SPARK’S INIMITABLE BRILLIANCE GLIMMERS IN EVERY IDEA.

nearly 40 when her first work of book-length fiction, The Comforters, was published – writing for her came enviably easy. In fact, Spark dashed off literature with such speed and nonchalance that she began to doubt whether she was doing it properly: “Novel-writing was the easiest thing I had ever done,” she reflects in an essay on the beginning of her midlife vocation. “And since I write my novels so quickly and easily I sometimes feel I am cheating. The actual writing is more like play than work.” She disliked revising, rewriting, and even re-reading her own work once she finished with it, however; she claimed she kept her books not on the shelf but in the cupboard, where they could be cast out of her mind.

Given this self-willed sense of finality, it is surprising how frequently Spark lingers in The Informed Air on certain topics dealt with at length elsewhere in her oeuvre, revisiting pet interests and cherishing favoured themes. The Book of Job, which she describes as “one of the loveliest, most intricate and most ambiguous books of the Bible” (Spark belonged to the Roman Catholic Church and greatly admired the Bible for its historical and literary qualities), is contemplated in three successive essays, written both before and after the publication of her novel The Only Problem, about a scholar of the Book of Job. Cardinal Newman’s Apologia is the focus of another trio of essays, and of course was also the heart of her (heavily autobiographical) novel Loitering with Intent. An entire 25-page section detailing a formative visit to the house of Louis MacNeice closely resembles, to the point of redundancy, Spark’s short story “The House of the Famous Poet.”

And so it emerges that Spark could be as obsessive as the characters who populate her books – interesting to fans of the author insofar as it illuminates more comprehensively the workings of her singular mind. The essays and criticism collected in this volume each represent a vivid snapshot of her passing enthusiasms and concerns; likewise are the attitudes she expresses about literary form the interesting perspective of a devoted reader. Spark’s assertion, for instance, that “happiness or unhappiness in endings is irrelevant,” that an ending should rather “cast its voice, colour, tone and shade over the whole work,” helps clarify the conclusion of her late masterpiece Symposium, with its shift into the future tense on the last two pages as it pivots to follow a character on the furthest periphery of the plot. Her defence of satire sheds light on The Abbess of Crewe and Not to Disturb. Her reminiscences of her time among the elderly reveals a new dimension of Memento Mori, and an anecdote about witnessing an affair between privateschool tutors explains much about The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Spark’s fiction is so fundamentally weird that it seems sui generis. What reading The Informed Air does is not so much dispel this notion as enrich it: this catalogue of thoughts and impressions, this assortment of judgements and recollections, offers a look at the inspiration for what Spark dreamed up on the page, the basis of her mysterious inventions. “I would not want to have written anything by anyone else, because they are ‘them’ and I am ‘me’,” Spark wrote in 1981, when asked what books of others she would have liked to have written herself. “And I do not want to be anybody else but myself with all the ideas I want to convey, the stories I want to tell, maybe lesser works, but my own.” One can be assured that this was never going to be a problem. She didn’t want to be anybody else. Seeing how her mind worked, what ideas occurred to her, and how she expressed them, who else could she possibly be?