Book Review: Loitering with Intent is somewhat autobiographical, wise, and challenging. Muriel Spark combines the serious with the comic in a way that is difficult to unravel or decipher. She deals with weighty subjects in a deceptively and disarmingly light manner, and makes me feel I'm not clever enough to understand her. She is comically serious. Or vice versa. Our narrator in Loitering with Intent is Fleur Talbot, an aspiring novelist who goes to work for a small, eccentric literary journal. There she finds a labyrinth of plots, and despite the obstacles arrayed against her, states: "I was not any sort of victim; I was not constituted for the role." Fleur knows she is intelligent, strong, and capable, she who says "How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century," is willing to take on the whole world and has faith that she has a chance.
Spark, and Loitering with Intent, is inventive, intelligent, philosophical. The story's also about becoming a writer. She writes of the wonder of creation. At one point she has Fleur make her artistic statement and she's speaking for two: "Without a mythology, a novel is nothing. The true novelist, one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story, and the methods are mythological by nature." [5★]
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