There is something about writers from Scotland, rather like those from Scandinavia, that just brings along the darkness. Reading Muriel Spark’s short 1990 novel Symposium reminded me of a read from last year, Elspeth Barker’s 1991 novel O, Caledonia. Both novels feature old moneyed families fallen on hard times in Scotland, and both cast a gimlet eye on the intellectual, propertied class. Also, both are excellent, quick reads. Symposium is a murder mystery that happens while a dinner party is occurring. Sparks takes us in and out of the dinner, going back in time to show the reader how characters know each other and think about each other in the weeks leading up to the crime. As with O, Caledonia, in the end the “who” dunnit is less interesting than the revelation of the characters’ true natures and their relationships with each other.
Symposium opens with a robbery. Lord and Lady Suzy have had their house burgled while they slept. The thieves have made off with the silver and other valuable items, and they have urinated on the walls but left an extremely valuable painting behind. Lord Brian Suzy – 50-ish- is incensed and compares the theft to rape, ranting about it with unabated vigor even weeks later at the dinner party thrown by friends Chris Donovan and Hurley Reed. Meanwhile Lord Suzy’s much younger wife Helen begins to see the disadvantages of having married a man old enough to be her father (he is, in fact, the father of a school friend). The other members of the dinner party are a collection of both younger (20s) and middle aged members of the propertied and intellectual/artistic class. Hostess Chris Donovan is a wealthy divorcee supporting her lover, American artist Hurley Reed. The Untzingers have connections to academia and the art world, and they are both enamored of a young American post-Grad student who hires himself out for parties (such as the one they are all attending). Roland Sykes works for a private eye company as a genealogist while his cousin Annabel works for the BBC. Most interesting are the young newlyweds William and Margaret Damien. William is heir to a fortune made by his formidable mother Hilda Damien, an Australian media magnate whose murder will lead to a most unfortunate ending of this dinner party.
As Spark spins out her story, we learn that gossip and suspicion are at the root of the relationships amongst these dinner party guests. The Untzingers seem to each suppose the other of being sexually involved with the young American student, and they both wonder how this young man is able to live as well as he does on his meager income. The butler and chef at Chris Donovan’s home seem not to trust each other for some reason. And a number of characters, including Roland, Annabel, Chris and Hilda, do not trust William’s new wife Margaret. Margaret is a beautiful red head whose goodness and generosity generate suspicion amongst these folks. Margaret’s story is especially fun to read, as bits and pieces of her past in Scotland (and her mad relations) are slowly revealed.
While we know who did in Hilda Damien before the rest of the characters do, the real interest is in the relationships between characters and the reactions of the dinner party guests to the news that Hilda is dead. I wouldn’t read Symposium for the “murder mystery” aspect of it so much as for the character development and the depiction of affluent members of the English intelligentsia.