucan's crime is that of his class, which stood by one of its own, hence the title, Aiding and Abetting.
Violence is often at the heart of Spark's work - even the old die violently. She agrees, before remarking - "but they're (her novels) not based around violence, though the Lucan book is". Spark pauses. "I've always been interested in the criminal mind. I'd like to be able to write a detective story." Fact underpins most of the new book, bar the wild finale and she does accept that its most potent motif is blood. As for Lucan, she says she found him rather dull and hopes the book "makes him appear more ridiculous than fascinating". She is far more interested in her anti-heroine, psychiatrist Dr Hildegard Wolf, formerly a bogus stigmatic specialising in heavy bleeding.
There is a strong element of moral fable about her work ("My fiction is not always ethical") and her judgements sit lightly. Spark is, above all, a realist drawn to the supernatural. A convert to Catholicism in 1954, she has never mythologised her decision. Unlike Graham Greene, there is little soul-searching about her. "I am deficient in guilt," she says cheerfully, and reasons that, as the daughter of a Scots-Jewish father and a Church of England mother from Hertfordshire, with a Presbyterian schooling, "I never had a strong sense of tradition and I suppose I was in need of a religion, of a settled position". Religion has also caused a public rift with her Jewish orthodox son. While she is a lively, willing talker, with opinions ranging from President Clinton, "I do like him, I'll miss him", to Annie Proulx, asking about Spark's life was inhibited as her companion, Penelope Jardin, sat in on the interview and in the quickly-established atmosphere of three-way conversation, tended to answer questions, argue points and make corrections.
Born Muriel Camberg in Edinburgh, as she writes in The First Year of My Life, "on the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War", Spark says she was always bookish. She says little about her parents, aside from "my father was an engineer" and mentions her brother, more than five years her senior, "a chemist who lives in San Diego. I've visited him there". The muted Edinburgh she recalls as "not unlike Cork" was "a prim, academic city. A bit dull. Not like now." Her schooldays were dominated to some extent by her own Jean Brodie, "Miss Christina Kay, that character in search of an author", whose classroom walls featured Italian paintings as well as "a newspaper cutting of Mussolini's Fascisti marching along the streets of Rome". Spark developed an early interest in poetry, "I wrote it before I ever wrote fiction", and was known as the school poet.
Her early reading was rooted in the 19th-century classics - Stevenson, some Scott, the Brontes - and she speaks of the appeal the verse-novels of poet laureate John Masefield held for her. She would later write a biography of him, as well as studies of Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte. But she did not go to university. "There was not the money." Instead, she went to work and was married at 19. "It was disastrous," she says. It was made even worse by the fact she had followed her husband-to-be, Sydney Oswald Sparks, out to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), sailing alone to Capetown. Not only did the marriage go badly, after being initially delayed owing to her still being a minor, but her husband soon drifted off into mental illness.
Spark was left to deal with their baby on her own. But she is no complainer. "It was in Africa that I learned to cope with life. It was there that I learned to keep in mind - in the front of my mind - the essentials of our human destiny, our responsibilities, and to put in a peripheral place the personal sorrows, frights and horrors that came my way." It was a lonely time. (She discovered years later that another young aspiring and lonely writer, Doris Lessing, was also then living in Rhodesia.)
Curiosity about the war brought Spark back to Britain. In time, her son arrived in Edinburgh to be minded by Spark's parents. He was to settle and remains there. Her six-and-a-half years spent in Africa were not wasted - but then Spark has wasted little - using her experience well throughout her fiction, while seldom appearing a conventionally autobiographical writer. Indeed, it is only on reading Curriculum Vitae, which was published in 1992 and follows Spark until the age of 39, that the various pieces begin to fall into place and sources identify themselves. Her African stories, including Bang Bang You're Dead and The Go-Away Bird are among her best work. The Seraph and the Zambesi, which won the Observer competition in 1951, was also set in Africa. Back in Britain, she began working at the Foreign Office in a blacked-out London and, true to her habit of not glamorising her life, says she was involved in "detailed truth and believable lies", an elegant way of describing the business of broadcasting propaganda to the Germans. As the war wound down, she was seconded to the US War Information Service.
Peace introduced her to the volatile world of publishing. A quarterly magazine, Argentor, provided a good training and in 1947 she took over the editorship of Poetry Review, the journal of The Poetry Society. There she learned all she needed to discover about literary egos, particularly those of the less talented, and was forced to resign after two years. Again, the irritation was not wasted. She drew on many incidents when writing Loitering With Intent (1981).
Being asked about her work pleases Spark who says: "Thank you for reading my books." Although she has written a great deal, she is well aware many remember her mainly for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). "And then there was the film and Maggie Smith was so good, I do think my other books should have had more of a chance." Brodie is that most dangerous of individuals, an intelligent maverick, albeit an eccentric romantic. Another of Spark's mavericks is Dougal Douglas, in a clever novella, The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Devil or angel, Dougal is guilty of making people think. Like Brodie, he is a Scot. It's no coincidence: "I'm one," she says. She professes sympathy for her characters, particularly Mrs Hawkins in A Far Cry From Kensington (1988), but she does not sentimentalise them.
Of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she says, "I went to Edinburgh to write it." Published in the US in The New Yorker, it made her famous and has kept her so. Another of her best books remains one of her favourites. Memento Mori (1959), is a hilarious study of death and ageing, featuring a vivid cast of ancient characters, some of whom are violently killed off. "I didn't know a great deal about being old when I wrote it. But I do now."
Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark is published by Viking at £9.99 in the UK.
