The poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable impossibilities.
—Aristotle, the Poetics
When I first started writing people used to say my novels were exaggerated. They never were exaggerated, merely aspects of realism.
—Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent
In a review of the reissue of London Labour and the London Poor in 1968, W. H. Auden remarked that Henry Mayhew’s sprawling portrait of Victorian London street life—brimming with such vivid specimens as Jack Black, Rat-Killer to Her Majesty—led him to revise his understanding of Dickens. Far from being a “fantastic creator of over-life-size characters,” Auden concluded, Dickens was in fact “much more of a ‘realist’ than he is generally taken for.”
One occasionally has a similar feeling when reading the fiction of the Scottish-born novelist Muriel Spark. What seems at first like caricature often turns out to pass, for the moment anyway, as unvarnished reportage. Generally, the reports are not encouraging. Perhaps, deep down, “the facts” themselves express a species of caricature; and perhaps, on reflection, one realizes this. Spark’s trick is to coax us into musing that, if one were to go deeper still, maybe . . . The presentiment often terminates in an ellipsis, a feeling of uneasiness, anxiety. Not for nothing is the imperative “Memento Mori”—Remember that you shall die—the title of one of her best known and most accomplished books. In that sober tale, all the characters are aged and more than a few are senile. “Being over seventy,” one
