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Symposium: A Novel (New Directions Classics) Paperback – October 17, 2006

by Muriel Spark (Author)

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Dame Muriel Spark delivers a delightfully alarming novel, full of high society and low cunning.

One October evening five posh London couples gather for a dinner party, enjoying "the pheasant (flambe in cognac as it is)" and waiting for the imminent arrival of the late-coming guest Hilda Damien, who has been unavoidably detained due to the fact that she is being murdered at this very moment

Symposium was applauded by Time magazine for the "sinister elegance" of Muriel Spark's "medium of light but lethal comedy." Mixed in are a Monet, a mad uncle, some unconventional nuns, and a burglary ring run by a rent-a-butler. Symposium stars a perfectly evil young woman (a classic sweet-faced hair-raising Sparkian horror) who has married rich Hilda's son by hook or by crook, hooking him at the fruit counter of Harrod's. There is also spiritual conversationand the Bordeaux is superb. "The prevailing mood is urbane: the wine is poured, the talk continues, and all the time the ice on which the protagonists' world rests is being thinned from beneath, by boiling emotions and ugly motives .No living writer handles the tension between formality of expression and subversiveness of thought more elegantly." (The Independent on Sunday).

Print length

192 pages
Language

English
Publisher

New Directions
Publication date

October 17, 2006
Dimensions

5.2 x 0.6 x 8.1 inches
ISBN-10

0811216594
ISBN-13

978-0811216593
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was the author of dozens of novels, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori, A Far Cry from Kensington, The Girls of Slender Means, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Driver’s Seat, and many more. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions (October 17, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0811216594
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811216593
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.6 x 8.1 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #81,426 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #825 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction

Customer Reviews:
278

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Muriel Spark

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Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. Spark grew up in Edinburgh and worked as a department store secretary, writer for trade magazines, and literary editor before publishing her first novel in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), considered her masterpiece, was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film. Spark became a Dame of the British Empire in 1993.

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Kenneth Brown

1990 Treasure found

Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2023

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Already applauded seller. Great Indy bookstore. This is a first edition find of a NY Times recommended read. Delightful premise (a dinner party) and unique method of conveying who will be attending, an eclectic cast of characters. 192 page easy read. Now need to read her earlier classic, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

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The Wingchair Critic

"In Scotland, People Are More Capable Of Perpetrating Evil Than Anywhere Else"

Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2006

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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 a backdrop of autumn foliage, which immediately reminds suspicious painter Hurley Reed of one of the languid, vampirish women of the pre-Raphaelite school. The personal favorite of her jubilantly insane and permanently institutionalized Uncle Magnus, who acts as her mentor and accomplice, the rest of her family lives in quiet horror of Margaret's inexplicable power and unfathomable private motives.

Armed with her voodoo doll pins and fragments of ominous border ballads, Margaret moves confidently forward into London high society, unaware that she is but one human monster in an invisible web of well-camouflaged human monsters.

Though unworthy of being considered with Spark's best novels, 'Symposium' rests comfortably among her second tier novels, such as 'Robinson' (1958), 'The Public Image' (1968), 'The Hothouse By The East River,' and 'Territorial Rights' (1979).

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eva c.

While the story is engaging, I found the writing ...

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2014

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While the story is engaging, I found the writing one step up from the usual crime novel. It was just okay.

Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2023

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An excellent short read on a rainy evening. Ah, the comings and goings-on before, during and after a dinner party of well-heeled. and the pudding course was crème brûlée.

Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2023

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A fantastic and fairly brief read. See NYT NOV.18,2023 -'re books for a happier thanksgiving' for more reason to read

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2010

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.

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Lynn

Ending ruined it

Reviewed in Canada on November 27, 2023

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Such a great premise and I enjoyed much of the dialogue and the characters but the more I read the less I liked this book. The ending completely ruined the whole thing, totally unsatisfying and the trope that it’s the mental patients killing everyone is just lazy and offensive. In what seems like such a clever tale, I found the last third decidedly unclever and really disappointing. And the end just annoying.

