Electric Spark
by Frances Wilson
In life, Muriel Spark was by turns an editor, critic, biographer, playwright, Jewish Gentile, Catholic convert, divorcee, abandoning mother, spy. As Frances Wilson observes in this canny biography, she looks in every photograph as if she is played by a different actor, so drastic are the changes in her face and style. From precocious Edinburgh schoolgirl to unhappy Rhodesian wife, spirited London bohemian to poised Roman socialite, Spark made an art of unsettling transformations. She was the queen of narrative control, not least the narrative of her own life.
It’s Wilson’s belief that Spark was playing a cat and mouse game with the future, packing her novels with clues and cryptic mementoes from her own past. Rather than the conventional cradle to grave, Wilson’s focus here is on the first 39 years of Spark’s life, culminating in the publication of her debut novel, The Comforters, in 1957: “the years of turbulence, when everything was piled on”. This doesn’t mean that later masterpieces like A Far Cry from Kensington or Loitering With Intent are ignored, but rather mined for evidence of their real-life antecedents. Time slips and shuttles, fittingly for a writer who was such a master of prolepsis, those devastating little glimpses into the future that make novels like The Driver’s Seat and The Girls of Slender Means so uncanny. Olivia Laing
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