Edmund Wilson once remarked that "the English do not insist on having the women in their fiction made attractive." Muriel Spark's readers on both sides of the Atlantic do not seem to insist on any of her fictional characters being appealing. And her 15th novel, Territorial Rights, is populated by as rum a lot as you will find between hard covers, even in these disenchanted times….

On the surface, the book might pass for a comedy of decaying manners…. Yet underneath the deftly paced plot and the gleaming prose there lurks a disconcerting darkness that goes beyond black humor.

The trouble, I think, is that the characters are dislikable to a degree that is fatal to the novel. True, other writers have given us obnoxious characters—Evelyn Waugh, for one—who share some of the nastiness of Spark's creatures. But one does not recall them with the same...