Muriel Spark's next four books – The Hothouse by the East River (1973), The Abbess of Crewe (1974), The Takeover (1976) and Territorial Rights (1979) – all gradually move away from the classically concise literary form of her previous three novels. After these coldly impersonal works, Spark was to relinquish her illusion of god-like narrative control and the minimalism which allowed her to command every aspect of her foreshortened universe. But her renunciation of authorial mastery is no longer in deference to a higher transcendental truth but due to the riotous and unrestrained nature of contemporary reality. In this phase of her writing, encompassing most of the 1970s, Spark alludes either explicitly or implicitly to the Cold War, the Watergate scandal (1972–4), the Middle Eastern oil crisis (1973– 4), the rise of political kidnapping and international terrorism and, more generally, to the ever-changing vicissitudes of global capitalism. This is a world which has spun out of control and which is terminally in crisis. No wonder Spark is unable to construct a narrative, however flawed, to contain such turmoil.

Spark's all-encompassing sense of danger and uncertainty is reflected in her eventual return to the heterodox and anarchic literary form of The Mandelbaum Gate (which was, in turn, designed to mirror Middle Eastern discord). In The Mandelbaum Gate, Spark's maverick community of exiles – the potentially insane or sexually and politically perverse – included a characteristically arch-category known as ‘international messes’ (MG 101). Much of Spark's subsequent fiction, culminating in The Takeover and Territorial Rights, can be described as ‘international messes’. No longer able to turn reality into a coherent story-line, Spark has begun to relish the worldly confusions which she had hitherto transfigured in her fiction. At the beginning of her career, Spark attempted to distinguish rigorously between those who are life-giving truth-tellers and those who are death-inducing mythomaniacs. By the 1970s, however, Spark is able to accept her outrageous mythologizers as figures who embody a material world which itself cannot tell the difference between truth and artistry. Spark's religious and aesthetic ordering principles had previously enabled her to make sense of a meaningless universe.