Three years ago, in Loitering with Intent, Muriel Spark returned to the scene of her extraordinary first novel, The Comforters, published in 1957. In The Only Problem she is once again looking back: the new book has much to say about Job and comforters, a topic on which, it seems, Mrs Spark once planned a book. Hitherto nothing more had come of the project except an article called ‘The Mystery of Job’s Suffering’, which, as it happens, is quoted in The Only Problem: Job ‘not only argues the problem of suffering, he suffers the problem of argument.’ The central figure in the novel, a man called Harvey Gotham, is also working on a book about Job, and he finishes it, as, in a sense, Mrs Spark has finished hers, but thirty years on. ‘The only problem’ is what Harvey writes about, and it is simply the problem of suffering, though consideration of it entails many other questions, such as why God allows it; why he was so concerned to make Job admit what they both knew very well – namely, that he wasn’t around when God created the horse, leviathan and behemoth; and why, to win at least a respite, Job, who had done nothing wrong, had to declare himself vile, so winning his reward of thousands of sheep, camels and oxen, seven new sons and three new daughters, one of them named Keren-happuch, which Harvey likes to translate ‘Box of Eye-Paint’ but which is, I understand, more correctly rendered ‘Horn of Antimony’.–
Three years ago, in Loitering with Intent, Muriel Spark returned to the scene of her extraordinary first novel, The Comforters, published in 1957. In The Only Problem she is once again looking...