Dorian Gray

Murder most foul !

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 13, 2020

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a polite dinner party

but might one of the guests really be a wolf in sheeps clothing ?

reads like poured silk but underneath all that gentility might one of the rich and famous really be that savage ?

capable of murder most foul ? and not just once or even twice ! but three or four times !!!!

a bit far fetched , a little over-contrived but what the heck !

its Muriel Spark and what U get is that fantastic economy with words and that sparkling dialogue along with a wonderfully entertaining thriller !

Amazon Customer

Did not excite me.

Reviewed in Australia on February 7, 2020

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Strange story.

SparklingButterfly

SATIRE AND SLAUGHTER

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 26, 2018

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This is the fourth book of Muriel Spark that I have read, the others being "Loitering With Intent", "A Far Cry From Kensington" and "Robinson". This one, "Symposium", is also one of the most ambitious, dealing with the themes of religion, class, social mobility. Also about perceptions of mental illness versus eccentricity versus evil: how do you tell if is a person mad, or merely bad, that is, if they are amoral, if they don't observe the same rules as the rest of us. And what do we as a society do about it: do we lock them up or let them alone? Such a character is Magnus, the mad uncle at the centre of the novel, with his niece Margaret as his female alter ego and accomplice. And the dilemma of what to do about them is the task of their bewildered, beleaguered, colourful Scots family, and is one of the main plot lines of the book.
There are also two crime subplots leading to a surprise ending.
It's also a wonderfully funny story. The shock of a burglary, with which the novel begins, is one of the most comical elements of the book, as the aristocratic husband struggles to come to terms with the crime, repeating "It's like rape!" at dinner parties and in every conversation he has, until his wife is at screaming pitch. Their marriage is documented by her letters complaining about her husband to her stepdaughter, showing the impact of the burglary in their relationship.

At this time, one of Spark's other novels "A Far Cry From Kensington" has been adapted for BBC Radio 4. It's worth listening to on catch-up, for her sparkling dialogue.
But back to this novel "Symposium".
One of the strongest characters is Hilda, a rich businesswoman, whose decisions spark off many of the events of the book: to buy her son and new daughter in law, a flat as a wedding present, and then fatefully decides to buy them an original Monet painting as well. She is one of the reasons that Margaret fortune-hunts marriage to Hilda's son in order to get at his mother's money. Margaret is revealed in the course of the book as being strangely connected to a series of murders, which is highlighted by her marriage to a young heir.

There are a lot of upper middle class and upper class dinner-and-drinks party scenes and superficial-sounding dialogue, which, like Jane Austen, Spark peels back to reveal serious social questions beneath.
In many ways it's a hard-hitting book: Spark is pretty perceptive about the criminal mind and how it works, despite being best known for comedy/satires. In "Symposium", it is the crimes that lead the different strands of the story, rather than say, the business of writing a novel, as in "Loitering With Intent", or the publishing industry, as in "A Far Cry From Kensington".
Add to this story a whole host of characters: an unusual order of nuns, TV crews, media boffins, ambitious graduates serving the moneyed elite as butlers, a couple of arty socialites who provide the party circuit that links many of the characters, rich and poor. Set in London and Scotland, It's an amazing amount to pack into one short novel.
It's probably best to take your time to savour it and give it a thorough read, although it would be tempting to rush through it because of its relatively small size: it's not an airport novel. In return, though, the author takes you on a highly entertaining laugh-out-loud, blackly humorous journey.

3 people found this helpful

Richard H

Comedy with a chilling interior.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 16, 2021

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Biting social comedy with a chilling interior, focused on the enigmatic Margaret, a portrait of incipient evil who leaves a trail of bodies in her wake. Intensely funny at points informed by Spark's merciless eye for pretension and hypocrisy. I enjoyed it hugely.

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Symposium: A Novel (New Directions Classics) Paperback – October 17, 2006

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