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Muriel Spark was born and educated in Edinburgh. She wrote poetry, stories, biographies, and a remarkable series of novels. She won countless awards, was made an an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1993 was given an OBE. She died in April 2006.
This seems to be Spark year (Collected Poems I; Collected Stories I) and this merciless, unblinking contemplation of the current phenomenon of public image-making, set in Rome, can raise the same bone-chill as the often macabre preoccupation of her short stories and poems. Screen actress Annabel, emptying herself of indiscriminate affections and irritations (from earning more money than her husband Frederick, to the accomplished exercise of mailing a letter) discovers that she can succeed by living with her stupidity and building her image, as her success grows. Drawing in Frederick to the airy caverns of her comfortable concept. Annabel produces a baby, a repository of dim but instinctual feeling. However, Frederick, unable to break away, manufactures the supreme practical joke to puncture the Image, by arranging an orgy in Annabel's new apartment while he commits suicide, martyr-fashion, at the Church of St. Paul and St. John. Annabel, whose image represents the all-discreet and faithful wife, with tiger fires burning beneath, is in danger of becoming a disreputable tiger only. With extraordinary manipulations, Annabel confounds conspirators, deflects blackmail, and preserves the Image, carrying her baby away from Rome as an empty shell contains. . . the echo. . . of former and former seas. No more than a novella, but brilliantly crafted, with the new breed of hollow men and women in amber. (Kirkus Reviews)
