IF there is one common characteristic in this, the third collection of Muriel Spark's novels, it is an overriding presence of casual cruelty. This shows itself in the cool indifference of many conversational exchanges. The Takeover's Hubert Mallindaine, for example, delightedly torments his secretary Pauline Thin ("If you think your figure fits into that outfit, with your haunches like a buffalo's"). The entire staff in Not to Disturb discuss who might be the father of young maid Heloise's baby in her presence and then arrange to marry her to their employer's simpleton brother.
The same loftiness is evident too in Spark's own reporting of events in her work, especially whenever a death occurs readers of her entire oeuvre will know that at least one character dies in each book. So, towards the close of Not to Disturb, she notes in passing that "the lightning, which strikes the clump of trees so that the two friends huddled there are killed instantly without pain, zig zags across the lawns.
In The Mandelbaum Gate, she remarks the day before the news from Harrogate was brought to the Cartwrights' house that Freddy's mother had been stabbed to death by a mad old servant, Miss Bennett, Joanna was up very early ..." In both cases, death is incidental to tee main purpose of the sentence in which it is recorded.
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965) is the first of Spark's books to be set outside her native England. Set in Israel and Jordan during the early 1960s, it is much preoccupied with questions of religious faith, since the heroine Barbara Vaughan is, like the author, a convert to Roman Catholicism. Muriel Spark shows no qualms about introducing religion into her work in The Only Problem, some years later, her protagonist Henry Gotham spends much of his time puzzling over the story of Job.
And once Spark moved to Italy, she began to set much of her fiction in that country, starting with The Public Image from 1968 until 1979's Territorial Rights. Italy is the location for The Takeover, in which once again religion provides a central focus, in this case the ancient cult of Diana which Hubert Mallindaine, who believes himself the descendant of the goddess is attempting to revive. The Takeover is also much concerned with international terrorism, obviously a major preoccupation for any Italian resident during the 1970s (although it turns up too in The Only Problem, which is set in France).
But more importantly, like all of Spark's work from this middle period, the novel has moved its focus of attention away from the difficulties faced by the impoverished genteel in post war London (to which she returned in 1981 with Loitering With Intent) to dwell instead on a more cosmopolitan and disparate cast. From The Mandelbaum Gate onwards, although the books remain slim, the number of characters tends to increase and their connection with each other becomes steadily more tangential. The exception here is Not To Disturb (1971), which, while given a setting typical of this period the Swiss villa of a titled couple concentrates on a very tight group of individuals over a single night.
What it does share with the other books is a willingness to reveal the unravelling of events outside any chronological sequence. Muriel Spark has never cared to conceal what is=going to happen later in any of her novels and frequently reports on major events before they actually occur.
This has the effect of casting a reader in the role of co-conspirator with the writer and means we must share her amusement at what will subsequently happen. She is a puppet mistress who is = untroubled by any sense of necessity to hide the strings. Her characters are clearly being manipulated to suit her purpose and provide us with amusement. This is what makes a Muriel Spark novel so entertaining and so callously cruel.