Muriel Spark's next two novels, Symposium (1990) and Reality and Dreams (1996), return the reader to the more impersonal and minimalist mode which was first encountered in Memento Mori (1959) and which reached its apotheosis in much of her best work such as The Public Image (1968), The Driver's Seat (1970), Not to Disturb (1971) and The Abbess of Crewe (1974). Throughout her writing career, Spark has always challenged the assumptions and preoccupations of her previous books. She is continually in dialogue with herself and it is unsurprising, after her many imaginative meditations on her early life in post-war London, that her most recent fiction has once again eschewed her lifestory. With the publication of her first volume of autobiography in 1992, dealing with similar material to Loitering with Intent (1981) and A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), there is a clear exhaustion with the artistic reclamation of her wasted or unconverted life. The pattern of Spark's career, beginning with her first two books, is to veer in and out of her biography and to move from a distinct persona to an impersonal narrative voice. Just as she questions the nature of autobiographical recollections in her fiction of the 1980s, she plays with the supposed power and command of authorial omniscience in her current works.

Most of Spark's critics have mistakenly thought of her as an unchanging moralist who has been absorbed by the same eternal verities since her conversion. A good many studies of Spark's fiction have concluded, with remarkable similarity, that she is ‘writing in the great moral tradition of British literature’ or that her novels are written ‘sub specie aeternitatis’ (under the light of eternity) and are ‘primarily concerned with the relationship between God and man’. Alan Bold is the notable exception to this rule as he has rightly qualified the presumed continuities within her supposed moral vision by noting her fundamental misgivings towards both her faith and the novel form. Symposium and Reality and Dreams confirm this sceptical reading, with the protagonist of the latter novel claiming that he no longer believes in ‘convictions’ as they are ‘generally hypocrisy’ (RD 29).