Word: sparkingly
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...FASCINATION WITH POWER--often human and individual, sometimes supernatural, never quite definable--has traditionally emerged from the glowing reaches of Muriel Spark's imagination. Her novels and short stories feature closely-knit enclaves of manipulators and their victims. In The Bachelors, five or six nearly middle-aged men and women linked by their fascination with the supernatural, and hounded by clinging mothers and impossible romances, formed friendships that became occultist liaisons--which led to trials for forgery, coercion, and suggestions of murder...
Strange forces and magnetic personalities often lead to mysterious deaths in Spark's worlds. She does not, however, create repetitively leaden conflicts between the bold and the puny. Power is ephemeral--it is never the sole right of an individual. "It is all demonology and to do with creatures of air." Ronald, sometime occult victor and sometimes victim in The Bachelors, observes, as the wheels of power spin dizzily about his head, whirring and clicking, bobbing back and forth with no point but endless effect...
...Loitering With Intent, Spark's birstling dailogue bounces back and forth, carrying with it the seeds of power. As attention shifts, characters shuffle, hesitate and lose their authority. Fleur Talbot, the narrator of the story, is a novelist, recounting the events and characters that populate her life and her first novel as they unroll side by side in post-war London. Her voice is self-assured, speaking to us from a secure vantage point, anchored thirty years later by reputation and maturity. Fleur is single, 25 years old and extremely, efficiently ambitious. She's secretary to Sir Quentin, founder...
NEITHER FLEUR NOR AUTHOR SPARK has any timidity about recounting their stories--We don't know if the novel has any resemblance to Spark's own life. Fleur gives us precious little personal background. Fleur lives alone in a one-room apartment. She spends every free minute working on her first novel, Warrender Chase, named after its hero. Warrender, strangely enough, bears an uncaany resemblance--in all aspects--to Sir Quentin...
...suspicions. They show signs of addiction to amphetamines Quentin gives them as part of mystical rites that have become central to the Autobiographical Association. Their struggles for sanity and survival as they succumb to Quentin's mysterious manipulations--part of an elaborate con-game--become farcical and charming. Spark's talent for dialogue and vacuous wit blooms, fertilized by the increasingly hilarious improbable set of characters and situations...