BOOKS
.719
the flow of boastful platitude that winds through his pages. He
,writes, for example: "I consider God as one of those dangerous
abstractions, like the State, Freedom, Truth and Justice, that cause
us. to behave worse than the beasts of the jungle,:'. and it does not
seem to occur to him, so delighted is he with this verbal bravado,
that his commonplace reflections could ever have been thought
or spoken before. His book is a noisy bore.
Miss Muriel Spark, severely comic and modestly depressing,
is tidy to the point of compulsion, and whatever she sets out to
do, she does. Entirely on her own, she is very much the unruffled,
formidable lady novelist. She is, to be sure, a minor writer, but
more from choice than necessity, for one comes to feel that her
control is a willed constriction, that she refuses to surrender her–
self to the possibilities of her imagination and indeed, seems always
to be beating it with a stick.
Miss Spark's method is to present a small, severely confined
world as if it were the entirety of human existence and there were
nothing beyond it for contrast or relief. In her earlier and extremely
New
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INTERNA
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DONALD
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