While writing a book about American poet TS Eliot in 1954, Muriel Spark began to suffer from hallucinations. As she recalls in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1993), the words on a page she was reading suddenly shifted about to form ‘anagrams and crosswords’.1 Spark’s hallucinations continued for the next three months, but disappeared when she stopped taking dexedrine (an appetite suppressant). This experience planted the seed of an idea for Spark’s first novel, The Comforters (1957), which would ask questions about the nature of fictionality and reality.Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918. At the age of 19, in 1937, Spark became engaged to Sidney Oswald Spark and travelled to Zimbabwe with him where her son, Robin, was born. In Zimbabwe, Spark discovered that Sidney was prone to violent outbursts and writes bluntly in her autobiography ‘We had no marital life after the birth of my son.’2In 1944 amidst WW2 Spark returned to Britain aboard a troop ship — without Sidney — and worked in intelligence until the end of the war. It was not until 1954, at the age of 36, that Muriel Spark began to write her first novel. (She had previously written some poetry and literary criticism, including studies on the Brontës and Mary Shelley upon her return to England.)As Spark herself remembers,1950s Britain was ‘the time of the Angry Young Men’,3 represented by writers like John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain, who expressed disillusionment with traditional British society. Spark’s contemporaries were concerned with creating a form of literature that depicted mundane domesticity with a documentary-style realism. Spark conceived of her early literary efforts as a means of shaking up this realist style;4 she would go on to write 22 novels in total challenging existing literary forms.Early in The Comforters, Spark’s omniscient narrator states plainly ‘At this point in the narrative, it might be as well to state that the characters in the novel are all fictitious, and do not refer to any living persons whatsoever.’5 The Comforters is about Caroline Rose, a writer haunted by the sound of a ghostly typewriter and a disembodied voice that narrates her thoughts and actions. Plagued by the sounds until the novel’s end, she comes to the realisation that she is in fact a character in a work of fiction. In a later novel, The Driver’s Seat (1970), Spark employs a similar method as in The Comforters. After spending the first two chapters introducing the protagonist Lise as she prepares for a trip abroad, Spark’s narrator suddenly announces Lise’s fate:She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.6This dramatic and premature announcement forces the reader to engage with the text as a work of fiction, jolting them from the comfort of a conventional murder-mystery.In her 1971 address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters titled ‘The Desegregation of Art’, Spark suggests that ‘the art and literature of sentiment and emotion, however beautiful in itself, however striking in its depiction of actuality […] cheats us into a sense of involvement with life and society.’7 Her argument is that by creating a faithful illusion of reality, realist fiction fails to acknowledge the inherent artifice of fiction writing.Spark’s novels reject this illusion by constantly forcing the reader to engage with it in its true form — as fiction. The sudden avant-garde announcements in The Comforters and The Driver’s Seat bend the narrative into satirical and ridiculous forms. Spark’s frequent declarations of the fictionality of her novels approach a reality that is concealed by conventional forms of literary realism. This is not fiction purporting to represent the real but rather fiction about fiction itself. Characters like Caroline and Lise are stripped of agency as the narrator exercises an unsettling level of control over the narratives that contain them. By exposing the fictionality of her novels, Spark insists that truth can be found somewhere beyond the objective representation of mundane details and domestic realities. Like the hallucinations with which she was inflicted in 1954, Spark’s novels present an unreliable and unobjective sense of truth that cannot merely be captured through a description of the reality in which they are set. The real truth, for Spark, lies in the way we tell stories and the stories that we choose to tell.Spark’s uniqueness as a writer remains intact even 60 years after the publication of her first novel. Her use of avant-garde methods and twisting of literary genres make her novels hard to define. When asked in 1998 how she would identify herself as an author, Spark replied reluctantly and evasively: ‘Maybe Post-modernist; I don’t know about Modernist. I think so, probably. They say postmodernist, mostly, whatever that means.’8 This difficulty of definition has afforded Muriel Spark a distinctive and enduring seat in the Western literary canon.