‘Another world than this’: Muriel Spark's Postwar Investigations

Abstract

‘While there have been many historical studies of specific aspects of Britain’s involvement in the Cold War,’ wrote Harriet Jones in 2000, ‘there is as yet no overarching narrative understanding of its impact.’1 Jones’s comment, still largely true in 2011, might explain why, apart from a couple of recent exceptions, scholarship on the Cold War’s impact on British narrative fiction has also been thin on the ground.2 This does not mean that the fiction of the 1950s in Britain, the period under discussion in the present essay, does not bear the imprint of this international conflict. Rather, as Rod Mengham has suggested, the Cold War itself is a challenge to narrative, so its expression in and by narrative may take indirect or aporetic forms.3 In the event of a nuclear blast there is no consecutive sequence of events that could be reliably followed, and thus there is no obvious narrative means by which a person’s relation to this outcome can be mapped. Yet, precisely because of this difficulty, British governmental war planners and American RAND (Research and Development) war-gamers of the period used fictional means to generate possible real-world scenarios on the basis of which policy decisions could be made. The CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had offices in thirty-five countries, was perhaps the strangest case of mid-century political fictionalizing, having as a central mandate the advancement of the ‘claim that it did not exist’.4 If 1950s political engagement proceeds in terms of fiction, in a still more acute way than is usual, then British fiction of the period that conveys