Muriel Spark's next three books, considered among her very best, are written in reaction to The Mandelbaum Gate and her other baggier works such as The Comforters, Robinson and The Bachelors. Spark's dislike of The Mandelbaum Gate, expressed in her 1970 interview, particularly concerned its panoramic scope and ensuing lack of authorial direction. But her rejection of this looser documentary form in her subsequent short parables – The Public Image (1968), The Driver's Seat (1970) and Not to Disturb (1971) – is also a direct response to her prolonged exploration of her past. Spark, in these new works, is no longer interested in the consciousness or life-story of the individual nor in the virtues of historical reconstruction. Her foreshortened fictional world is now decidedly minimalist with a callous indifference to its inhabitants, who only rarely manage to break free from their external circumstances.

On one level, these three books are merely a return to the concise mode and impersonal, aloof voice of her earlier novellas such as Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means. But her later works differ from their predecessors in having a cool and uncluttered surface which is the least messy, the least emotionally invested, of Spark's writings. At this stage in her career Spark was especially influenced by the French nouveau roman and the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet. In The Mandelbaum Gate, Barbara Vaughan had associated the nouveau roman or ‘anti-novel’ (MG 177) with the testimony of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, like the authors of the anti-novel, turns people into objects and drains them of their humanity by using a deadening bureaucratic language. Spark, in this light, utilizes the anti-novel as a means of substituting conventional concerns with the inner self for a more chilling and dehumanized account of the ‘times at hand’ (MG 177).

Up until The Takeover (1976) Spark simply gave up on material – either historical or personal – which could not be completely ordered and contained. In these new works there is a distinct shift from actuality to artifice, from the past to the present, and to a pitiless tone which has been rightly described, in relation to her earlier output, as ‘machine made’.