July 1961
This is a collection of four radio plays and six stories by a novelist whose style and attitude are so well known that any more general remarks about them run the risk of being repetitive. But these pieces are of interest to anyone who - as I do - reads Miss Spark with admiration and curiosity - particularly if - as I did not - one has not heard her radio pieces. She says in her Note at the beginning of this collection that the plays are for the outward, the stories for the inward ear. They are all certainly for the ear: there is no one, I think, writing today who makes such continuous claims upon that organ, or who understands better how to take subtle advantage of it. It is indeed very near to certain kinds of music - supposing that one can sit down and read a score; one is able to hear her dialogue and easily make the transpositions of key or character which together compose the chords, or discords of a scene. Which ear these pieces fall upon, it is hard to say, and her distinction about them does not seems to me accurate - it is something more like an outward ear and an inward eye - even a private eye, for what she sees about people is usually that which they do not intend to have seen.
She is at her best when she is at her most simple, eschewing the supernatural, although everything she writes is always a little yeasty with the macabre. Thus, The Fathers’ Daughters, about an ageing and forgotten novelist, his shrewdly devoted daughter and the young man who naturally suits their situations, is one of the most successful, with dimensions to the father-daughter relationship both original and true, and The Party Through the Wall, a play about a neurotic who is haunted by the Edwardian revelries of the next-door house, is too extremely particular to make its point. Several of the stories take place in Africa, and one of the best plays on a mountain in Wales. Whether you like this remarkable writer’s work or not, it is impossible to deny her creative skill, and the liking perhaps depends on whether, in relation to human nature, you feel that the remaining four-fifths of the iceberg is much the same old ice - just a lot more of it - or whether it is secretly frozen brimstone.