"I was never really in the world," the great Scottish author Muriel Spark told an interviewer late in her long life. That would explain her ability to squirrel herself away and write 22 novels, some of them among the finest of her time, as well as poetry, plays, and short stories. Her colorful life has been catnip for biographers since Spark, a lifelong cat lover, died at 88 in 2006. One such biography is Like a Cat Loves a Bird by the English critic James Bailey, author of the scholarly analysis Muriel Spark's Early Fiction. With this volume, he widens the aperture for a reverent and engrossing look at Spark's peripatetic life.
Bailey became obsessed with Spark, "perhaps modern literature's finest shapeshifter," when he read her most famous work, 1961's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Once he finished the rest of her output, he was struck by "how deceptively violent her books are," with shootings and cannibalism, and "in one particularly grisly scene, a corkscrew driven through the neck," a reference to The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Her range of subjects made her a hard author to pin down. Bailey wrote this book to capture "this lifelong slipperiness, this sense of perpetual reinvention," and to present, as he puts it, "a series of flickering sparks, each illuminating a different aspect of a life in constant motion."
The result is an affectionate work that covers Spark's Edinburgh childhood, when she was already "an avid watcher of others"; her years in South Africa, when, at 19, she married 32-year-old Sydney Oswald Spark, who, Spark learned too late, "had been suffering from a serious mental illness for some time"; her escape to England, leaving Sydney and young son Robin behind, to create wartime propaganda for the Foreign Office in Milton Bryan; her controversial postwar stint as general secretary of London's Poetry Review; her midlife conversion from Judaism to Catholicism; her eventual success as a novelist; and her final years living in Tuscany. To its credit, Bailey's book is not indiscriminately adulatory. He doesn't hesitate to criticize works like The Mandelbaum Gate, which he says is "riddled with contrivances," and he calls 1970's The Driver's Seat "a deeply unsettling book." But he's clearly a fan, and readers unfamiliar with Spark's work will be, too, after reading this excellent book. -- Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer
Shelf Talker: Like a Cat Loves a Bird by the English critic James Bailey is an appreciative but by no means indiscriminately adulatory biography of the great Scottish novelist Muriel Spark.