THE CHARACTER PORTRAYAL OF MURIEL SPARK AND THEIR UNIQUE PROFICIENCY

Muriel Spark is considered as one of the most engaging, most tantalizing writers of her generation. What is extraordinary about Sparks achievements is that she is having a large international readership. She manages to engage with many of the most serious intellectual issues of her time. It is typical of her work that it both gestures to words and acknowledges many of the debates and concerns of the age without, ever, being wholly reliant on them. She says:

I possessed one very rare book … rare books didnt interest me, for their rarity but for their content … we have all started to write our memoirs, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And we are lodging them for seventy years in a safe place until all the living people mentioned therein shall be living no longer. 1

These works… will be both valuable to the historian of the future … you should easily be able to rectify any lack or lapse in form, syntax, style, characterization, invention, local color, description, dialogue, construction and other trivialities. 2

Her literary style, therefore, has self-consciously mixed the exactness and intensity of poetic language with the more expansive and relaxed mode of the contemporary novel. Spark, to a large extent, derived her stylistic principles from her neoclassical poetry and she has, in this regard applied the neoclassical tenets of lucidity, precision and formal elegance to her prose. The paper discusses some universal experiences and worldly phenomena which Mrs. spark very beautifully reveals through her characters.