Complacent Bounty

Susan Eilenberg

  • All the Poems by Muriel Spark
    Carcanet, 130 pp, £9.95, October 2004, ISBN 1 85754 773 X
  • The Finishing School by Muriel Spark
    Penguin, 156 pp, £6.99, April 2005, ISBN 0 14 100598 X

For the past half-century Muriel Spark has been the recognised master of detachment. The closer she approaches matters of terror or outrage or betrayal or shame the more controlled her voice. To memory-summoned menace and ritually recalled violation her response has been severe amusement or colder revenge; to the threat of madness or obsession (her own or another’s), controlled glee. Her achieved indifference, the spectrum of its neutralities as wide as the world, is balanced on a point of lucid joy. She saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha.

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