Symposium

The classical Greek ideal of the symposium was the perfect dinner party where the well-matched guest list would deliver scintillating discourse that would advance culture. The annals of the time have recorded many stories about how that did not always work out in practice, especially when guests showed up drunk. Fast forward to late 20th century London in Muriel Spark's novel where a fashionable couple have planned what should be a perfect dinner party wherein the sophisticated guests deliver scintillating observations and witticisms. After the party opens unspectacularly in the conversation department (one guest who was recently robbed goes on at unwelcome length at how the robbers urinated all over his place), Spark tacks to the back stories of the participants. As information is revealed, it becomes obvious that something could happen when Spark eventually gets back to the party, and it won't be improved conversation. Just what that is keeps the reader in suspense right up to the end. The hosts are Hurley, an American artist, and his significant other, Australian Chris. Their guests are Roland, the gay genealogist, and his devoted cousin, journalist Annabel; the Untzingers, a middle-aged couple whose careers split them between London and Brussels; Lord and Lady Suzy, the aforementioned victims of the robbery; and newlyweds, William and Margaret. So recently and suddenly are they newlywed, there is some surprise that William wasn't coming with his mother, Hilda, a wealthy widow and close friend of Chris. The back story touches on everyone but Margaret gets the most scrutiny as revelation after revelation throws her into ambiguous moral lights. The story of how she and William met cute in the grocery, for instance, could either be what it was or engineered. But what is disturbing are the murders and unexplained deaths that seem to pop up around her. You get the growing suspicion that something will culminate at the dinner party, but will it have something to do with Margaret or what? This story moves along like a freight train. It doesn't hang quite together like some of Spark's earlier and more well-known fictions, like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, Memento Mori or A Far Cry From Kensington. That said, it has its moments. There is one hilarious passage that seems to have butted in from another book, an abbey with left-leaning nuns, one of whom is unrepentantly foul-mouthed.

Though Muriel Spark went on to write three additional novels before her death earlier this year, Symposium (1991), which has the frothiest surface of all of Spark's fictions, was her last genuinely substantial work. Symposium features a number of playful allusions to her earlier books, which suggest that Spark, in rollicking trickster fashion, was looking back over her career during its composition. Thus, longtime admirers will recognize such motifs as the briefly-mentioned Scottish schoolmarm and her young female charge as a cue to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), while sinister butler Charterhouse recalls the scheming Lister and the precognitive domestic staff of Not To Disturb (1971). Spark also tips a nod toward both the wayward nuns of The Abbess of Crew (1974), here reimagined as foul-mouthed socialists, and the sophisticated criminal assaults on the very wealthy from The Takeover (1976). The subject of psychosis, which Spark briefly explored in The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and more fully in The Driver's Seat (1970), rears its head again here in the form of inherited family madness. The metaphysical concerns which subtly dominated The Comforters (1957), Memento Mori (1959) and The Hothouse by the East River (1973) are present, but now blowing at gale force: though no Spark novel ever offers a irrefutable solution to the mysteries it raises, with Symposium, Spark came closest to offering her audience a definitive statement on the paranormal and the nature of reality. As with most of her work, Symposium questions not only the nature of reality and what force or forces guide it, but who--or what--is ultimately in control of individual and collective human existence. Spark has never been overly optimistic about the inherent goodness of mankind, and accordingly, the novel is replete with deceivers, plotters, parasites, and bisexual social bounders of every stripe. Symposium is largely the story of Margaret Damien, a complex young Scot who has been a "passive carrier of disaster" since puberty. Exhausted, dismayed, and frustrated by the violent calamities that continue to occur around her, Margaret, like Lise in The Driver's Seat, decides to firmly establish a determining role in shaping her future. Cleverly insinuating herself among London's cultural elite, Margaret is shortly married to a millionaire's son and surrounded by the sort of upper class British citizen who quotes Walter de la Mare, owns Monets and Bacons, and maintains residences in Brussels or Paris as well as in London. Though Margaret shrewdly promotes herself as innocent, philosophically sunny, and selfless, Spark makes it clear that she is a mythically-framed femme fatale, if, due to her inability to effectively wield her "evil eye," something of an awkward one. Though beautiful, Margaret nonetheless has fang-like "protruding teeth" and a head of brilliant red hair; in one scene, Margaret appears in "a longish green velvet dress with flapping sleeves" against