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Irish Times
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark – a fitting tribute to a writer who found comedy in the blackest corners
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark Author : Frances Wilson ISBN-13 : 978-1526663030 Publisher : Bloomsbury Circus Guideline Price : £25 Muriel Spark's novels are gemstones, their complications condensed into a hardness that eviscerates. They are deceptively slight (most run under 200 pages) and difficult, words that could describe their petite-statured author, who was as much of a puzzle-mystery as her creations. Writing a biography about her presents a challenge, one that Frances Wilson meets in her sly, unsentimental Electric Spark, which manages to hew closely to its subject's spirit. Born in Edinburgh to mostly Jewish parents, Spark was married at 18 and divorced by 26. Before she published her first novel, she'd abandoned her son in southern Africa , generated fake news to the Nazis , and was editor of London's Poetry Review. The book covers the story of Spark's early years, but refracts them through her later works and selves, thus echoing the structure of Spark's own novels, especially the semi-autobiographical Loitering with Intent. Such organisation allows for some unsettling moments. Take Spark's attempts to reunite with her son Robin in the second World War. '[E]verything later went wrong,' Wilson foreshadows. When young Robin moves into his grandparents' house, Wilson notes, 'As it was, Robin arrived at 160 Bruntsfield Place in September 1945 and left it when he died on 6 August 2016.' Wilson triumphs in animating the bonkers world that inspired Spark's fiction – equal parts daffy and disturbing, packed with demented grandmothers and pompous poets. Spark's wartime boss spent hours gathering content about Nazi orgies where 'the lingerie of prostitutes was made from choir robes'. Her Poetry Review successor declared himself king of 'the fantasy micro-kingdom Redonda' and held court in Soho pubs. READ MORE There's more sinister madness: Spark's ex-husband suffered from psychosis, and Spark's capacity to see through human nature made her paranoid. Like her character Jean Brodie, she is a 'creator of fictions obsessed with betrayal'. She also hears 'voices', a possible result of Dexedrine, formerly used as a diet pill. [ In her own words: Muriel Spark at 100 Opens in new window ] However, Spark's trademark is comedy, and so it is with screwball strokes that Wilson chronicles a nervous breakdown that involves the writer TS Eliot. Spark thinks Eliot is sending her coded messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, and suspects him of other nefarious doings. 'Eliot was posing as their window cleaner … Eliot had broken into her [Spark's] flat to steal her food …' For a writer who found laughter in the blackest corners, is there any more fitting tribute?
Irish Independent
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
New Irish Writing: Poetry by Paul McMahon
New Irish Writing's winning poetry entry for April 2025 Today at 21:30 Paul is from Belfast and lives in Clonakilty. He was awarded the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize by Carol Ann Duffy. Other poetry awards include first prizes in The Moth International, the Nottingham Open Poetry Prize and the Listowel Writers' Week Poetry Collection Prize. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, London Magazine and The Stinging Fly. For more details visit:
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Letter: Tim Radford obituary
Tim Radford had the possibly unique distinction of being, at different times, both literary and science editor of a major newspaper. He was also truly a one-culture man, the other example that I was aware of being Primo Levi, whose great book The Periodic Table, I discovered through Tim. I was a beneficiary of his mentoring of young writers as both a poetry person, editing Poetry Review, and as a science writer who had studied chemistry. From the time, in 1985, I first pitched a hopeful piece on fireworks to him, through the literary editor years when he published my book reviews and later when he published science pieces that resulted in my first non-fiction book, he was a true guide. Though equally at home with high-flown science and poetry, he remained someone completely without pretension.
