Symposium (novel)

Symposium is a novel by Scottish author Muriel Spark, published in 1990. It was regarded by John Mortimer writing in The Sunday Times as one of the best novels of that year.^[1]

Plot introduction

It is the story of a dinner party and the events leading up to it involving the lives of the five couples attending:

• Hurley Reed (an American painter) and Chris Donovan (a rich Australian widow), the party hosts
• Lord and Lady Suzy, who have recently been burgled
• Ernst and Ella Untzinger, an EU commissioner and his wife, a teacher
• Margaret and William Damien, newlyweds just returned from a honeymoon in Venice
• Annabel Treece and Roland Sykes, a TV producer and genealogist, cousins

The story includes many flashbacks into the lives of the guests including a convent of Marxist nuns, a burglary ring preying on the guests, a mad Scottish uncle and several unexplained deaths. The dinner party itself ends with the murder of the mother of one of the guests...

Reception

• Symposium was applauded by Time Magazine for the "sinister elegance" of Muriel Spark's "medium of light but lethal comedy." ^[2]
• 'Symposium is put together like an intricate jigsaw...It is extremely clever and highly entertaining' - Penelope Lively^[3]
• 'Stiletto-sharp fiction...it is the dialogue that propels this dangerous, devilish book' - Scotland on Sunday^[4]

References

External links

• review from EW.com
• Spark's Symposium: a postmodernist critique