Muriel Spark, the Edinburgh native who once said that fiction was "a lazy way of writing poetry," went on to become one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. Frances Wilson examines the early years of Spark's peaks-and-valleys life in Electric Spark, a scholarly yet accessible biography. The Spark that Wilson presents "is not the grande dame of her last forty years but the young divorcee whose arrival in post-war London sent feathers flying and started all the hares." Wilson "explores how Muriel Spark became Muriel Spark, and why it took her so long." The focus is primarily on the first half of Spark's life--she died in 2006 at 88--and encompasses her first six novels, from 1957's The Comforters to 1961's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and two later masterworks, Loitering with Intent (1981) and A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), which Wilson calls Spark's "two most brilliantly achieved novels."
Wilson expertly covers Spark's progression, from growing up poor with a Jewish father and English mother to her short-lived marriage at 19 to a teacher prone to "erratic behaviour--such as firing starting pistols in the classroom" to her brief time as general secretary of London's prestigious Poetry Society, a tenure that rankled the stodgier members, and to her conversion to Catholicism in 1952. The valleys included bad relations with men, a psychotic episode due to Dexedrine, and more. That Spark still produced 22 novels is a testament to her determination and talent, both of which Wilson demonstrates in this appreciative work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer