Vital Spark makes god companion

A Muriel Spark is an ideal companion at dinner. The same is probably true of The Muriel Spark, but I lead a sheltered life and can't say. Her compact and airy books fit snugly by your plate and feel perfectly at home in a provincial French hotel or similar atmosphere of general competence enlivened by the owner's quirks and the random fascinations of your fellow-guests.

Her stories have beautiful narrative manners. They are both considerate in anticipating your responses - "You will wonder ...", "I must explain that ..." - and full of surprise so you can't second-guess them: "He looked as if he would murder me and he did." The heroine of Bang-Bang You're Dead is expert at "listening to people ambiguously, which enabled her to mix without losing identity, and to listen without boredom"; this is a skill you need if you're subject to chance encounters of the wel-heeled kind, such as Mrs Spark must have undergone on her own travels. Her fictions, whatever their length, have often been prompted by guest-houses (The Ormolu Clock and Territorial Rights), centres for religious retreat (The Comforters and Come Along, Marjorie), or other locales propitious to the unforeseeable, like schools (The Twins and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). She improvises from the details that have happened her way, and because she herself seems so eternally on the qui vive, she enlivens her reader. Malebranche's fine saying - "Attention is the natural prayer of the soul" - makes an apt motto for her writings.

To contrast Mrs Spark's novels with her short stories would have the charm of any tidy schematism. It can't be done, because she is not a novelist but a storyteller, some of whose stories go on for longer than others. When Dickens assembles a disparate cast at the start of Little Dorrit, one of them makes a speech to the effect that "they had all been thrown together by chance" and "were now about to disperse, and were not likely ever to find themselves all together again". We know, though, because we know we are reading a novel, that he is mistaken; they will turn out to be vastly interconnected through Dickens's secular, providential scheming. In one of Mrs Spark's fictions, some of them would just disappear, like the "young couple who made pottery" who pass, unnoticed and unnoticing, a novelist at his last gasp in The Executor. They figure for half a sentence and then evaporate, momentary gifts of her inventiveness, like mayflies.

She does not write "seamless narratives". On the contrary, her storytelling abounds with jump-cuts and shearings of tone; its essence is that "you see all the stitches", as the needlewoman says in The Dragon, one of Mrs Spark's many oblique parables about her own craft in which "every inside-seam" is "edged with narrow lace ... Nobody could see how beautifully it was finished inside". She has the alertness to contour of a Jean Muir. And her painstaking, though wholly unlaboured, craftswomanliness gives her a sure, quiet point of vantage from which to distinguish the varieties of human fraudulence, which have long been her subject and delight, from the age-old "half poet, half journalist" in her first, competition-winning short story, The Seraph and the Zambesi (1951), through the "pisseur de copie", Hector Bartlett, in A Far Cry From Kensington (1988) to the wretchedly inauthentic Lord Lucan of last year's splendid Aiding and Abetting.

If you read her stories in the order in which they were published over nearly half a century (which is not how they are arranged in The Complete Short Stories), you realise that, however intent she is on the "small and perfect", she also has "a larger sense of living history than most people do" in these days when epochs are made as swiftly as omelettes. Her tales retrieve the times when "we were sitting in a milk-bar drinking coffee, or whatever it really was", when breasts were called "busts", or when a woman in unusual trouble might petition: "O God, everlasting and almighty, make me strong, and guide and lead me as to how Mrs Thatcher would conduct herself in circumstances of this nature."

Mrs Spark is a tonic. After reading her, as Fleur says in Loitering with Intent: "I go on my way rejoicing."