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Electric Spark

The Enigma of Muriel Spark

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About this listen

 Bloomsbury presents Electric Spark by Frances Wilson, read by Sara Vickers.

*A 2025 HIGHLIGHT FOR: Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer and Scotsman*

'A brilliant, wonderfully shrewd biography' WILLIAM BOYD

'A joyously, brilliantly intelligent work of biography. In Wilson, Spark has met her true match' ANNE ENRIGHT

'A pitch-perfect, electrifying symphony, reconfirming Wilson's pre-eminence as Maestra of British biography' RACHEL HOLMES

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.©2025 Frances Wilson (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Art & Literature Authors European Literary History & Criticism World Literature Biography Magic Magic Users
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Good narration apart from the very annoying and frankly unacceptable pronunciation of Job (rhyming with robe) as job ( rhymes with bob)

A lively and informative biography

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Buy the physical book for this one which is a disgraceful pig's breakfast of an audio rendering from Bloomsbury. Having published with Bloomsbury myself, I know that they have robust and effective editorial processes for ensuring that authors don't misspell, perpetrate malapropisms, or otherwise mangle the English language *in print*. Why they don't have equivalent processes for sonic publication (which is what this is) I do not know. They should get some.

First, despite being supposedly unabridged there are bits that it entirely omits, such as the example of the cryptography on p.270. Several quotes from letters show underlining and strike-through, with the struck through passages also entirely omitted when they are relevant to the point being made. The photos are also missing and not included in a PDF as quality audio titles usually do.

Second, although the actor here has a suitably nice Scottish voice, she can't pronounce correctly many of the words in this well-written and complex biography. I lost count of the words that placed the stress in the wrong place, were shorn of a syllable as she rushed over them, or were simply mispronounced. In some cases she substitutes a word she does know for the one that is actually written, creating nonsense (the funniest version of this was inventing a College called CORPSES Christi!). I was so frustrated in the end, that I stopped listening to the audio and reverted to just reading the physical book. I'd advise everyone to do the same, without wasting their money on this poorly performed version.

Audio omits things and is badly performed

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