J. G. Frazer begins The Golden Bough with an account of a “strange and recurring tragedy” that took place on the northern shores of the lake of Nemi, in a sacred grove dedicated to the goddess Diana. Here there once grew a certain tree around which “a grim figure might be seen to prowl” at all hours of day and night. He was Diana’s priest, the King of the Wood, but never did a crowned head lie more uneasy. For the law of succession was brutal: “A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.”

Frazer’s study of magic and religion is an invitation to examine the world of pagan custom, and a whole generation fell under his spell following its publication in the 1890s. The novelist Muriel Spark arrived rather late to the party, in the early 1970s. But she became fascinated all the same. Perhaps The Golden Bough seemed applicable to her own life. Spark was then renting an apartment in Rome, but also attempting to buy another one in Nemi. The exigencies of Italian law were against her: her Roman landlady connived to evict her, and her lawyers assured her that remodeling her apartment in Nemi would prove impossible. Soon Spark was living nowhere at all. Instead, she shuttled around the country—Rome to Nemi to Naples to Tuscany, and then back over again. All around her it appeared as if the world were ending. The Yom Kippur War disrupted European politics; the Arab oil embargo of 1973 wrecked the Western economy; the Watergate scandal threatened the Pax Americana’s stability. And Spark herself was menopausal. “The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun,” Frazer wrote, “can have accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure.”

Spark was also working on two novels simultaneously. The first, The Abbess of Crewe, was published in 1974. It is a satire of the Nixon administration in which Tricky Dick and all of his cabinet officials have been transmuted into cloistered nuns. But the similarities between Spark’s wiretapped abbey and the besieged White House are only facial. Rather than using her nuns to comment on the state of American politics, Spark repurposes the Watergate scenario to examine the failures of the Church after the Second Vatican Council. The abbess, Alexandra, far from being a Nixon stand-in, could be an amusing and absurd portrait of Spark herself. While the other nuns accept the post-conciliar rubrics and mumble along with the rickety new English prayers, Alexandra institutes her own private reforms and substitutes Yeats and Pound and Auden in place of the Psalms. In the novel’s most memorable scene, she addresses the assembled sisters and declares that in her abbey “we have discarded history. We have entered the sphere, dear Sisters, of mythology.” The line is one of Spark’s most quoted, but it would take her a whole other novel to spell out what it means.

The Takeover is that novel. It operates entirely within the sphere of mythology. Spark had begun it in 1973, set it aside to write The Abbess of Crewe, and then picked it back up in 1975. It is set (mostly) in Nemi and follows the attempts of the American millionaire Maggie Radcliffe to reclaim her vacation house overlooking the lake from Hubert Mallindaine, a debauched English playwright who claims it is his right to stay. Hubert has deduced from his family records that he is the descendant of Diana by way of the Roman emperor Caligula. His surname, he explains to Maggie, is “derived from an old French form, ‘malline’ which means of course malign, and ‘Diane’ with the ‘i’ and the ‘a’ reversed.” By sacred tradition, he declares, the grove over which Maggie’s house was built belongs to him, for he is “Rex Nemorensis, the King of Nemi, king of the woods, favoured son of Diana the mother of nature.” And whenever anyone questions him, he rattles off his titles until the challenger shuts up.

The truth about Hubert is much more squalid. He is a deluded charlatan, a con man who has tricked Maggie into letting him stay in her house; and, once securely ensconced, uses the “positively mystical” intricacies of Italian law to remain there. As for his hereditary claims: a pair of dotty aunts, infatuated by The Golden Bough, had been in correspondence with a quack genealogist and instructed him in the plainest terms to establish the family’s descent from the goddess Diana. At one time Hubert knew his ancestry was fraudulent, but the longer he remains in Nemi, the more he comes to believe that he really is the King of the Wood. And, Spark writes, in a way he is not wrong. After all, he displaced Maggie, and he prowls about the property in constant fear that someone stronger or craftier will displace him.

The Takeover would be little more than a comic riff on The Golden Bough were it not for an authorial aside midway through the novel. The scene is a dinner party at Maggie’s house in Ischia where she and a group of Italian aristocrats are griping about Hubert’s knavery. Spark halts the story to comment briefly on world affairs:

It was not in their minds at the time that this last quarter of the year they had entered, that of 1973, was in fact the beginning of something new in their world; a change in the meaning of property and money. They all understood these were changing in value, and they talked from time to time of recession and inflation, of losses on the stock-market, failures in business, bargains in real-estate; they habitually bandied the phrases of the newspaper economists and unquestioningly used the newspaper writers’ figures of speech. They talked of hedges against inflation, as if mathematics could contain actual air and some row of hawthorn could stop an army of numbers from marching over it. They spoke of the mood of the stock-market, the health of the economy as if these were living creatures with moods and blood. And thus they personalized and demonologized the abstractions of their lives, believing them to be fundamentally real, indeed changeless.

