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''Frances Wilson writes books that blow your hair back'' KATHERINE RUNDELL From one of our leading biographers and critics comes an exhilarating, landmark new look at Muriel Spark. ''Is the story fact? Is it fiction? It is what it is'' - Muriel Spark The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is ''puzzling''. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as ''Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes''. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography, and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code. Electric Spark explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. We return to her early years when everything was piled on: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skulduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Muriel Spark it is because the experiences of the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically reduced, the material of her art.
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A revolutionary book. When Spark published her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957, it was recognised as unique - something that quite simply had never been done before. Wilson's achievement in Electric Spark is equally remarkable: an entirely original method of life writing which leaves conventional biographical techniques gasping in the dust . . . Electric Spark heaves with ghosts and furies, burglaries and blackmail. It is disquieting and absolutely mesmerising. I was possessed by this book in the same way that I suspect its author was possessed by Spark. It still hasn't put me down Lisa Hilton Spectator
