Lent Talks
BBC RADIO 4

Writer Anouchka Grose’s contribution, under the title “Destiny and the Psyche”, to this year’s Lent Talks (8 March, series continues to 12 April), began with a brisk analysis of Muriel Spark’s The Comforters (1957). Written in the wake of Spark’s conversion to Catholicism, the novel features a heroine plagued by the noise of a “ghost typewriter”. This turns out to be the sound of the novel being written around her. Fascinated and at the same time baffled by the “Christian mysticism” in which Spark’s narrative is drenched, Grose set about applying its determinist slant to the cast of the New Testament.

What followed was essentially a secular sensibility, raised on a diet of modern fiction, trying to make sense of the Gospels in terms of “character”.