Muriel Spark meets Stephen King in Booktribes

I’m pleased that my review of Muriel Spark’s novel Symposium gains me a copy of Stephen King’s Duma Key in the latest Booktribes competition.

Stephen King is a master story teller and I would especially recommend his book On Writing.

It also seems very fitting as 1 February was Muriel Spark’s birthday and, being born in 1918, she would have been 90 this year.

Her literary career took off after her story, ‘The Seraph and the Zambezi’, won a competition held by The Observer in 1951.

The Muriel Spark Society is marking this with a short story competition.
Be quick, the closing date is 29th February 2008.

Book Review
Symposium by Muriel Spark

I'm unnerved at dinner parties; too much talking, too little dialogue, I can never quite grasp what's really being said. Muriel Spark's Symposium has a dinner party as its centrepiece: "They are a party of ten. The house is in Islington. The room is very beige, with a glimpse of the dining-room which is predominantly kingfisher blue." You know from this, there will be muted undertones to match all that beige.

The hosts are a mid-life pair: Chris Donovan, a rich Australian widow and Hurley Reed, an American painter. Theirs is a "union of great convenience and contentment", which is just as well because several of their guests are discomfited by inconvenience and discontent.

The table talk revolves mostly around the aftershocks of two crimes: a burglary and bag-snatching. Lord Suzy repeatedly declares the burglary, in which the miscreants "pee'd all over the place" but left the Francis Bacon painting hanging on the wall, is "like rape". His much younger wife, Helen, to whom he has been married not quite a year, has already tired of his wild declarations of calamity. Meanwhile William Damien, just back from his honeymoon recounts how his new wife had her bag snatched in Florence. "Margaret lost her passport and her Mastercard; we had to go to the Consulate..."

Margaret however is waxing philosophic: "According to some mystics the supreme good is to divest yourself of all your best-loved possessions."
And the evening winds like this, right up to the crème brûlée. Apart from some meanderings on marriage ("the vows of love-passion are like confessions obtained under torture") just to lighten the tone. But what none of the guests say out loud is: 'There's something about Margaret'.

It's a thought her sister Eunice has incubated for years and now Margaret née Murchie has fallen under suspicion at this north London soiree. Nobody believes she met William Damien by chance in the fruit aisle at Marks and Spencer. Or in her soothsaying chat up line: "Be careful, those grapefruits look a little bruised". It's a plot her wealthy mother-in-law, Hilda Damien, has never believed and she has confided as much to her friend, the hostess.

Symposium cleverly undercuts the progression of the dinner party with the unearthing of Margaret Murchie's past.

It's a past peppered with "unfortunate occurrences" of a deathly kind for those straying too close into Margaret's orbit. And always lurking in the shadows of such misfortune has been "Mad Magnus" Murchie, Margaret's uncle and inmate of the Jeffrey King mental clinic in Perthshire. The two, Margaret's father notes, have "an affinity".

It's part of Muriel Spark's supreme craft, that her dialogue lets us hear how the sane are often mad and the mad quite plausible. "Generally speaking," says Magnus to Margaret in an affinity moment, "guilty people do not feel guilty. They feel exalted, triumphant, amused at themselves."

As Ian Rankin writes in his new introduction to the novel: "Her genius stems from the fact that she was an expert stylist who could engage the general reader while still posing tough questions."

The novel takes its name and pulse from Plato's The Symposium; a discursive travel around the theme of love, aided in ancient Greek fashion by much drinking. It's attended by the philosophical Socrates, who is clearly the model for Mad Magnus, and could easily have lent him his lines. "Is not the good also the beautiful?" posits Socrates. "Then in wanting the beautiful, love wants also the good." Except of course, Magnus's idea of the good is a little different.

It took a while for the novel to work its magic. Like a bad-tempered dinner guest I was restless with the hors d'oeuvre scene setting and impatient for the main course to arrive. And then it did, and all was served beautifully.