Plots and Plotters

Abstract

The subject of plot-making fascinates Mrs Spark: both the fictional construction of a novel and the scheming activities of her characters. As a novelist who is also a Catholic, she is aware that her own fiction-making activities take place within what could be called ‘God’s plot’, being a metaphor for the Christian belief in a divinely ordered universe. In her novels the stress is either on the plots laid by her characters, or reflexively on a demonstration of how plot functions in a novel. In each case she elicits our perception of a divine or a moral plot behind the obvious one, and the interest is heightened by the tension between the two, and how it is resolved.