Volume 37, Number 20 · December 20, 1990
Sociable Murder
By Gabriele Annan
Symposium
by Muriel Spark
Houghton Mifflin, 192 pp., $18.95
Muriel Spark is a theological writer. Her doctrine lies concealed in the rococo parables she tells. So an account of her novels has to be an exegesis—quite likely a mistaken one. She might enjoy that. Her attitude to her readers is genially sarcastic, her manner crisp, dry, and light as a biscuit. Symposium is about a young middle-class Scottish witch. 'In Scotland,' says her mad uncle Magnus, 'people are more capable of perpetrating good or evil than anywhere else'; and so the novel is punctuated by sinister snatches from Scottish ballads. Magnus is debonair, wicked, quite rational when properly sedated, and content with his life in a mental home. Every Sunday he comes out to lunch with Margaret's parents in St. Andrews: he has a special affinity with his niece. He knows she has the evil eye before she guesses it herself, and takes it upon himself to direct her into serious, planned evil doing. Until his intervention, she has only been involuntarily and inexplicably connected with violent deaths: two at her boarding school, then her grandmother's murder by a psychopath from the secure wing of Magnus's institution (presumably sprung by him), and finally the strangling of a young nun at the convent which she joins as a novice.
Review, 1467 words
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