But it did not occur to a single one of those “spirited and in various ways intelligent people” that

a complete mutation of our means of nourishment had already come into being where the concept of money and property were concerned, a complete mutation not merely to be defined as a collapse of the capitalist system, or a global recession, but such a sea-change in the nature of reality as could not have been envisaged by Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud. Such a mutation that what were assets were to be liabilities and no armed guards could be found and fed sufficient to guard those armed guards who failed to protect the properties they guarded, whether hoarded in banks or built on confined territories, whether they were priceless works of art, or merely hieroglyphics registered in the computers.

Up to this point, Maggie and her rich friends have thought of Hubert’s game as the antics of one nasty eccentric. They feel secure in their wealth. Little do they realize that the world has changed; it now belongs to tricksters like Hubert. Shortly after the dinner party, a gang of Neapolitan burglars break into Maggie’s bedroom and steal her jewels. She throws a fit; she loses all sense. She impulsively hires a Swiss–Argentine financier, improbably named Coco de Renault, to protect the rest of her wealth. But he turns out to be Hubert in different clothes: he produces a “global plan” for Maggie’s fortune, “so intricate that it might have been devised primordially by the angels as a mathematical blueprint to guide God in the creation of the world.” He rolls up her business headquarters in New York; he fires her lawyers, secretaries, and accountants. When Maggie questions this decision, he assures her that “a headquarters was the very thing she had to avoid. He was her headquarters and she must realize he was dealing with her affairs globally.” And of course he robs her blind.

The war in Israel and the Arab oil crisis loom large in the novel’s background; Spark smirkingly refers to their fallout as “the Dark Ages II.” For a moment, we are teased with the possibility of an alternate future—one where the author who had written so memorably of the interwar period in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and of London after the blitz in The Girls of Slender Means turned her attention to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. But it was not to be. Spark introduces the idea that a world where money’s value is not tied to anything physical is a magical world—not too far off from the one described in The Golden Bough. “Money of any sort is, in reality, unspendable and unwasteable,” she writes. “It can only pass hands wisely or unwisely, or else by means of violence, and, colourless, odourless and tasteless, it is a token for the exchange of colours, smells and savours, for food and shelter and clothing and for representations of beauty, however beauty may be defined by the person who buys it.” In other words, a fetish object, whose transmission is sacred. But, having introduced the idea, she lets it drop. Instead, Spark wraps up The Takeover with a few corny jokes about Jesuits, an unconvincing orgy at Nemi, and a rushed reconciliation between Maggie and Hubert.

Spark’s biographer Martin Stannard writes that The Takeover marked a “turning point” in the author’s life and career. While working on the novel, she gave up her nomadic urban wanderings and moved into a Tuscan villa with her friend Penelope Jardine. There she settled and lived for the rest of her life. She produced eight more novels—some good, some not—but none so entertaining as her comedy at Nemi.

Nearly all of Spark’s novels revolve around an unexpected irruption of the spiritual into the material world. The Takeover is exceptional because here the spiritual rushes in and subdues the material. As I reread it this summer, I had to wonder whether Spark was paying a more subtle tribute to Frazer than at first it seems. In the closing passage of The Golden Bough, no less famous than its opening, Frazer compares the development of thought to a woven web on a loom. A black thread represents magic, red religion, and white science. If you look back at the beginning of the work, it is all black and white, interwoven in “a patchwork of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet by the red thread of religion.” Somewhere in the middle, though, “a dark crimson stain”—by this he means Christianity—blots out the other colors. Eventually it shades off into a light pink, as more and more white is woven into the tissue.

But what of the future? Frazer, who was writing in the dying days of Queen Victoria’s reign, expected a duel between science and religion.

What will be the colour of the web which the Fates are now weaving on the humming loom of time? Will it be white or red? We cannot tell. A faint glimmering light illumines the backward portion of the web. Clouds and thick darkness hide the other end.

Was Spark attempting to clear away the clouds? If she was, the future she dreams up is neither red nor white, but inky black.