Epitomy of everything English reading the Catholic Herald?

The Stories of Muriel Spark (Bodley Head, £12.95).
SHORT stories by Muriel Spark have just been published in France (in translation), and I was not entirely surprised to learn that they are received there as a bizarre reflection of all that is English.
Much as I dislike this kind of commentary on any foreign literature (how would it be if all we could say about Balzac were — oh, how terribly French?), I have to concede that there is something in what they say.
Muriel Spark takes care with the setting of a story, and by that I don't just mean place, but social milieu and levels of language.
Many of these stories are set in South Africa after the war, some in post-1945 Britain and a few "on the continent" — but in each case we are made to be aware of the dire selfconsciousness of "middle classes" and of how it is exploited by those who serve them (landladies, farm-hands and so on).
The discomforting degree of self-deception, even hypocrisy, which traditionally besets all middle classes, is exposed as soon as the foundations of their social credibility are challenged by events.
The lot which befalls Raymond and Lou Parker for instance, in The Black Madonna, wrecks all their years of conspicuous racial tolerance, Labour-voting, Catholic Herald-reading and Mass attendance.
What struck me most about the stories however, was the way in which the commonplace happening or banal saying is twisted into something supernatural, sinister and disturbing.
Whoever would have thought that the phrase "needle in a haystack" could signify anything quite as chilling as it does when spun into one of these gripping yarns?
Ordinary phenomena, unobtrusive phrase and fable are turned about brilliantly by Ms Spark into nuances of foreboding. It is this power to convert accepted and familiar things into new and unimaginable meanings which imparts a disruptive quality to the stories.
But like all brilliant things,