There is certainly a remoteness, a lack of ordinary compassion, in [Mrs Spark's] dealings with characters, but this is part of the premise of her fiction; if we feel sorry in the wrong way, it's because our emotions are as messy and imprecise as life, part of the muddle she is sorting out…. [Not only is she] an unremittingly Catholic novelist, committed to immutable truths, but … she is [also] uncommonly interested in the shapes assumed by these truths as perceived in the tumult of random events and felt upon insensitive fallen flesh. The question for the reader is not at all whether he accepts the truths, but whether the patterns are made good and recognised. Reading them, like writing them, is a work of the imagination, fallen or not. What establishes their validity is … imaginative cohesion, a rightness in the shapes, a truth sensed in the fictions.

The...