Her religious vision has always seemed the oddest, and perhaps the most authentic, in the trinity. Graham Greene was more interested in sucking up to earthly tyrants than in worshipping the ultimate powers that be, and Evelyn Waugh 's professions of faith had a political dimension too, albeit one opposite to Greene's. This has for so long been Spark's territory that one wonders why it took her all this time to get around to the vanished earl. Still, for all his suitability, and for all her deliberate, characteristic lurches between the real and the surreal, Aiding and Abetting does feel more than necessarily disjointed. Hildegard gets lost as the reader is dispatched on a merry chase after Lucan with the daughter of someone from his former circle.
Spark eventually manages to bring the plot lines back together, but the unity is less than complete.
The books we'll be seeing from this group won't all be up to the last of Penelope Fitzgerald 's, or even Saul Bellow 's. But the typical Spark novel has always been stimulatingly off its rocker, and on the strength of Aiding and Abetting, there's yet no need to start persuading Dame Muriel into hers. All rights reserved.