Muriel Spark's twenty-first novel Aiding and Abetting (2000) is in press at the same time as this book is nearing completion. It is probably not her last work of fiction as the eighty-two year old Spark, still waking at seven every morning to write, has begun another novel entitled The Finishing School which purportedly returns her to the familiar world of snobbery and social manners, a subject which she has always found ripe for satire. Aiding and Abetting, however, is a fitting late work as it is an implicit summation of many of her fictional concerns. Much vaster in scope than her previous two novels, it encompasses Central Africa and the Scottish Highlands as well as London and Paris. The book's heroine, Dr Hildegard Wolf (also known as Beate Pappenheim), came from ‘Bavaria, then Prague, Dresden, Avila, Marseilles, then London, and [is] now settled in Paris (AA 1). While Hildegard is in a long line of Sparkian cosmopolitan heroines, she is unusual in having a wholly other personal history. Born Beate Pappenheim on a pig farm in rural Nuremberg, she managed to escape extreme poverty by becoming a ‘fake stigmatic’ (AA 16) who tricked thousands of Catholics into sending her ‘many millions of marks’ (AA 16). After changing her identity she became Dr Hildegard Wolf, a celebrated psychiatrist practising in the centre of Paris.

The novel begins with the figure of Lord Lucan, wanted for bludgeoning his children's nanny to death in 1974, visiting Hildegard at her office so that he can recount his typical ‘English story’ (AA 1). While this is unusual in itself – the actual Lord Lucan has famously never been captured and is thought to have died some years ago – it is compounded by the bizarre fact that Hildegard already has a ‘Lord Lucan’ as a patient. As with Hildegard's dual self, the two Lord Lucans indicate the extent to which everything in Aiding and Abetting is doubled and redoubled. Spark's fiction has always been fascinated with doubles and, from her earliest work, the act of doubling is closely related to the act of writing. The double vision of Dougal Douglas or Douglas Dougal in The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) announces not only his spiritual role in Peckham (going beyond the pervading materialism) but his eventual vocation as a novelist.