Symposium (novel)

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

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 and Chris Donovan, 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."
'Symposium is put together like an intricate jigsaw...It is extremely clever and highly entertaining' - Penelope Lively
'Stiletto-sharp fiction...it is the dialogue that propels this dangerous, devilish book' - ''Scotland on Sunday''