Gravity, mischief and variety

Muriel Spark rightly insists that she is a poet who, as it happens, writes novels, and that she writes novels without ceasing to be a poet. Being a poet means having the ability to recognise that the world can announce more interesting inter- relationships than common sense chooses to notice — unforeseeable collocations, intrusions into the ordinary of aspects of reality ordinarily ignored, simply because the extraordinary is what ordinary minds prefer to dismiss from their attention. One should ‘see life as a whole,’ says Dame Muriel, ‘rather than as a series of disconnected happenings’. Poetry connects them. Its unusual ability to do so can sometimes be akin to madness, as in The Driving Seat, the dark book that may be her finest. Or it may insists that the connected happenings are expressed as comic or tragicomic, as in the beautifully composed early novellas, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means.