Aiding and Abetting

Lord Lucan was a dissolute member of the British aristocracy whose accidental murder of his children's nanny (he was trying for his wife) and puzzling disappearance created a sensation in Britain—and a tantalizing mystery as yet unsolved. In Muriel Spark's version of Lucan's flight, his adversary is Beate Pappenheim, a fake Bavarian stigmatic who embezzled missions from devout followers before assuming a new identity as a celebrated psychiatrist. These two inhabitants of the farther shores of morality collide memorably in her brilliant new novel, where "aiding and abetting" Lord Lucan's well-padded fugitive life is the name of the beastly upper-class game and a duel of wits plays out with potentially mortal consequences. The artful murderer meets the master con-woman—who will emerge victorious?

In part a rumination on the nature of evil, in part a damning indictment of aristocratic mores, Aiding and Abetting is a dark and dazzling entertainment from a writer whose clear-eyed judgements never intrude upon her narrative legerdemain. Spark's bitingly satirical wit and seamlessly executed passages quickly undermine the readers' pat moral judgements and seduces them into a world deemed foul by normal standards. And her game of cat and mouse will culminate in a denouement at once deeply shocking and deliciously apt.

Aiding and Abetting proves beyond a doubt that Muriel Spark retains her crown as the most distinguished and entertaining moral satirist of her day. It is literary fiction at its finest.