From More Intelligent Life: Time for a Spark Revival.

Despite her many awards, her damehood and her distinguished champions-Evelyn Waugh saw her as a writer “whom people rejoice to introduce to their friends”-Muriel Spark remains outside the highest literary firmament. Her poet’s ear makes her books deceptively slight: they deal with life and death, God and morality, madness and fate, in 150-220 pages.

Post-modern before the word existed, Spark pushed boundaries in her first novel, “The Comforters”. The tale of a woman stuck in a novel she herself is writing, it displays humour and a quirky faith: “the True Church was awful, though unfortunately…true”. Spark was a fierce experimentalist, and her idiosyncratic use of flash-forward means that, by the third chapter of “The Driver’s Seat”, the heroine is looking for a particular type of man-to murder her on holiday, subverting both the romantic and mystery genres.